PARIS (AP) – He leans at the dining room table, putting the finishing touches on his World War II miniature tank. Deeply focused, he keeps his hand steady while working to make the reduced plastic model look as realistic as possible.
And in doing so, Maxime Fannoy – a jailed husband and father riding the coronavirus with their family in Belgium – feels the incessant pandemic nightmare of the outside world happily going out of focus.
“It is an escape. When you’re building a kit or a scene, you really immerse yourself in it, ”says Fannoy. “Everything else loses importance and, in the current context, this is a real help.”
Rejuvenated by quarantines and blockages, the old school hobby of creating miniature worlds by assembling and decorating smaller models or running minitrens on mini-rails is undergoing a renaissance – plastic therapy against pandemic blues.
Sales are growing as families stripped of their social lives keep idle hands and minds busy making models and dusting trains. British brand Airfix saw a race in plastic kits for Spitfires, the iconic WWII fighter plane. Hornby, who owns Airfix and also manufactures a variety of models of trains and cars from other brands, has become profitable again with high sales.
The analog pleasures of pasting and painting, fixing and moving are also taking some members of the digital generation off their screens. Teens are catching the modeling virus from parents and grandparents who suddenly find time again to engage in hobbies that many have been too busy to practice since childhood.
In France, 70-year-old retiree Guy Warein says his blocking-time renovations on a train model that was collecting dust in his attic helped him connect with his video game grandchildren, pulling them “from the virtual world. to reality. “
On an out-of-class visit, the eldest, 16, said: “’Come grandpa, let’s see the trains and make them work’. So, we put them together and did things together, ”says Warein. “It is a union of generations, and that can only be beneficial.”
So he fixed the HO scale locomotives and the undercarriage he inherited from his father-in-law and repaired the room where he plans to place them on a U-shaped track layout he is designing. The activity helped Warein, a former educator and city councilor, to disconnect from the pandemic and its anxieties.
“You fill in your time and forget what’s going on around you,” he says. “Turning on the radio or television is like being hit by a nightstick, because they talk systematically about the virus and the misfortunes it brought. … Having a hobby allows me to think about other things. ”
Manufacturers have struggled to meet the global surge in interest. Hornby’s CEO Lyndon Davies says he had to transport 10,000 Spitfire kits by air from a factory in India when Airfix stocks dried up for the first time in the company’s 71-year history.
“What you don’t want from your children, your grandchildren, is that they sit around watching TV or looking at the phone all the time. This pandemic really brought families together at home, ”he says. “They used the types of products we made to try to forget what was going on in the outside world.”
Another British manufacturer, Peco, has hired extra staff to meet growing orders – up to 50% in some markets – for its miniature trains, rails and modeling accessories.
“This is happening everywhere: our markets in the UK, across Europe, Australia, North America, China,” says Steve Haynes, the sales manager. “People are using their free time, their free time, their forced time at home much more to face boredom, to face isolation and to do something creative.”
In Belgium, Fannoy calls himself a “model maker out of confinement”. He bought plastic kits a long time ago, because they reminded him of his childhood, but he never had time to build them. Instead, he kept them in a wardrobe.
When the pandemic interrupted his hectic life and forced him to do his job as a home business developer, he started working on his inventory, stocking up brushes and paints in the last few days before closing.
He first completed a series of 1/24 scale rally cars. A World War II Tiger tank, painted to look worn and mounted in a winter setting with troops and a jeep, followed it in late 2020. He posted photos of the diorama, the result of 50 hours of manual labor, on Facebook.
“I usually start at night around 8 pm and stop around 11 pm at midnight,” says Fannoy. “I can’t do the things I normally would do anymore. So what do I do? I open a kit and work on it. In fact, it is my wife who comes and takes me out of this mini-world in which I live. “
“The hours fly by. It is a form of meditation, ”he says. “It helped me enormously over the past year.”
___
Follow the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic AP at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak