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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.
This Monogram F-100D Super Saber is my oldest model airplane . I built it when it first came out in the late 1970s when I was in high school in Monument, Colorado. My Badger Wren airbrush was used to paint it with Polly S paints . I’m [...]
After reading the terrific book ,”Star of Africa”, by Colin Heaton & Anne-Marie Lewis, I was struck with the desire to build a model of Yellow 14 , Hans Marseille’s 109F.
This Monogram Promodeler/Hasegawa 1/32 Bf-109G-4 was a [...]
This is a Revell/Hasegawa Early Spitfire. The box was dated 2000.
I found it on the consignment table at the local hobby shop.
I was inspired to build this by an EAA video of a man named Bob DeFord who built a full sized Spitfire from [...]
This was my 7th and last build for 2020. This kit's box and instruction sheet had a copyright date of 1978. The decals were in poor condition and not useable. Fortunately I had some decals from an Italeri kit. It was built out of the box [...]
This recently completed 1/48 MiG is my first & only Trumpeter kit. I was impressed with how well the parts fit, it was an extremely easy model to build, almost like it wanted to be built.
The decals were also very nice. David Mills [...]
Here are a few miscellaneous aircraft photos from my collection that I’ve been adding to for over 30 years.
These A-7s belonged to the Colorado Air Guard’s 140 TFG and Oklahoma’s 138 TFG. A-7s were the first live aircraft I worked on as an “ Airframe Repair Specialist”, as the Air Force liked to call people like me.
The aircraft with [...]
A beautiful member of the Century series of fighters. Except for the Thunderbird aircraft, these are all Air Guard airplanes.
I started collecting photographs of aircraft in the 1980s when I was in the military. at the time I had access to hundreds of old Negatives snd also a fully equipped darkroom. Since then I just get them when I happen to come across [...]
Originally this 1/48 Fujimi Bf- 110 was to have the mouth marking on the nose, but the decal wouldn’t lay down on the compound curved nose properly, so I went to plan B. I found some photographs in a book that showed a similarly painted [...]
