Author: Iron Modeler

After last night's post, my mind wandered back to the way I built models in the 1980's.  I had, by then, developed my skills to the point where I was getting pretty consistent results regardless of the kit I built.  Of course, back then I didn't worry too much about the one thing that seems to be the #1, most important thing to a modeler these days:

Is it accurate?

Mr. Webster, a little help?

accurate (adj \ˈa-kyə-rət, ˈa-k(ə-)rət\): 1: free from error especially as the result of care <an accurate diagnosis>;  2: conforming exactly to truth or to a standard : exact <providing accurate color>;  3: able to give an accurate result <an accurate gauge>

In Part 1, I told you how I discovered the hobby shop and all of the riches contained within.  By the time I graduated from college, I had been roped in to the hobby, lock, stock, and #11 blade (Who am I kidding–I was deeply hooked long before then).  Between the hobby shops in Daytona Beach and Ft. Lauderdale as well as some mail order places, I was able to feed my habit.  By the way, do you remember mail order?  Quaint notion–you filled out a form, wrote a check, put it all in an envelope, stuck a stamp on it (Remember those?  The stamps you had to lick, not those self adhesive ones we have now) and put it in the mail.  In about two weeks, a friendly employee of the USPS had a package for you.  The aftermarket was just starting to get a good foothold back in the '80's, and the only way to get it was to either have a well-stocked local shop or through the mail.  Newer kits from Japan were also making their debut–I recall when a new Japanese upstart company called TriMaster first released their 1/48 scale FW-190D-9 kit–it sold for a whopping $42.  Compare that to the $10-$15 that the Hasegawa, Fujimi, and Tamiya kits were going for, and that's a fair chunk of change.  I finally bought it, using up two or three weeks' worth of disposable income…

Anyhow, I was hooked, bad.  Every week I'd make the trip to the hobby shop to get the plastic fix.  New kits were hitting the shelves fast and furious–and of course, they were subjects I had longed for and in my preferred scale.  That all adds up to the fact that I "needed" them.  Lest you think I'm jesting, it was (and still is, to an extent) an addiction.  Substitute plastic models for dope and hobby shop for dealer, and you're close to the mark.  Well, I would hang out at the hobby shop for hours on end and shoot the bull with the local club guys every Sunday.  We'd all usually arrive at 11:00 or Noon, and hang around for the afternoon.  This went on for quite a while…

Warrick Hobbies had by this time moved from their store in the Twin Oaks Center on Davie Blvd. (I still miss the train layout in the enclosure in front of the store) to a similarly sized store at the corner of Griffin Road and University Drive.  By the time I became a regular, talk was that the owner was looking to move again, this time to a store in the old Best Plaza at University Drive and Peters Road.  Talk became reality, and the store moved sometime in 1991.  Well, moving the store closer to home didn't help matters much.  I would spend Sundays at the store, talking shop and seeing all the new stuff available, as well as seeing what everyone was building when they brought their models in to show.

I guess it was around 1992 or 1993 when the then-manager was going to get married and take some time off.  He asked me if I thought I could fill in for him for the weekend.  It didn't take me long to answer, and that started what was to become a working relationship that would last until 2001, when I moved to South Carolina.  From my first visit to the store out on Davie Blvd., I remembered that the stock was a good, solid foundation of kits with some good aftermarket products beginning to appear.  As the years passed, we would add product lines as the customers would want the new stuff, both kits and aftermarket.  New companies would come along with newer products–decals, once the territory of Microscale, were being produced by a half-dozen firms now.  The new decals were sharper, better researched, and included basic histories and color instructions.  New lines of brass were available–a little Czech company called Eduard were popping out new sets weekly, it seemed, and they were giving Airwaves a run for their money. 

As we would add lines, we would gain customers.  Actually, we didn't see them as customers–we had friends that we sold hobby stuff to.  The local club would hold their unofficial meeting-away-from-the-meeting at the store, on Sundays (I guess the few of us that started hanging out on Sundays started a trend).  We'd go have dinner together at the local pizza joint (3 Guys from Italy, University Drive and I-595 next to the IHOP–don't bother, it closed and became a taco bar) or the then-new Applebee's that opened across the parking lot from the store.  As an aside, if you work in the food service industry, here's a tip–if you take care of your customers (as the staff at the Applebee's did throughout the years), the customers will take care of you.  I think we collectively put a few of the wait staff AND their kids through college….

By about 1996, things were really humming like a well-oiled machine.  Sure, one or two of the guys would move away–one moved away, then came back, then moved away again right about the time we moved to SC.  Then, the manager moved.  A few years later, the Third Musketeer in the department also moved.  A few of our good, core customers also moved about a year after that.  There was a great disturbance in the Force, but the shop didn't seem to notice–business was still good.  The period from around 1985 until maybe 2002 was a Golden Age in Plastic modeling–a subject that I'll cover that sometime later–as the product was selling itself.  In 1999, I met the woman who I was destined to marry, and by 2001 I had decided to move away.  Consider that some of the folks who were instrumental in the shop were also wheels with the local club, and both institutions were feeling the loss…

In the meantime, down the road in Miami, Orange Blossom Hobbies had enjoyed the same period of success that we had at Warrick.  They would be packed on the Saturdays that I decided to ride down and check things out.  It seems that the guys who stopped in at Warrick on Sundays also congregated at OB on Saturdays, too…

To me, it all seemed to fall apart after the September 11th attacks–now, I'm not trying to say that the attacks affected the hobby industry that profoundly, but things took on a new focus in the country.  Consider this–I resigned my position at Warrick in late 2000 and moved away in September 2001.  By the end of the year, Orange Blossom was closed, bankrupt.  They liquidated their merchandise–some of it wound up at the Pearl Art and Craft on Oakland Park Blvd., as my wife and I found out while on a visit that December.  Warrick had moved again, and while things seemed to be doing well with the new staff in "my" department, it never seemed to be the same.  By 2005, the department was being "downsized".  The last time I was there in December 2007, the plastics "department" consisted of a few kits.  All of the aftermarket, all of those interesting decals sheets, all of the books, gone, blown out.

To this day, it still makes me shudder to think of what became of the vast stocks of decals–some long out of print–that both Orange Blossom and Warrick used to have tucked in their file cabinets.  I also am saddened to think of all those aftermarket sets we bought for the benefit of the locals that got sold off for pennies on the dollar.  I guess the lesson is this, kids–Support your local hobby shop if you are lucky enough to have one.  If you don't, you'll find yourself in the position that a few friends of mine are in–everything they buy for the hobby (and I mean everything–glue, paint, putty, etc.) must be mail ordered.  Of course, mail order these days is easy enough–a few clicks of the mouse, and *poof*, the order is on the way.  But suppose you're trying to finish a project and run out of paint?  Good luck finding FS35622 in the stocks at Office Depot.  With gasoline creeping back up to around $3 a galon around these parts, that 80-mile drive migt not be on the slate this week…

I hope you enjoy my ramblings–thanks for taking the time to walk down memory lane with me.  I'll have Part 3 ready in the near future.

Be good to one another, and I bid you Peace.

Years ago on Revell model kit boxes, they would have an Application Form for Revell’s Master Modelers Club.  One of the questions they had on the form was “Where did you buy this kit?”  The options are amazing.  These days, if you want to go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy a model kit, you are pretty much limited to a hobby shop or one of the full-line craft stores like Michael’s or Hobby Lobby.  It wasn’t always like that, as the Revell Master Modelers Club application alludes to.

As a kid, most of my first kits came from the local K-Mart.  For 99 cents, you could buy one of Monogram’s Snap-Tite kits IF you had the extra change to satisfy the Governor’s Sales Tax–that brought the total to a whopping $1.03, and with my weekly allowance and the revenue gained from a few collected Coca-Cola bottles, I could swing it.  As my tastes matured, I found that the kits cost a bit more, so instead of a kit a week, I’d get one every two weeks.  I learned early in the game that big kits were the thing for birthdays and Christmas, but the average model car, plane, ship, or tank were easily obtained on my own.

Aside from the K-Mart, the local SuperX and Eckerd Drug stores carried kits.  If we couldn’t get to the K-Mart (which required a ride in the car), we could always ride our bikes to the drug stores and see what they had.  One summer, I believe that my brother and I nearly bought out the SuperX store’s model kit stocks–there was the Revell box-scale A-5 Vigilante, the then-new Revell 1/72 scale F-15 and F-16, and some of the newest MPC annual car kits.  The Eckerd location usually had more cars than planes, but between the two of them, we could get kits when we wanted to.

Then, one day, we went to the Lionel Playworld across from the mall.  I was in awe–the plastic model section was huge!  The shelves seemed to stretch to the ceiling, and the aisles seemed to go on for miles.  There I saw my first MPC “Profile Series” kits, as well as my first large-scale kits of not only airplanes, but ships as well.  There were kits from Airfix, Matchbox, Revell, AMT, Monogram, Aurora, Lindberg….why, there were kits from pretty much every domestic and some overseas manufacturer.  I remember getting a scale model of the Hindenburg once–it may have been the Testor’s kit, I can’t recall.  I remember also getting the AMT Kenworth from the TV show “Movin’ On”, and I though it was one of the neatest kits I had ever built.

Not to be outdone, Sears had a pretty sweet model selection too, upstairs in “The Big Toy Box”.  I remember seeing kits of airplanes that I swore couldn’t have really existed (the Messerschmitt Me-410, for one), and of exotic sports and racing cars.  I think I also caught my first look at Monogram’s big 1/48 scale bombers there, too.

It seemed that every store you went into had at least a small selection of model kits.  They were at the local Jefferson’s and Woolco.  Walgreen’s and McCrory’s had a few.  They had models at the local U-Tote-Em and Mister Grocer convenience stores.  They even had models at the then-new Skaggs-Albertson’s, a grocery store!  You would have to shop at one of the high-end fashion stores (and that included JC Penney, too) to find a store that didn’t have model kits!

Of course, there was the hobby shop.  I’ve written a little bit on how I discovered the local shop, and I’ll regale you with more of that tale later.  Suffice to say, if you built models, you didn’t have too far to look to find them.

As I got older, one of the things I enjoyed most was cruising the town and stopping in at some of the places I knew had a model selection, just to see what they had that looked interesting.  I came across quite a few neat kits from time to time in the most unlikely places.  I also recall going to the K-Mart in Daytona Beach and discovering the complete line of Airfix’s 1/24 scale airplanes on sale for $5 (that’s no typo–five dollars a pop).  Not my bag, I passed, but I did mention this to my college roommate, who quickly took his leave.  He returned about 20 minutes later with a large stack of kits–I believe he bought every last kit the store had.  The Embry-Riddle bookstore at one time had some model kits, and I still have a Williams Brothers C-46 that I bought for $4–they had it priced as a wrench.

Something happened over the years, and model kits started to slowly disappear from store shelves.  Perhaps they were loss leaders.  Perhaps the various parent companies started doing cost analyses and decided that the model kits were taking up space that could be used to sell something with a higher margin.  First, the convenience stores dropped them.  Then, some of the department and discount stores stopped carrying them.  Albertson’s (as the chain was known after Mr. Skaggs and Mr. Albertson parted ways) sold off their kits and re-vamped the stores a bit.  The drug stores held on for a while, but soon they, too, decided that cheap toys were better items to sell.  The discount store hold-outs (Jefferson’s, Woolco, The Treasury, and Zayre, to name a few) stopped carrying models before their respective owners declared bankruptcy.

By the mid- to late-1980’s, you could find kits at only a few selected places other than hobby shops:  K-Mart and their competitor Wal-Mart had them, and Lionel Playworld still was hanging on.  Then Lionel Playworld went out of business.  Toys-backwards ‘R’-Us never really had a large selection at all, but what they did have disappeared.  Then K-Mart and Wal-Mart cut way back in what they carried.  And, finally, Wal-Mart dropped all but a few basic kits a few years ago.

The sad thing is that a lot of kids these days have no idea what a model kit is, let alone know how to build one, simply due to lack of exposure.  We saw model kits everywhere.  All of the kids on the block built models.  These days, without knowing a modeler, kids haven’t a clue about scale modeling.  And that is a shame.  Model building teaches a great deal–history, spatial relationships, creativity, patience, and attention to detail are but a few of the things I learned in my lifetime of putting little plastic airplanes, cars, ships, and tanks together.

If you want to do a good deed, take a kid–your kid, or your niece or nephew, or the neighbor’s kid–to the hobby shop.  Buy a Snap-Tite kit and build it together.  You’ll have a blast, and your young friend may learn a thing or two.  While they may not pick up the hobby immediately, they’ve at least been exposed to it.  My wife, brother, nephew, and I have done this in the past, and we’ve all had fun together.  You never know–later in life, they may wander past a hobby shop, take a look in the window, and see a kit.  Then they’ll remember the fun they had….

Thanks for reading.  Be good to one another, and I bid you peace.

This weekend, my wife was perusing one of the kits from her stash (that’s right, we’re a two-stash household), a Revell 1/542 USS Forrestal aircraft carrier.  It was a 1971 boxing of the kit, but what caught me eye took me back to when I was a kid.  There, on the side of the box, was an ad for the Revell Master Modelers Club.

For the princely sum of One American Dollar (a fortune for kids in 1971!), you would receive a tool kit complete with tweezers, clamps, cement applicator, and body putty spatula; a wallet size Membership Card; an Engraved Membership Certificate; and a subscription to the Revell magazine Together.  The premise was to get kids interested into the hobby for the long run, since you started out as a basic Modeler and, as you built more models, worked your way up to Grand Master Modeler.  The lure of a 32-page Color Catalog and advance information on their new releases didn’t hurt.

I was a little young for the Revell club, but I was a “member” of another club that in its later years was closely tied to Revell models.  The club in question was the Young Model Builders Club, later known as the Model Builders Club of America.  They would advertise in various magazines, and in the early years would feature kits from the domestic model manufacturers like Aurora, Lindberg, Monogram, and Revell.  These clubs operated differently from the Master Modelers Club–you would pay a fee (usually in the neighborhood of 50 to 75 cents, later it went up to a dollar) and you’d receive a model kit.  You would also receive a one-time “Free Gift” in the form of a tool set, this time consisting of a file, pair of scissors, paints (Pactra paints, too!), paint brush, and a tube of cement (usually the Pactra non-toxic stuff that didn’t work).  The model kit would arrive with a small leaflet that gave a brief background on the subject and perhaps a few hints and tips.

Every month, another model kit would arrive–with an invoice.  As a kid, you don’t sweat the details, but the way the club worked was that you’d get a model every month.  You were obligated to buy the next four kits, then you could quit at any time.  Now, for you Children of the ’70’s and ’80’s, does this sound familiar?  If I said that the mailing address in the later years was Fruitridge Avenue in Terre Haute, Indiana, would that ring any bells?  How about the name Columbia House?  Ahhh, you remember now, don’t you….I can’t say for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if both were managed by the same group.

I was a “member” on at least two occasions, and I still have one of the files running around here.  The kits I built include the Revell USS Missouri, replete with flat bottom and in that ever-popular scale of 1/535.  I built at least two of them, as well as two of the Columbia/Eagle Apollo Spacecraft kits, one of the Deal’s Wheels or Tom Daniels VW Van kits, an early rendition of the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, and at least one armor kit.

These clubs got young people interested in the hobby.  Between them, the Airfix Modelers Club and the International Plastic Modelers Society, they’ve worked for years to entice new members into the hobby.  While the Revell and Airfix clubs are memories, the IPMS lives on….

Thanks for reading.  Be good to one another, and, as always, I bid you peace.

When I was a kid, we went to the hobby shop exactly once a year.  The purpose of the trip was to buy one of those paper mats with fake grass on them, so we could wrap a 4X8 sheet of plywood for the requisite electric train under the Christmas Tree.  There was a shop about 30 minutes from the house–the now defunct Universal Hobbies on State Road 7 and Broward Boulevard–so we went there and spent maybe 10 minutes from the time we opened the door until the transaction was completed.

Fast forward to about 1981.  I was in my full-on "serious" modeler mode, having recently discovered modeling magazines in whose articles the authors discussed such exotic materials such as putty, airbrushes, and decal solvents.  Well, the K-Mart didn't have any of that stuff, so I'd beg a ride to the hobby shop.  They had some of the stuff I was looking for, but none of the kits I wanted.  My mother mentioned that she worked around the corner from another hobby shop, but it was further away from the house.  I just got my ticket to drive, so I took a trip one summer day.  It wasn't too much further from the house, and had lots of stuff packed into a little space.  I had discovered Warrick Custom Hobbies in the Twin Oaks Center on Davie Boulevard, and it wasn't too long before I became a regular.

Remember the stash I wrote about a week ago?  Well, the roots of that stash go back to 1982 and Warrick Custom Hobbies.  Looking through the stacks in search of an Otaki 1/48 F4U Corsair kit–a kit that was, at the time, my Holy Grail–I noted another oddity.  It was a Life-Like kit in my favored 1/48 scale of the Gloster Gladiator.  Asking around, I discovered it was initially released by a company called Inpact some years before.  It was fairly cheap (maybe $3 by the time the Governor got his cut), so I bought it.  Once home, I quickly botched the build, so I went back and bought a second–the only one left on the shelf.  That kit was stashed in my desk drawer, waiting for the time when my skills were such that I could do the kit justice.  I still have the kit, and my skills are certainly developed enough to do a nice job–but in the meantime, another company has released a better, more modern kit of the same airplane.  To be sure, I will keep the Life-Like kit, if for nothing more than nostalgia purposes.  I may even build it–the fact that it was old enough to vote when I first bought it belies the fact that it exhibits a good amount of fidelity to the original, it just needs some of the now-expected fine details not present in kits from the day. 

Oh, and that Corsair?  I found one a few weeks later, built it, botched the paint job beyone salvage, and went to the shop and bought a second.  That one got completed to my satisfaction and remained in my collection for a good many years, until it got broken during a move.  Of course, since then we've seen much newer and much nicer kits arrive on the scene, much like the Gladiator kit.

Once I went to college, I couldn't frequent the shop as often as I did during that summer.  I would, though, visit on those weekends when I travelled home, and I would usually find something to purchase.  Some, I would build during that semester in school, others would join the Gladiator in the desk drawer.  Being on the six-year plan (two studying Aero Engineering and four with Aero Studies with an Avionics concentration) meant that I may have visited the shop five or six times a year, maybe a few more if I had a summer break.  That would change once I graduated and moved back to Ft. Lauderdale.

I'll tell you more of the story later.  Until then, be good to one another.  I bid you peace.

A few weeks ago, we had our HVAC system tested, and in order to do so, I had to move some boxes in our upstairs bonus room in order to get to the attic access door.  While the boxes were displaced, I decided that I needed to do something that I hadn't done in at least 15 years–take an inventory of what I have in the "modeler's stash".  While not true for all, some modelers are pack rats, and amass a collection of un-built kits that rival that of any well-stocked hobby shop–and I am no exception to that rule.  As of this posting, I'm at 1,500 and counting–and that's more or less just kits, no aftermarket doo-dads or decal sheets included.  If you think 1,500 is a lot, ponder this–a few years ago, there was an estate sale for a modeler who had died with some 10,000 un-built kits in his collection. 

Why do we do this?  We're supposedly sane people, right?  None of us has ever appeared on Reality TV as some weird victim of our "habits", at least not that I know of.  So why would otherwise upstanding people, viable contributors to society, gather such a large number of little plastic airplanes, ships, cars, tanks, or whatever?  Why does anyone collect and/or hoard anything? 

For some modelers, it has been the threat of "Limited Edition" kits.  You know the drill–"Buy it now or pay through the nose later."  Early on, I fell for it, but very rarely these days do I rush out to buy a mainstream kit because I don't think it'll be available in a week, month, or year.  Mind you, there are some cottage industry kits that are limited to a certain number–and I will get those if the subject interests me, since a good many of those are truly "if you snooze, you lose", but for the most part I know that the kit will, more than likely, be available when I'm ready to purchase it.

Along the same lines, there is the "The molds were destroyed" story.  Rumors abound on the interwebs about two or three kits that will never again be available since the company did away with the tooling.  Airliner modelers chase their Holy Grail in the form of the Otaki 1/144 Lockheed L-1011 TriStar.  Small-scale military modelers likewise snap up every one of the 1/144 Otaki/Entex/Nitto/Revell/Testors C-5A Galaxy kits they come across.  Both kits, we're told, will never again be made, since Otaki is said to have dumped the molds in Tokyo Bay.  The stories behind those actions are many and varied, but I don't know if anyone knows the real dope.  Steel molds cost way too much for them to just be dumped.

Another angle:  "Well, you know that the original mold of the Superfly was irreversibly altered in order to make the Super-Duperfly, right?"  The only kit molds that I believe were "permanently altered" would have to be Revell's 1/115 scale Lockheed Electra airliner and their 1/48 H-34.  The Electra story goes that the sales of the Electra kit had dropped off, and the U.S. Navy had just introduced the Electra-derived P-3A Orion to the fleet.  Revell decided to capitalize by altering their Electra tool into an Orion, but in order to do so they could not go back.  Whether true or not, we haven't seen Revell reissue an Electra kit, so I'd have to the story has merit.  As for the H-34, it is said that Revell changed the molds to make a Queen's Flight Wessex, altering the molds in such a way that to mold an H-34 was now impossible.  Nowadays, though, with slide mold technology and mold inserts, that is a thing of the past.  I'm not falling for that line…

How about the collector?  While there are kit collectors out there, I'm not one of them.  True collectors want pristine examples of what they collect, whether that be coins, stamps, cars, dishes, or whatever.  Nope, the boxes in the stash are dusty, some crumpled, some gone altogether.  Nope, I'm no collector. 

I'm a builder–a very slow builder, but I bought every kit I own with the intention of building it.  The problem is time–it keeps moving.  Will I ever get all of the kits in my stash built?  The only way I can see that happening is if I were to crank out two or three a week until I leave this world for the next, without buying anything new.  The way I build, that's not likely to happen.  The alternative would be to do what I'm doing:  Take stock, figure out what you really can live without, and sell the rest as SIDNA.  SIDNA, by the way, politely stands for Stuff I Don't Need Anymore, and I've held a number of SIDNA sales over the past 15 years or so.  Another one is looming…

Until next time, be good to one another.  I bid you peace.