I’ve been modeling since the 8th grade (want to see a goofy picture of me at my workbench?) and for a long time I saved those models. Well, my parents saved them in their attic. After several moves as an adult, I finally decided to give up on storing these and took some (terrible) photos then tossed them. At this point in life, I really wish I still had them. Oh well.

I’ll share and describe them below, but a few thoughts as I look back at these models in this stage of life and modeling skill:

  • My interests haven’t really changed. Expanded, perhaps. But fundamentally, the work I was doing in high school is the same general type of stuff that fascinates me today.
  • The techniques I was using were… rudimentary. But fundamentally, many of the same techniques from then are what I’m doing now. Just doing it slightly better. That was 35 years ago and I was still making tarps out of white glue and kleenex, using tree branches as trees, creating cobblestones out of milliput. A lot of things have changed, but a lot hasn’t.
  • One of my all time favorite models was one I just made up. It wasn’t real, but I can still remember the “story” that drove me to create what I created and have it make sense in the context of this “story”.
  • I apparently only saved the “good” models. There were a bunch of others that never made it to the save stash.

Anywhere, here’s the photos and details (in no particular chronological order)!

Tamiya Bradley
This was one of the first dioramas I did, and one of the first projects that I thoroughly researched. This was the Gulf War era and I was absolutely fascinated by the Bradley. There was a lot of information floating around about it at this time, including a really good Verlinden book. I still wanted to paint it in the European pattern because I really wanted to do a snow diorama. This was one of my first attempts at painting a whole model with an airbrush (A single action, red handled Paasche). I believe this placed in the Junior category in the Pasadena (California) Modelers Society contest some year. 1990?

Kitbashed Tamiya M113 Recovery Vehicle (concept)
This was a fun “what-if” project. The nice thing about youth is you have no context for being scared to try new things. I wanted to make a recovery vehicle (see, I still love that kind of thing to this day), so I made one. Is it real? Nope. Does it have major problems conceptually? Yep. Did I/Do I care? Not a bit. It was fun. I thought it turned out pretty cool.

Tamiya Krupp Protze diorama
Another snow diorama depicting a German camp site at a destroyed building. This was a fun project and one of my last projects before packing things up to head off to college. It had a fire with an orange light bulb under the logs and hidden by cotton ball smoke. I don’t recall how I found the light, but it was repurposed from some other device. The wood base was a cabinet door sample my Dad gave me from his job trailer (he was in construction).

The tree was a real tree root I found when I was getting gas one day and glanced over at the trash can to see that beauty laying on top of the trash in the can. The trailer was a scratch built box on top of the flak gun trailer.

Kitbashed Tamiya Sd. Kfz. 251/17
Long, long before aftermarket kits (beyond Verlinden stuff) was easy to get a hold of…or even in existence, I hacked away most of the Tamiya Sd. Kfz. 251 kit and replaced it with a flat bed and mounted Tamiya flak gun. I based this conversion on two photos I found in a book. This was pre-internet and ALL I could find was TWO photos in one book. I used drafting dividers to measure the photo and then used every bit of my math skills to size to 1/35 scale. I went through at least 3 full packs of Evergreen styrene sheets cutting and recutting trying to get the angles of those side panels correct. That was a task that took several weeks.

By today’s standards it’s pretty rudimentary, but I am still impressed a high school kid with zero resources other than two grainy photos managed to get pretty dang close to the real thing.

Tamiya M577 Command Post Carrier
I was particularly proud of this one because I applied a number of techniques on this model. Weathering, roughing up the wood texture on the platforms strapped to the sides, stowage, tarps, all the good accessories! Also a Junior award winner.

 

Tamiya Horch
Pretty straightforward build, but I was really proud that I scratchbuilt the spare tire mount. I was also pleased with how the tarp on the captured US trailer looked.

Tamiya British LRDG Command Car
Another fun build. Look at those misaligned wheels! It would have gotten eaten alive at today’s IPMS contests! 😀

I don’t remember much about this build other than that the tires were fucking impossible to get straight. There was something about that build that refused to stay in place, much less aligned.