77 articles · 39.2K karma · 49 friends · active 3 hours, 35 minutes 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)
The chaos of the Christmas and New Year holidays was upon me, so I wanted to do something simple. I had previously built some of the re-released kits from Atlantis (mainly old Revell kits), and thought it might be fun to do another one. [...]
This is a continuation of an article I posted a few weeks ago at the start of this project. If you are interested in the previous part, you can find it at (link). I probably should have done this in the WIP Group, but here is the [...]
I haven't posted anything for a while because I haven't built any models for a while because I was involved in building some buildings and scenery on my N Scale layout. Sorry, poor excuse. After I got to a stopping place, I really had [...]
Sometimes I feel like I am the last one to arrive at the dance. It always seems like when I get my hands on something new that many of you have not only seen it, but built it. So I was a little surprised when I came across this Bf-109 [...]
I have built a bunch of the "toon" tanks, planes, and ships over the last few years, usually as a way to decompress from some of my more intricate builds. I had previously built four Meng "toon" ships before and really [...]
When I finished my last build, a 1/72 F-4J, I said that I wanted to do something more simple, like build a sailing ship. I thought I wasn't serious, but the more I thought about, the more I wanted to do a sailing ship. I don't have a lot [...]
I was just looking at a great build by Ramon Lomeli of an AH-6J from Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia in 1993 ((link)) It really brought back some memories. I spent several months in Mogadishu in 1992 in support of Operation Restore [...]
I was reading some of the comments in an article on iModeler and the discussion of mistakes and ham-fisting during a build came up. We have all made errors during a build, some more obvious than others. I suspect that mistakes that I [...]
Well, there I was waiting for decals to arrive from Hannant's for my Monogram Fw-190 when I came across an old Hasegawa Ki-43 sitting in the consignment section at my local hobby store. I remember these early Hasegawa kits were simple to [...]
I wanted to do something relaxing, so I grabbed this old Monogram FW-190 from the stash in my garage. It also fits my keep-it-simple modeling philosophy. My plan is to build it mostly out-of-the-box and just concentrate on a decent build [...]
