re: #350 Shiplord Kirel, Friend of Moose and Squirrel

I’m going to give up model building and sell my collection. I just cannot find the kind of super-special flooring this hobby apparently requires. Anything you drop on a carpeted floor will vanish forever. Modelers call this phenomenon “the carpet monster.” Today I dropped an irreplaceable clear part on the carpet, saw within a few inches where it landed, and still could not find it. I went over every square centimeter with a flashlight and my fingers, nothing. This is not the first time either. A hard rubber or plastic mat is no better, since it will bounce the parts into the next dimension. Concrete is the worst. Besides providing the highest and farthest bounces, it is a chameleon material that will make literally anything that falls on it invisible. Any surface I could get would also have to be surrounded by a small fence and covered with a fine mesh net to catch bounces. If I cover the floor with flypaper type sticky material how do I get in and out of the work area? How is it physically possible for an object weighing a fraction of a gram to bounce completely out of the house, if not the county, after falling a couple of feet onto a soft surface?

Pro tip: Take the hose part of your vacuum cleaner where the attachments go and cover it with panty hose. Then gently wave it around the area you lost the part.