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I am twice-retired. I retired as an Air Force pilot (C-141) & instructor pilot (T-37, C-141) in 1993. I spent the next 20 years teaching high school social studies & also as an adjunct instructor at a local junior college. I retired from high school teaching in 2015 & taught my last college class in the spring 2016 semester. I currently teach two adult education classes each semester for a local school district. I began modelling when I was a kid and continued until the 1980s when my flying began to make my modelling time nonexistent. This trend actually got worse when I became a teacher. Now that I have time to model again, I find myself trying to sort through the many new techniques & tools available now. Over the years I kept buying kits, but not building them because they were easier to move while still unbuilt in the box. So now I have a two-car garage completely filled with unbuilt airplanes, armor, ships, space ships, and a few cars. I am now building my way through this cache of thousands while still selectively buying new kits. I am also two-thirds complete on an HO Scale train layout and I just started a small N Scale layout. :o)
My wife and I decided to go to the IPMS National Convention, which was being held in San Marcos, Texas. I have never had the chance to attend a national convention, but this one was being held just 90 minutes from our house. I don't [...]
I was looking in one of Jim Sullivan's books, entitled "Bent and Battered Wings", and came across an interesting series of photos of an F9F-2 Panther that came to grief in 1952. Apparently the returning Panther failed to catch a [...]
First, a little background:
Following WW2, the Air Force had a lot of warplanes left over from the war. Many of these planes quickly became obsolete as warplanes, so new missions were sought for these planes. The B-25J Mitchell was soon [...]
This is the second model I have built during my forced downtime due to stomach surgery. I don't normally build hypothetical planes, and I also don't like to build models with a natural metal finish (because I don't do NMF very well), but [...]
I don't usually build 1/72 scale models, but I have liked this plane since I first saw it in the old TV series Sky King (Yes, I am that old). I thought this kit might be a challenge when I got it, but I am recuperating from some surgery [...]
First, a little background.
In the spring of 1944, the Czech Government in exile in London and various resistance groups began to believe that the German occupation forces had been sufficiently depleted by the war on the Eastern Front that [...]
Happy New Year everyone. This model was built for the Hawker 100th group. It was built using the 1/48 Airfix Hawker Sea Fury FB.11 kit that was released in 2018. It depicts an Australian Sea Fury FB.11 from 724 Squadron of the Royal [...]
I normally plan on completing one model each month, but we moved last January from our house of 30 years into a new house in a new town. These are the models built since the summer. Everyone have a great New Years. Cheers.
This was my first motorcycle model, and it was a fun and challenging build. I also have never been on a motorcycle. So why build a motorcycle? Spiros (@fiveten) asked me to join his Motorcycle Group, which I was glad to join (Thanks, [...]
I was deployed to Somalia for several months in late 1992-early 1993. My unit was a mobile airlift headquarters that set up with the joint task force headquarters in what was left of the American Embassy in Mogadishu. The Embassy was [...]
