33 articles · 11.4K karma · 39 friends · active 2 days, 6 hours ago
Sometime around 1970 , I started building plastic model airplanes and ships. Back then it was mainly kits from Aurora, Hawk, Monogram, Revell, and sometimes exotic foreign brands such as Airfix or Hasegawa. Even in more recent years, those old kits are still some of my favorites.
1940s & 50s USAF and Luftwaffe fighters in 1/48 or 1/32 scale are my favorite model subjects. Other subjects & scales also find their way in to my collection. O.O.B. Is my usual M.O. , but sometimes I get more creative.
To help pay for this hobby, I’ve been working as an aircraft mechanic for a large airline for over 30 years. I’m also a former Air Guardsman with a short stint in the AF Reserve. A-7s, F-16s, KC-135s and one particular Convair C-131 were the aircraft I was around during my military service as an “Airframe Repair Specialist “ back in the 80s & 90s.
I’ve been married 35 years and have two grown up kids & one dog.
A friend of mine was given two old kits , he asked me to build them for him. One was a 1/72 Revell SR-71 with a drone mounted on top...
the other was an AMT/Ertl 1/72 XB-35 flying wing...
The SR-71 was simple to build. If it had been [...]
This kit was in a shrink wrapped box with a $2.99 price sticker on it. The box was dated 1976. The kit was in great condition, the old decals looked perfect. I also had a new set of Warbird Decal’s F-86 common stencils & markings [...]
This is my recently completed Revell -Monogram 1/48 F-105F. The last one for 2022.
Although it’s a kit from long ago , it still builds up nicely and looks good collecting dust on the shelf .
For such a large model it doesn’t have a [...]
This is a 1/72 MPC C-47... although the box describes it as a DC-3. This is originally an Airfix release kit and had a “Made in England” slip of paper in the bag with the parts .
The fit of the parts was generally good, and there was [...]
This is the Hasegawa 1/32 Bf-109E kit from the 1970s. I bought this on the secondary market and it had some resin aftermarket interior parts with it. I don’t normally spend the extra money for those, but since they were with the kit [...]
Aviation has been a large part of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s history. To preserve it , the Air & Space Museum was created to show case items that have a link to Tulsa’s aviation history. Today I visited it for the first time in a couple of [...]
This is the Monogram 1/48 P-39 . First released in 1969, this example is from a 1989 dated box. The kit provides decal options for 4 different P-39s , one Russian and Three American. I chose the P-400 version, which is [...]
This B-17 completed 28 missions with no crew members killed, only two were wounded. The Miami Clipper completed its last mission in March of 1944 and then was returned to the USA. It was scrapped in January 1946.
It was assigned to the [...]
A few months ago, Greg Kittinger @gkittinger invited me to his home where he had a collection of kits someone in his model club had inherited. He kindly gave me the chance to pick some of them I wanted. This Revell 1/32 P-40 is one that I [...]
This was built as part of the Desert Air War group build . There are several great builds going on in that group .
There are many interpretations of this particular aircraft. After much looking around the internet and looking at photos of [...]
