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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)
I have a lot of modeling vices that seem to have no bounds on time and money, such as building planes, ships, armor, and the occasional car. In addition to this, my dad got me interested in model trains many years ago. Now that I am [...]
Every once in a while I stray from my "keep it simple" path and travel down the less-traveled road. Bear in mind that I have reached an age where I got rid of most of my 1/72d scale kits because I could neither see or accurately [...]
There is a great camera store in Austin, Texas (where my daughter lives) that offers a wide variety of classes covering many aspects of photography. This weekend they offered a class taught by a well-known aviation photographer (Moose [...]
I want to thank Martin & the iModeler team for selecting me to receive the March iModeler award. I know this is a "picked out of a hat" award, but I literally have never won anything in the last 68 years of my life (if you [...]
I have always really liked the naval vessels of the Cold War. I usually build aircraft models, but I got first started building ships with a 1/500-ish Renwal re-release, and I just stayed with the scale. This model hasn't been available [...]
As I have gotten older, I have taken the pledge to avoid all things complicated and small. But sometimes I convince myself that I want to do something that definitely doesn't meet my "keep it simple" guidelines. And so it was [...]
I attended the annual model show (Modelfiesta) of the Alamo Squadron of IPMS today. I don't enter models anymore, but I like to go find good stuff at the vendors and take some pictures of the entries. I get to the show when it first [...]
I wanted to post some of the kits I have been doing, but it is a little intimidating in the midst of the other kits that have been shown lately. After many years of going the extra mile on kits with all the photoetch, resin, and [...]
In the midst of all of the recent posts that showcase some really awesome modelling, I wanted to send out some 1:1 inspiration. I have previously posted on a 1989 cross country trip I took to Harlingen Airport in a T-37 when I was [...]
The subject of these photos is probably a little obscure, but there have been a couple of T-41 models from Minicraft, PM, and others. My wife was a military instructor pilot who was assigned from 1986 to 1990 at Hondo Airfield just west [...]
