Scale Model Building

In addition to travel, finding great new restaurants, reading business books and IT blogs or conducting genealogical research into my family tree, one of my favorite pastimes is building scale model airplanes and spacecraft (fictional and non-fictional). Since this is my first foray into this topic here I’ll back up slightly to share what I’ve worked on over the past year or so to give the reader an idea of the scope.

Growing up I loved building scale models, but that was back when we had tubes of sticky glue that always managed to get on your fingers then all over the model, paint was brushed on and I was always in a hurry to build whatever kit I was working on vs taking my time and enjoying the experience.

During the recent pandemic I was looking for a hobby to keep me busy and decided to get back into scale modeling. I didn’t just dip my toe in however, I went big and decided to build a 1/48 scale B-17 Flying Fortress with a wingspan of almost 18 inches.

It turned out as one might expect for a modern model kit using the same techniques of my childhood. It was a bit more refined, but generally messy. I hung it up on the ceiling of my office and it stayed there by itself for well over a year.

In April of 2023 I got the bug again, but this time dipping my toes in wouldn’t do and as I often do I dove all the way into the hobby. I bought an air compressor, airbrush, paints, tools and other accessories. I decided for my first model of the new generation I wanted to build out the Space Shuttle in 1/100 scale. Not content with using the standard kit though I went out and bought special waterslide decals for the black tiles that actually looked like the ceramic tiles on the bottom and lower nose/wing sections. The underside decals came in 3-4 pieces and are likely some of the largest I’ll ever have to work with, so you know, easy for my first attempt.

In the end it actually all worked out pretty well though and I was happy with the final product. At this stage (and for a bit) my pictures are confined to the models in situ (hanging from the ceiling in my office).

For my next model a couple months had passed and we were now into June 2023 and I wanted to start getting into weathering. I’ve never been one to appreciate a perfect museum floor quality model and instead much prefer to make my models look like they have been ridden hard and put away wet, mirroring the conditions they might experience in war or general usage whether terrestrially or in space. I switched things up and went fictional this time with the Millenium Falcon from the 1977 movie Star Wars.

For this Bandai model the construction went together very quickly (2 days) and it was the detailed weathering of engine soot, rust and space debris collisions that presented the most fun.

This was another large model that spans about 18 inches front to back and it holds a prominent place right over my office chair. With the help of YouTube videos this one took about a week to complete painting and weathering.

Because I had so much fun working on the Falcon I immediately went out and bought an SR-17 Blackbird kit because I wanted to experiment with painting an all black plane without making it look all black (The real world SR-71s are a faded combination of greys, reds, browns and blacks).

The build on this one was problematic as the upper and lower body delta wing parts didn’t come together cleanly and a lot of plastic putty and sanding was needed. However, once that was accomplished the real work began to get in the streaking that is prevalent on the upper body.

I like how this one turned out, but at the time I was also trying out some different matte clear coats for the final protective coating and I was really not happy with how cloudy (and yet still shiny) this turned out, so the effort to refine that aspect continues.

Because of the move from California to Oregon for my new role nothing happened between July 2023 and January 2004. While researching (and buying inventory) what I wanted to do next, I came across an old favorite tv show from 1978 call Star Blazers. The central craft on the show was the Space Battleship Yamato.

I decided to pick up the Bandai model 1/500 scale version and bought some new Tamiya paints, namely Hull Red, which we’ll see more throughout several of my next builds.

This build was just a joy to put together. Bandai really makes some high-quality products that have very tight tolerances and look beautiful even in unpainted form. I spent quite a bit of time on YouTube seeing how others approached this one then decided to go with a darker more dystopian color pallet. The Yamato sits right over my office chair and is quite the looker.

Not even a month passed before my next build in late January, the original Star Trek Enterprise. Being a Trekkie I’ve always wanted to build this model and with it being one of the most iconic and longer lasting kits there were multiple versions. I picked up the special anniversary edition and proceeded to put it together all wrong. It was really bad and totally my fault for rushing and not paying attention to the instructions. So, I bought another kit and started over.

After about a week or so I ended up with a pretty decent product. With Star Trek being a more utopian environment, the weathering is very light.

For my next build I went out and picked up a 1/72 Spirit of St. Louis. What I didn’t realize from the pictures (and didn’t put 1 and 1 together from my time seeing the original at the Smithsonian) was that 1/72 scale of a small plane to begin with made this a tiny model, with about a 4-5 in wingspan.

The build only took about 3 days and was completely uneventful. Rather than use the included decals for the wingspan “tail numbers” I painted them on instead.

By early February I had a stack of models building up in the garage. Most of them I found on Ebay, but I also discovered a local area hobby shop as well that I was checking out and picking a few things up from.

For my next build I had been a fan of the 1978 tv series Battlestar Galactica and I had purchased both a Cylon fighter and a colonial viper along with the Battlestar Galactica itself and a Cylon Base Star. I decided to start out small, focusing on my favorite ship from the series, the Viper.

Even though the kit was over 45 years old the build went together pretty easily with fairly tight tolerances throughout. I didn’t want to risk putting on such old decals that looked pretty fragile though so I ended up doing quite a bit of masking and hand painted the craft where all of the decals would have gone. Unfortunately, I learned another lesson on this build as it was sprinkling on and off and during my final matte clear coat I was doing the spray by placing the model on the top of a ladder just outside the garage and using the rattle can sprayers vs my airbrush. During that process it started to rain and I had trapped water drops adhering to the surface. From a distance it still looks fine, but if you zoom in the rough surface is visible and just not up to the standard I’m looking for.

I had signed up to take some classes with Harvard Business School online and they weren’t progressing as quickly as I wanted them to because I was spending so much time building models in my spare time so I decided that I needed a pause to focus on schoolwork. By the end of February I found a spot where I could take a break from studying and jumped back into model building right where I had left off 40 years ago or so, with the F4U Corsair. This 1/72 build was smaller than the 1/48 scale I had built as a kid, but I’m certain this one turned out a whole lot better.

My primary focus for this plane was to weather it like it had been in the hot South Pacific sun, flying through salt spray and coral dust every day of its life. The pictures turned out much better than I had been able to record other models in the past, but even still this one really looks great in person and I was very happy with how it turned out.

For my most recent build, completed yesterday, I’m just going to leave a picture of the box here. I’ll be documenting the build with a post all its own and will use that format going forward. I have some further ideas on how to better document the process but those won’t be implemented until my next build.

So, if you are still here with me at this point you are probably into models as much as I am, or you are a glutton for punishment. I wanted to document my path to this point in this post, even though it was a bit rambling, just so I’d have something that captured the early stages of my journey. I continue to wonder how various projects will turn out and seek to align reality with my vision and learn something in the process each time.