[Jean S]

This is excellent.
I've always enjoyed your writing.

[Last Dakotan]

Great read. I and my brothers transformed our model making skills later into engineering and science degrees.

I think one of the reasons that engineering enrollments have collapsed is that kids don't make things anymore.

[Army Air Corps]

I still make models. Take this 1/72 Mitsubishi J8M1 for example:

[MistrX]

I got horribly dizzy, nauseous and head achy from doping the wing of an airplane model in 1966. Later, I found out that some people actually liked this feeling. Go figure. I spent hundreds of hours gluing-up and painting models, mostly cars, in the 60's. I even placed third in an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth contest. My winning saying was: "Do unto other Rat Finks before they do unto you!"

[H. Paul Pressler IV]

Timmy picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.

[swheats]

I have marines in training. Great article.

[DTogo]

Excellent story! Ah, the numerous model airplanes that adorned the ceiling of my bedroom, and ships and tanks on the shelves!

I still think all the Testers glue fumes did me well! :)

[RedQuill]

At a first-grade Christmas party, we all got to pick a present from under a teeny tree. Mine was a BAe Electric Lightning fighter. Lacking glue, I assembled the whole thing that night in bed with rubber bands by flashlight. Decals and all. From that event forward, I had one sole purpose. I got my Navy wings in '89. In the interim I built whole air forces.

[BIGLOOK]

Thanks, normalcy rules.

I spent hours painting and shaving and gluing model aircraft and Hot Rods with my son. Projects that I'll never regret. Our projects, our craft, our imagination endures.

[Jack Hammer]

Wonderful piece about a time when boys were actually allowed to be boys. Model kits were great, and some of us - destined in future to become particularly regressed examples of outdated gender stereotypes - even played war with our models, a handfull of toy soldiers, and cherry bombs, blowing up everything in sight in messy fashion before rushing off to the woods to play soldier.

Nothing in human nature has changed, but now that it's all culturally prohibited and politically incorrect, kids have to be furtive about it. Funny that the "do your own thing" generation became the "do my thing my way or else" generation.

Reminds me of the joke about the little girl at Christmas who's waiting in line to see Santa. When it's her turn, she climbs up on Santa's lap and Santa asks, "What would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas, little girl?"

The little girl replies, "I want a Barbie and a GI Joe."

Santa looks at the little girl for a moment and says, "I thought Barbie comes with Ken."

"No," returns the little girl. "She comes with GI Joe; she fakes it with Ken."

Seems there's a message in there somewhere; kids learn to fake it so young these days. Not to mention everything else they learn so young. What happened to innocence and childhood?

[NY Attitude]

I have a neat video of an F-14A Tomcat model that flies. Trouble is I don't know how to paste it into a response.

[wildcatf4f3]

um, i confess to having snatched a couple of Wildcats and Zeros off ebay last month. I am anxiously awaiting some freetime to escape back to those days of modelmaking. I even got the original Revell flying deuces series. with the F4F and A6M boxart that I remember, as about an 8 yr old, thinking was so cool. I confess. I confess!

[CarryaBigStick]

Glued to the top.

Brings back pleasant memories.

[RedQuill]

And that damned Cherry-scented 'Ross Sniff-Proof Glue' was the first salvo in the war to feminize boys.

[Othniel]

My 10 year old asked me what life was like in the 60's. I told him that guys built more things back then, instead of just going out and buying them. Like my dad, who painstakingly assembled a Heathkit color tv in the basement after our small b/w blew up.

I told him that one of the reasons why guys build rockets, or planes, or catapults, or whatever, is because there is a real thrill in seeing something you build with your own hands and your own imagination actually do what it's supposed to, be it fly, shoot, or pick up tv signals. Nowadays it's cheaper to simply buy a tv; I don't know if heathkit is still in business. But the thrill of it, the smell of the solder, the pause before you plug it in: will it or won't it make lots of sparks and blow all the fuses? Those were the days....

[JoeSixPack1]

35 years after I built my last plastic model airplane, a friend with a convention/party service company contracted me to assemble a dozen helicopters for a display. The price was right so I built them.

And I loved it!

I also discovered my hidden airbrush talent. :-)

Great read, good memories.

[Smokin' Joe]

Squadrons of aircraft, armadas of ships, Battalions of tanks, that takes me back. Excellent piece.

So I gotta put this link up, Model kits for everyone from the kid to the serious scale modeller

[KellyAdmirer]

I built my share of B-24s and Spitfires and Zeros. My pride and joy was a 1/24 Stuka, with huge wing-mounted antitank cannon. Eventually, I graduated to model rockets, but I kept the model planes for a long, long time. I had a huge kit to make a Cutty Sark model, but never did get around to it, too much painting and other preparation....

[CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC]

American models back in the 50s and 60s were "okay," I guess. But they paled in comparison to Japanese models. Being an avid model buyer and builder at home in Japan, I was always mostly disappointed when hitting the model shelves in American stores when we were home on furlough.

I'm not talking about comparisons of beauty or complexity or in scale accuracy or in attention to detail. No, in all those areas the American models were superior to the Japanese, IMHO. But what really stood out as the big difference for me were the motors and the gear boxes and the AA batteries and the lights and the switches. The Japanese models actually DID something! The American models just sat on the shelves and looked pretty.

Thought I haven't seen them in 48 years now, I can still picture those tiny dark blue Japanese model motors with the red and blue wire leads and the tiny brass gear on the shaft. When I built a cable car, it didn't just sit on the shelf showing off its paint job. It had gears and wheels that moved, and I ran string from the top of my bunkbed across the room and down to a floor lamp and when I switched it on, my newly assembled toy climbed up a 30 degree slope.

When I built a submarine, the backplanes and frontplanes actually steered the thing up and down underwater in the bathtub.

I built little motorized tank models with rubber treads and moving turrets with spring loaded gun barrels that shot plastic ordinance at card houses. Better yet was building forts out of cards, with toy soldiers on top, and then setting the tank to crawl across the room on its own and take down the fort. When it was time to move to the States and I couldn't take my tank models with me, I stuffed as many firecrackers into them as I could and started them off on their last battle run across the back patio, to blow up midway.

The ship models all had propellers that turned. The really big ones (that my family could never afford) had motorized gun turrets as well as props, and lights all over the place as well. My older brother used to visit a friend whose parents had money, and he and his friend would build huge ship models and then blow them up with firecrackers in their fishpond in mock naval battles. What a waste! (But what fun.)

And no, I never once put "Cemedine" in a bag and sniffed it. That's what bad kids did. Besides, they barely gave you enough in those little yellow tubes with the bright red caps to complete a model.

Ahh, those were the days!

[Names Ash Housewares]

Built my share and then some as a kid.
Still put em together occasionally today.
And now I fly a few myself as a private pilot.
Working on a studio scale X-wing from Star Wars at this very moment.