To aid assembling parts with CA as well as to avoid unintentionally bonding a model to something, I assemble the parts on the surface of an old stainless steel ruler. The CA bonds to the stainless just enough to help hold parts in alignment while they set, but it's easy enough to gently pop them off the ruler with the tip of a sharp knife.

Scratch building is defined in Wikipedia as “The process of building a scale model "from scratch", ie. from raw materials, rather than building it from [ ... ]

Hopper Weathering Clinic III
By Bill Mock
January 2010

OK, I gave the inside of these hoppers a wash of Engine Black below the coal line. They [ ... ]