85 articles · 47.4K karma · 50 friends · active 5 days, 16 hours ago
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)
Background:
The Northrop A-17 was developed from the Gamma 2F cargo aircraft. It was built in 1935 to meet an Army requirement for a ground attack aircraft, and entered service in 1936. In WW2, it was used by the USAAF exclusively as a [...]
I built this kit as part of a IL-2 "combo-build" with several other iModelers in the Work-in-Progress Group. This was a great experience where we were all building an IL-2 at the same time. I had an Accurate Miniatures IL-2m3 [...]
I am always looking for planes to build that are a little out of the ordinary. I came across an article in Aviation Historian about B-17Fs that were used in the Mediterranean as ferrets. A ferret is an aircraft that is designed to [...]
This is a "new" kit from Atlantis, which is actually the 1956 Revell 1/54 model of the "short-nose" F11F-1 Tiger used by the Blue Angels in the 1950s. Atlantis has been re-releasing old Revell kits for a while, at [...]
I was looking for something inexpensive that I could use as a pallet for some painting and weathering techniques that I wanted to try. I found this ancient (originally from the 1950s) kit in my local hobby shop for sale for a few bucks on [...]
I don't normally build airliners, and I never build anything that has a natural metal finish, but I wanted to do something for the SAS 75th Anniversary Group. I had the Minicraft C-54 kit lurking around, and I was able to find some decals [...]
I am always looking for something a little different to build, and I was pleased when Special Hobby recently released this new model. The new Special Hobby kits have a very good reputation, so I was eager to build this plane for the [...]
I had heard great things about this kit, and I was looking for something a little different to do with it. When you search for P-40s on the internet, one of the first photos that comes up is a P-40CU that was used as a trainer at the [...]
Hello everyone. I built this unusual plane for the Luftwaffe Group Build. This plane was designed from the start to break the speed record, which it did in 1939. The Me-209 held this record until 1969. As the war progressed, the [...]
I wanted to find something a little different to build for the "Imperial German Air Service / Luftwaffe Group Build May 1st, 1910, to Present Day", and I discovered the Nike Hercules (MIM-14) surface-to-air missile was used by [...]
