How did I start modelling?

janos

janos

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Would it be worthwhile talking (writing rather) about the beginnings? I just realised that I started modelling nearly 60 years ago! Frightening, isn't it? I did not have anything but a kitchen knife and a hand drill for tools and fire wood for material. I was reading a lot that time (not today unfortunately) and there were a few maritime books from a Hungarian writer András Dékány who gave so nice a picture about being a seaman in the Mediterranean so that was the trigger. And there were sometimes quite good plans in the monthly paper Modellezés. And there was a little creek just behind our house with some water in it. Everything has changed since then of course but the youthful energy helped me a lot for all what happened to us in the mean time.
I am volunteering in the Sydney Maritime Museum and talking to people who come for a chat to the Modellers Desk - and they have been asking me a lot about how did I start. Hence the idea - could we share our story about being a novice? What, when, why or why not? I think it might be an interesting thread.
János
 
i started at a very early age around 4 or 5 my grandfather owned a 5 and 10 cent store early 1950s and he would bring home these little plastic ship kits that were no bigger than the palm of your hand. I would sit on my grandmothers lap and she built these little models, actually she built them and i help.

actually i still have one that is now 71 years old

little boat.jpg

When i was around 7 my parents bought a house and my dad set up a HO model railroad. So i spent a lot of time watching and helping him build a little town, rivers and lakes, mountains and bridges. Needless to say a visit to the hobby shops around town was a Saturday afternoon outing. By the age of 10 i was well into building plasctic kits of all sorts planes, trains, ships and cars and i had a bedroom full of them. We moved and the railroad was never rebuilt, my dad got interested in lapidary and carving my mom ran a ceramic studio out of the basement and i bought my first wood ship model kit the Mayflower from Model Shipways. i was also messing around with lapidary, stone carving, ceramics and clay sculpture along with painting cars and motorcycles. Then came art school, a wife and kids and a full time job in commerical art having a good paying job i bought another wooden ship model kit then another working with nothing more than a few hand tools. I began to collect tools from rummage sales and garage sales and christmas gifts. I recall back then i wondered how real wooden ship were built and here i am 76 years later still at it.
 
I started building wooden boats about 40 years ago. I felt the need to spend some of my free time on something interesting and not just going to coffee or watching TV. I bought the plans of traditional Portuguese vessels at the Navy Museum in Lisbon and always built from scratch. The models I built I offered to friends and also sold some. About 20 years ago I moved house and stopped being able to model. But the " pet " never died and I started building again in a corner of my garage. At the moment I am retired and spend most of my time in this space that I have remodeled to become more suitable and allow my constructions.

With automatic translator.
 
That early times (in the 60' and 70' in Hungary) we could only dream (unfulfilled) about a ship model kit, the photos of which we could occasionally see in magazines. Those were just too far away in financial as well as in political terms. Until the 70's we were simply not allowed to travel into a 'western' country and even when it became possible in the 80's we could buy only US$100 (!) once in every 3 years for travel, so not too much would have remained from that for a kit. Only later became obvious that those kits were so good only looking through hungarian glasses. As I started seeing those kits then in Australia in the 90's they turned out to be not that good at all. It is different today tough as there are quite good kits available from different countries (China, Russia and very rarely from Europa or the US). Discussing kits' quality from different suppliers could be the subject of another thread though.
János
 
Ahhhhh….. the beginning of: pride, gratitude, amazement, disappointment, frustration, madness etc…
My father thought model building would be a great way of spending time with his sons. At that time I didn’t know what would become of this. We started with plastic kits then added wooden boats to the list. He and I continued for years. Then Dad saw a posting at Lee Valley ( an adult candy store of tools for the hobby minded ) for model wooden boats. We attended and to our amazement, there was others like minded. Dad has passed on now and probably looking for his next build in heaven. It’s been 54 or 55 years since WE started building…….
Thanks to my father, for the introduction into a great hobby.

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Fascinating stories about people's beginnings in modelling. Thanks for sharing. For me, I never had a parent or role model who was interested in models. In my case, I had to find something to do after various break-ups with girlfriends. To chase away the blues and fill time I decided to build a model. It was the Santa Maria, and that was in 1972. There were 3 subsequent breakups and each time I took up a new model, naming them after my ex-girlfriends. There's a Barbara, a Bonnie and a Jane - all suitable names for ships. At some point, my bad luck in relationships took a turn and I have been happily married now for almost 35 years! When Covid and lockdown arrived, I looked at my earlier ships and thought, "Why not?" I have now built 3 ships, 7 locomotives and train cars and 8 trams.
 
Neither of my parents were into model building of any sort. In actuality, what limited time they had available went towards more trivial matters like day to day survival when you're poor as dirt and trying to raise a family. lol But I think my start was with one Christmas when I was 7 or 8, and my grandmother gave me a plastic model car kit for Christmas. And God bless her soul, to ensure I didn't become a glue sniffing junkie, she bought a tube of some sort of lemon juice based glue to use to assemble it. Yeah... it worked as well as you might envision. But it was my start. So I began building plastic model airplanes, and later migrated to 1:24 scale model transport trucks, and later, in my mid-teens, a Tamiya 1:16 scale Tiger I tank. I honed my assembly and painting skills along the way. At around the same time I completed the Tiger, I tried my luck with Guillows balsa wood model plane kits. I did the usual glider, and then a Sopwith Camel, a later a Vought Corsair. I tried my luck with u-control gas powered kits (not good luck, I might add). But I did learn that you can get a piece of 2x4 to fly if you put a big enough engine on it. :) Back to doing a model car in 1:12 scale of a Lambo Countach. Then modelling took a hiatus till I was in my early 30's, and I saw an ad in a magazine for a beginner wooden ship kit with a basic set of tools from Model Expo. So the Artesania Swift became my first wooden ship kit build and got me hooked on the hobby for the rest of my life to this day. Who ever knew that an impulse purchase would end up giving me so much joy and satisfaction for decades to come. I think a big part of the satisfaction of completing a wooden kit is simply that, unlike a plastic kit where you can modify and upgrade components... but most of it's provided and just needs to be assembled... is the huge amount of scratch building bits and pieces that become the finished wooden kit. The nice part is that the skills I developed in customizing and upgrading plastic kits were in many ways directly applicable to working on wooden ship kits. In many ways, I consider model ship building akin to vacations. Over time, you tend to forget about the challenging and difficult parts and seem to only remember the good parts of the process.
 
My parents and grandparents were all craft people. in the early years my dad had a portrait studio where he took B&W photographs and air brushed them in coilor. We lived and i still live on the shore of Lake Erie and for a time my dad had a boat we went out on . Lookng back it seems boats the lake influences from parents and grand mothers i had no choice.
On a personal level our farm house had an old coal burning furnace which got replaced with a modern forced air gas furnace. When that happened there was no longer a use for the coal bin which was this little room that my dad cleaned out when he was into HAM radio he out grew the little room and it became my personal spot for model building. That room became my spot away from 2 brothers and a sister a place i went turned on the radio and built the plastic Flying cloud clipper ship and countless other models to the tune of Love me do by the Beatles and the British music invasion.
Model building over the years became a place of Zen when the stress and pressure of commerical art and deadlines and people over you shoulders keep saying "how soon in need it now" and raising 4 kids and a house hold to support. I found out at an early age model building takes you away.
 
Back in 70s/80s America building plastic models was just what kids did. With very little parental supervision or input. Most of my neighborhood friends were into planes that they built quickly, sloppily and with no paint. Before the glue was even dry, they’d be out in the backyard blowing them up with firecrackers! Again, little supervision.

I was about 4 or 5 when we visited Plymouth and I saw the Mayflower replica for the first time. A Revell kit of her came home with us and I proceeded to do an atrocious job of painting and constructing her. I still remember my sense of pride and accomplishment.

A little later, around the age of 7, we visited the USS Constitution in Boston. This would have been just a few years after the Bicentennial. Another Revell kit (not the big 1:96 version) came home. By now, wooden ships had lit a fire in me, and I took much more care in building this model. My father helped with the detail painting, and my mother, who made clothing as a hobby, helped with the rigging. She rigged the whole model, actually.

A year later, in 1980, a new family moved-in next door. The father, Mark Hansen, would have been around 40 at the time. I was instantly fascinated by Mr. Hansen. He was often out in the yard with his RC tanks, or in the garage building black powder guns from kits. He was a friendly guy, and never seemed to mind company and an inquisitive mind.

His hobby room, where the modeling happened, was expansive. One whole wall was filled with completed models of WWII aircraft and tanks and supporting vehicles. There were a smattering of smaller scale plastic sailing ships, like the smaller scale Victory, and Constitution. Mr. Hansen’s models were carefully and professionally made.

At the time I met him, he had already build Heller’s La Sirene, which was in a case of his own making, and he was building the Royal Louis. This was my introduction to French naval architecture. Mr. Hansen had, by this time, seen some of my earlier efforts, and he began to educate me on what makes for a more realistic sailing ship model.

The piece-de-resistance, however, was the original pressing of Heller’s Soleil Royal at the top of his stache-shelving. I only had to see the side-box art to become instantly transfixed by this vessel, and thus a lifelong obsessive passion was born.

Mr. Hansen had two boys of his own, a little younger than me, and his plan was to build the SR in his retirement. Sadly, after an adulthood of smoking and casting lead bullets in his inadequately ventilated garage, Mr. Hansen died before reaching retirement.

It is his pressing of the kit that I am building right now, at this stage in life, when my own kids are a bit older and needing me less and less. He was a true mentor to me at an early stage in life when my own father and I didn’t seem to have much in common. He never expressed exasperation that I was a near constant fixture in his garage, asking endless questions, and just watching what he did with great fascination.

I will always remember his experiment to faux tiger-stripe the CVA percussion double-gun with stain and a fine sable brush. It came out pretty damn well! He even taught me basic woodworking and metalworking as I built my own kit Pennsylvania rifle.

He then taught me how to load, shoot and care for my rifle, thus igniting another abiding passion of mine - black powder firearms.

Anyway, Mr. Hansen is the person I think about as I build this model and it is to his memory that I have dedicated the project.
 
It was long ago approximately 1974 year when I was only 5 years old and it was thanks to my father that introduced me to the hobby. I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and during that period the only models available were the kits from DDR company called Veb Plasticart. I still remember the very first Mig-21 and Saab 35 along with my favorite Mil Mi 1 and 4. My first kits were a mess of glue and plastic that gradually improved thanks also to my father that followed me during the first steps. He liked very much the real aircrafts so it was a pleasure to both. During that time there were no other options and for some reason it was positive since I did the same kits a lot of times until I somehow improved. After, when we moved to Italy and I was 8, I discovered a brand new world with many other options and started by my own. In the last year before moving abroad my grand pa made me really happy since he found the battleship Potemkin from Ogonek in 1:400 and we discovered the spaceship Vostok-1 again from Veb Plasticart. Very unusual and nice matter, both such kits survived that era and are still available. The latest issues (with other brands, of course) are really recent!
 
Approaching 80, in the 50s there were no wooden kits that I remember. Kits were Lindbergh or Aurora or Revell and plastic. I built, probably (though no built kits have survived) 20+ kits, from tanks to aircraft carriers. Other things came along, such as girls and only in the past few years have I returned. Not as handy as I once was but still enjoyable for an old coot.
 
I started building models as I was 14, in the gray 60's, among the circumstances I wrote about earlier. The choice of ships was modern, painted warships of course, because we had some information about these only (sometimes just a photo). And poor quality timber could be covered by paint at least. My first more serious ship was CH 123, an American built subchaser, given to France during WW2. This went quite well and she is now in a collection back in Hungary. Then a few books became available, among them one from Heinrich Winter about a Dutch yacht in German. I built it and I still have it today, gone through a few rebuilds. My life had changed a lot, going to uni in 68 and there was no free time during uni years. Then I started working like a horse so not too much happened on the modelling front until about 2000, as we were already in Australia.
 
cdnfurball said:
Ahhhhh….. the beginning of: pride, gratitude, amazement, disappointment, frustration, madness etc…
My father thought model building would be a great way of spending time with his sons. At that time I didn’t know what would become of this. We started with plastic kits then added wooden boats to the list. He and I continued for years. Then Dad saw a posting at Lee Valley ( an adult candy store of tools for the hobby minded ) for model wooden boats. We attended and to our amazement, there was others like minded. Dad has passed on now and probably looking for his next build in heaven. It’s been 54 or 55 years since WE started building…….
Thanks to my father, for the introduction into a great hobby.
Click to expand...
Hallo @cdnfurball
we wish you all the BEST and a HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Birthday-Cake
 
I started modeling in plastic kits back in early 70's. Mostly aircraft due to my love of the Air Force and WWII flying stories. My father got me the Apollo Saturn V rocket kit which stood about 3' tall when all assembled.

I got into model ship building in the mid 90's when visiting the local model railroad hobby shop, which also had lots of other craft items. They had a informal ship building group that met there every Saturday in the work room of the hobby shop. And my curiosity got the better of me and I started with the Phantom, solid hull from Model Expo and then the Swift.

I enjoyed the group and the hobby shop moved to new location and then closed due to management issues, and the group moved and never found out where to.

I dropped out of the hobby for about 15 years until I came across this forum which got my interests going again, mainly as a place to chat and learn what to do when I had a problem I couldn't solve.

Still working away at models although at a slow pace due to life, work and other hobbies.

Two of my kids even started working model ship kits for a while until growing up got more time consuming as they got older.
 
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