One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to get through my backlog of model assembly. On the one hand, I enjoy assembling models – I love the craftsmanship, the manual work, and the accomplishment of looking at a finished product. On the other hand, the glue fumes are not so good for my sinuses, so I need to slow down a bit.

So, rather than doing marathon assembly, I’m going to be taking a step back and figuring out the best way to spread my model assembly out and avoid as much of the fumes as possible.

Whereas before, I’ve always assumed that turning on my ceiling fan and cracking a window open nearby was sufficient, I’ve decided that I’m going to take a more aggressive approach over the next few weeks. First, I’m going to put a box fan, blowing out, in my window and plan on working immediately below it. My hope is that I can use it like a cheap chemistry hood (recognizing that it’s not going to be as good as a hood, but also that it’s just glue fumes that I’m trying to get rid of) and provide better ventilation. Next, I’m going to be better about wearing my dust mask – while I don’t expect this to help with the fumes directly, I also end up working with resin models, and I hope this will help avoid the dust.

In addition to ventilation, I’m also planning on limiting myself to 1-2 hours a week of doing model assembly (at about an hour at a time max). My hope here is that less intense exposure will help as well. While I expect this to slow me down in terms of assembling models (and, as a result, slow me from achieving my New Year’s Resolution), I may try to set aside a day to do model assembly, which might be better anyway.

Luckily, I have a lot of interesting models to build, and my backlog is growing rather than shrinking right now. On the one hand, I feel behind, on the other hand… …Fun models to build!