Protection
Posted By Russ Emerson on January 19, 2010 at 3:52 pm
During the hiatus I took from shipbuilding, the question often occurred to me: how do I protect my project from a cat with a test-to-destruction sense of inquisitiveness?
Yes, I refer to Kismet, who gleefully gets into everything.
The last thing I wanted to do was invest a lot of hours in fiddly small details on a ship model, only to have it pushed off the work table and eaten (or at least chewed upon) by the cat, who would then suffer my inevitable short term wrath.
Really, even in the event of total destruction, I wouldn’t be able to stay angry for very long. He’s a nice little cat.
So the work in progress has to be protected during the hours I’m not working on it. How best to accomplish this? I can’t pick everything up and store it away every time I have to wait for glue to cure or paint to dry or whatnot. For starters, I haven’t got a good place to stow the project (which takes up more space than the finished product will) and of course picking up and carrying anything is an iffy proposition for me.
Then, one day while I was cruising the aisles of the Super Target looking for lonely divorcées bargains, I saw what might be the answer to my dilemma.
Et voilà:
The giant Rubbermaid bin, on its own, would not be likely to stop Kismet. He does, after all, have a habit of pushing things off tables in order to examine them at ground level. Hence the clamp arrangement seen at the bottom of the photo.
So far, it has served admirably well. Nevertheless, I am continuing my efforts to train Kismet not to get on the table at all. He keeps trying.
The next ship model I have in mind to work on is somewhat larger. I’m not sure what I’ll do about the problem then. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
They do make larger totes, you know. For the next project.