One of the things that I take pride in when I build a model is that I actually use wooden nails (called trenails … short for tree nails) to fasten the decking and planking.  There is no particular reason beyond, well,  just me showing off, but everyone does make a comment.

Most model builders skip this or use a few metal nails to hold the planks on the frames as the glue sets but nothing holds like good wooden nails hammered in.  You see the little dots and tell people that they are hand made nails and the first reaction is cool, and then they look at me and think, this is a weird anal person.

But as I said, I take pride in this detail.  Unfortunately the downside is the time I have to take to actually produce these wooden nails from bamboo.  The attached picture is the result of 3 hours of cutting bamboo and progressively drawing through a hole plate and then chopping into usable lengths.  Three hours of work (very boring) and I end up with, at best, a tablespoon of nails.

I will have to do this 3 – 4 times before the model is finished.  But I love it.  As I said it is a signature feature in my models.

Trenails