SCRATCH SCRATCH
 Sid Siegel

I am riding my hobby horse again. Not just ship modeling, which I consider an art to which I am devoted. But within ship modeling, my hobby horse is to destroy the word scratch. To expose it as meaningless, useless, word garbage. This is a tough crusade. Ship modelers seem to have the word engraved in their heads. Our publications use it, and it seems to pervade every consideration of ship models and ship modeling.

Whence and wherefore did it achieve such importance and how can we consign it to hell where it belongs? I believe this term arose as a corollary to the practice of building ship models from kits. I cannot believe that it was used to describe models built in the 17th and 18th centuries when there were no kits, and when, in fact, everything in the world was built from scratch and therefore such a term would be meaningless. So it probably came into usage with the development in the 1920’s of kits for ship models. Later, in the 1950’s it was used as a point of prestige, that is, it came to represent the practice of building ship models without a kit, which implied superior craftsmanship, better research, higher quality work. But this implied meaning is too vague. It cannot be defined in real terms, and the more one thinks on it, the less weight it carries. Let’s set some cases.

Suppose Rembrandt van Rijn paints a great big picture of the Night Watch, and one of his lowly students helps paint the dark background. Is this scratch work by Rembrandt? It’s an original painting, but is it scratch? Suppose the student than paints a copy, all by himself with no help from anyone. That would be scratch work, but so what? Would it be any better than the original?

Suppose that Andy Warhol decides to make a three foot high Campbell soup
can. So he tells his assistants what he wants and maybe draws a little sketch or shows them a real can of chicken noodle, and then they make it up out of mixed media. Is that Andy’s scratch work even if he never touched it with his own hands? It’s original, because Andy Warhol is world famous for his big soup cans. But the term scratch is irrelevant.

Now suppose I buy a ship model kit and build it exactly as the directions
dictate. Obviously not scratch work, you say. But suppose I throw away the
directions and use the stuff in the box to build an entirely different model. Original
work, yes, but is it scratch or kit? Now suppose I use the directions in the box but
throw away all the stuff and use my own stuff. Is it then scratch or kit? Suppose I draw plans and get all the stuff together all on my own, and then put it in a box and
then I build a model out of that box. Scratch or kit? Then suppose I put stuff in a
box, and someone else builds a model out of that box. Scratch or kit? Sounds
ridiculous, but then a person who spends years building a ship model is pretty
ridiculous in this day and age.

Now here’s something interesting. The Word Processing program on my Mac
says “Start a new document from scratch.” We know that means no template, not
that I should get a paper and pencil, or invent a new language. My point is that the term scratch is meaningless with respect to ship models, and should be discarded. Unless of course you go to a trash dump and scrounge all the parts and build a model ship and then we can truly say it’s scratch, and if it carries some germs and you get a rash, so much more scratching in the bargain.