The Internet and The LHS

Cookie Sewell’s Guest Editorial in the November 2007 issue of FSM touched a nerve. And it’s been nearly half a year and the nerve is still … teched.

I too grew up in a time when the local hobby shop was not an endangered breed.  When I was 8 years old and discovered Monogram kits and Estes rockets, I could walk to one (the name now escapes me) just down Van Dyke Rd from where we lived.  Later, when we moved to rural Michigan, there was one two blocks from the high school I attended in which I spent many hour discovering exotic kits from foreign manufacturers like Hasegawa, Tamiya and Airfix.  And throughout my childhood, I could get Testors’ square bottles of paint, model glue and other supplies from any drugstore or five and dime.

The shop on Van Dyke closed before we moved – which meant it lasted maybe three years.  The Capac Hobby Shop always sold more yarn and dollhouse furnishings than models – and that’s all they sell now (or did; last time I was home they were still open, amazingly enough, given the demographics of the area).  Perry Drugs, along with every other drugstore, five-and-dime and even major discount retailers like Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us and Target no longer carry anything related to scale models.

Local Hobby Shops (LHS) have always been a tough way to make money in the 40+ years I’ve been alive – and that’s the bottom line: making money.  If you don’t make money, you don’t stay in business.  Period.  Time and again over the past ten years I have heard the lament that mail order and the internet are killing the LHS, but that’s like blaming the pneumonia for the death after a long bout with cancer.

LHS fail for three reasons: they’re poorly run, they’re in an area whose population will not support them or the owner calls it quits.  We’ve all been to the shop with the rude and/or ignorant sales staff.  Just as frequently, the owner has a passion for one segment of the hobby and pursues it to the exclusion of all others.  Like it or not, you can’t succeed in most area on just plastic models – you need RC, trains, rockets and other “building” hobbies as well.  Demographics are also a huge factor.  If you don’t have a population that includes enough middle-aged men with disposable incomes and time for hobbies … well, you know.

My club started in a great little shop in West Dundee, IL.  Elaine covered all the bases but she was in an area where there just were not enough people partaking in any of the model-related hobby activities to which she catered (and that was R/C cars and planes plus plastic models) to stay in business, even with word of mouth bringing people such as myself in from 45 minutes or more drive afield.  She told me, as we helped her pack up the shop, that she had not made a profit in 7 years.  It was not for a heroic lack of trying.

The shop closest to me, where I buy all my supplies as well as the occasional kit, has been a fixture on the main drag of Mundelein, IL for decades. (I have had veterans of boot camp at Great Mistakes ask, oh by the bye, is that train place on 45 in Mudelein still around?  And it is!) Ron’s Hobby has a loyal customer base because he does everything right.  He has a great selection of model railroading stuff for the older generation and the best selection of rockets for the younger. He has every tool and basic scratchbuilding supply you could ask for.  He has enough kits to provide for the birthday/Christmas shoppers though kits are not his main focus.  He’ll special order anything you want if he can get it for you (which is how I get my Revell Germany kits) In short: the perfect LHS.  And on that sad day when he finally retires it will all be gone.

I love my LHS … but they are a dying breed because times change.  And the scale modeling hobby has changed for the same reason.  There are many factors why model building is no longer as common as it was when we were kids, but the one that’s most commonly blamed (after videogames) is the Internet. And the Internet  – or more properly, the mail order and online shops that use it – are routinely blamed for “killing the LHS”. Double whammy.

I, however, would submit that the Internet has not only saved the scale modeling hobby, it has enabled it to flourish, albeit in a new and different form. Evolved, if you will. I can now get a model of darn near any subject I want (except, apparently, for a 1/48 scale J-22A) after a half hour of diligent web surfing, and maybe a few phone calls.  We are in a Golden Age, when even the most esoteric of paper projects has an injection molded kit depicting it in some scale. We have paints that claim to replicate exactly the colors used by defeated nations 60+ years ago (when no one was keeping notes, or those notes burned up in a bombing raid).  We can now argue of the exact position, length and shape of the pilot’s relief tube in an aircraft that was pushed into landfills by the thousands before I was born … and those arguments can flourish because of the Internet.

Moreover, I can now make my living – paying my mortgage, my car payment, my utility bill and groceries – selling the models I love on the Internet.  And so much more:  Because of the Internet I can connect with people the world over who love sci-fi models as much as I do.  StarshipModeler.com has contributions and participants from folks on every continent.   I have had friends from countries as diverse as Australia, Brazil and United Kingdom who love sci-fi models as much as I do sitting around my kitchen table here in Vernon Hills, IL, arguing the merits of particular kits.  And almost strictly because of the Internet and my website, we survivors of Elaine’s hobby shop have been able to bring together a group of like minded modelers to form a club in the local area (one of at least four –so far – in the US that met through the StarshipModeler website).  We’ve been an IPMS chartered club for six or seven year now.

Mr Sewell, in his editorial, extolled the virtues of the LHS.  I certainly do not want to negate those – but let’s face it:  in a great many cities across the USA, there are no LHS.  If you have one – or more, as I am truly blessed with here in the greater Chicago area – patronize them.  They can get you the models you want at less than you would pay at a mailorder place plus postage.  But regardless of whether you have an LHS, there’s a cornucopia of wholesome modeling goodness on the Internet.  And you can find people who share your enthusiasm for your favorite subject there too.

Sunshine Patriots

Sometimes I feel like such a dope.
 
Had I known I could demonstrate my fidelity and loyalty to, and my deep and abiding love of, my country by just slapping a sticker on my car or a pin on my lapel … I could have skipped FIFTEEN years of uniformed service (between active duty and the reserves).
 
Where the hell was Fox News when I needed them?  A young, impressionable kid thinking patriotism was about actually serving my country …. at 17 years old, I thought that meant enlisting. (and I would have, too, but the ROTC scholarship came through and I somehow made it through OCS and started out as a second looey instead of a prive.  No one was more surprised than my dad.)(But I digress.)

Fifteen years.  Desert Storm. Mogadishu. Damn, I was stupid.  I could have just gotten a pin and wore it around.

True story:  One month after 9/11 the local Chamber of Commerce held their Fall expo.  We had a booth (not that we got any bidness from it – this was when we were still exploring all the marketing angles.)(sorry, more digression).  I was there all fancied up in suit and tie, meeting and greeting.  Just after the local nursrey came by with a free potted geranium, some guy came up with a handfull of pins and asked why I wasn’t wearing one – like I was some kind of freak.   My first impulse, I must admit, was to punch him.  Instead I just asked whether a dozen years of uniformed service was sufficient … or did I really need the pin?
 
Most days now I feel like punching someone – starting with Bill O’Reilly and working on down the list to George Stepincrapolous.

Fifteen years.   But it’s the pin that matters.

The Hits, She Keeps a’coming

The 72d scale Raptor will be ready for sale next week.  Meanwhile, feast your eyes on what Neil Prentice has done with the kit to date:

Image:  Front view

Image: Looking inside

Image: Further back

Image: Back to the front

V is for V-Wing

Thorsten has done it again. Coming of his awesome Flying Wing, he has created the definitive V-Wing kit. It’s in 1/48 scale – and I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

Underside detail

Front/left view

Front/right

Under the nose

Left side, wings folded

Left/rear

Rear

Top view

Left again

With Revell’s 1/48-ish Pocket-kit Jedi Starfighter

Left side

Wings will be positionable

Closer look

Looking down

Top view, wings extended

Left/front, wings extended

With Pocket Kit

Closer look

Parts

Parts, flip side

If I Can’t Have A Pony And A Plastic Rocket…

Please Buddha, make Bill Clinton shut the hell up.  Seriously, Billary, it’s not helping your case when you carry water for the Republicans, making their arguments for them.  Bill used to be the Revered Elder Statesman.  Now he’s just another partisan screamer – and don’t we have enough of those already?

Oh, one more thing, Hilldawg …..  “bipartisanship” doesn’t mean move right to meet them – because our collective experience over the last decade has shown that the further right the Democrats go, the further right the Republicans go as well.  Really, you can’t win.  They won’t meet you in some middle ground.  They’ll just sneer and put you down.  And why should they not?  You don’t show any courage by pandering to ‘em.

Do us all a favor: stop trying to be Republican Lite.  And put a muzzle on Bill.

Seriously.

Over the Top

If sticking a yellow ribbon magnet on your car shows your patriotism,  sticking on a whole bunch must mean you’re a whole bunch of patriotic, right?

Oi. 

And the door flags … they kick it up a notch.

Liars, Thugs and Bullies

Chris Chulamanis died last Thursday.  Most folks reading this will never have known him.  I didn’t know him well. We conversed – via phone a couple times, email mostly – sporadically over almost ten years, whenever he had a new product or when something caught his fancy.  He was into Disney’s Nautilus, astronauts and Colonial Marines from Aliens.  He was a gifted and prolific model maker, and had made and sold a wide range of products that fit in with his passions.  I have nearly all his 35th scale astronaut figures, for instance, plus a bunch of his 1/6th scale CM weapons and equipment and they are really gems.  Flawless casting, crisp detail, good poses on the figures.  They build up into contest winners – and I have the trophies to prove that.

Moreover, he was one of those guys who really cared about his reputation, and would walk the extra mile – or three – to make sure his customers were happy.  You could call or email and he would always be there, always have an answer or suggestion, or just plain encouragement.  The people who knew him better than I did are uniform in their praise: he was a good guy, a good friend, passionate, inquisitive and caring.  As one wrote: “He was a remarkably giving person and the world just can’t help being a shade darker without him.”

I’ve been thinking about it an awful lot since I learned of his passing …. because guys like Chris seem to be increasingly hard to find in these days, when civility is derided as weakness and belligerence and a thin skin are the highest aspirations of far, far too many people.  When boorish and bigoted behavior is lauded as striking a blow against “political correctness”.  When people who would never, ever dare confront you to your face can make the most damaging, most damning accusations against you in a forum where they know you won’t see it, or know you won’t respond – all the while hiding behind an alias.

There really are no consequences for slander, for defamation, for thuggery, theft or bullying on the internet.  It’s the one place you can flat out lie about someone else and there are no sanctions, no demands for proof.  No one will challenge you to provide documentation, no one will factor your biases or your history against your claims — automatically, what you say is assumed true just because you say it.  And if you are challenged, you can just claim to be a victim of the supporters of whomever you are trashing.

Don’t believe me?  You don’t have to look very far, or very hard, for supporting evidence.  Shoot, just read through the comments after each news story on AOL, or visit any of the multitude of websites that cater to the defiantly “politically incorrect”. 

Here’s the thing:  if something you say could get your ass kicked in meatspace it’s not “politically incorrect”.  And you’re seven kinds of coward for typing it online behind an alias.   Anyone can be a jerk.  That’s easy.  Lord knows I’ve been one myself more often than I care to admit.

It takes true strength of character to be a Man.  Chris Chulamanis was a Man.  A good, decent, respected man, a giant amongst pygmies.  The world without him just doesn’t shine as bright.

Goodbye, sir.  I hope to see ya on the flip side.

Me and My Fubar

November was a bad month all around and best forgotten.

December hasn’t been the greatest either.  We are preparing our house to go on the market in the spring.  Part of that is repainting …. pretty much everything.  The entire downstairs was very poorly before we moved in 11 years ago, and we’ve not done much to improve things over the years.  Now’s the time to correct that.

And while we’re at it, the hardwood floors in the family room need refinished, as they are fairly banged up – and an ugly pale grey color.  Friends of ours are hooked into Chicago’s vast Polish handyman community, and we can get a guy to come out and do the job at a very reasonable rate.  So far, so good.

…. And then we move all the furniture out and discover that the entire end facing the exterior wall is bowed and the boards all warped.  One of the end pieces comes right up – the nails holding it down have rusted through. 

Ouch.  That’s not good.

Plan B:  we tear up the hardwood flooring and replace it with laminate (less expensive than repairing what’s been water damaged).  But first, let’s take a look at that subfloor….. so I spend all of last weekend with a Fubar and a hammer in full destruct mode.  It rapidly becomes apparent that the warped hardwood flooring is the least of the problems.  The plywood subfloor is rotting away, the floor bows like a smile (indicating rot damage to structural members) and there is mold on the drywall.  I can replace the plywood easily enough (the solution is trivial – get new plywood and cut to shape – but the effort is very decidedly NOT trivial) but structural is beyond the tools and expertise I have.

Time to call in the contractor.

In the end, he has to shore up the wall, sister in new supports for the subfloor to existing joists, and get creative with the circular saw to replace the flooring (it seems the builders used plywood sheets that were 47 ½ inches wide instead of the standard 48” – where they got them is a mystery.  No doubt they “fell off a truck”, like half the shoddy stuff we’ve had to replace here over the years.) I watched the middle of the wall rise as he pounded the new supports in place – ouch.   Along the way I get the poor guy to clean out the rotted cardboard boxes and fiberglass insulation in the crawlspace below —- since he has the relatively easy access and I’m highly allergic to both mold AND fiberglass insulation, it’s a no-brainer.

I’ve spent 5 days on this disaster, and there’s still another to go with the Empire guys coming tomorrow to (finally!) install the laminate.  Then I get to scrub the walls and finish patching nail holes (though not in that order) so the painter (another Polish entrepreneur) can do his thing this weekend.  If he doesn’t cancel again.

All this has not been condusive to getting website updates accomplished, though I have at least been able to make canopies for Flying Wings and sort/bag parts for Vipers while stuck here at home.  And take pictures of the new 1/72 Raptor while measuring it for decals as well.   Man, it’s looking sweet!  It has translucent parts for all the interior consoles and instrumentation.  It’s accurate to the first couple of seasons, before they beefed up the CGI to make the missile carrier Raptors.  And Thorsten did the patterns, so everything is square and finely detailed.

Hooray, Thorsten!

So all has not been lost, I guess.

News From The iHobby Show

IHobby, a huge trade show for hobby companies, is held every October in Chicago.  I attended three of the four days (two of them helping with the make-n-take along with other members of the Techmages club).  There was a bunch of neat stuff to be seen – and thanks to Robb ‘kylwell’ Merrill, I saw most of it.

The first thing we saw were a new line of 35th scale diorama accessories from GC Laser.  These are wooden crates, pallets/skids and cable spools laser cut ftom birch plywood.  They have a bunch of painstakingly researched ammo, vehicle and food crates (mostly WW2 era) as well as some generic boxes and spools.  These impressed me so much I signed up Starship Modeler as a retailer, so look for these things in the Store soon.

Lindberg/Hawk had the big surprise of the show:  two new WW2 Japanese ‘mother subs’ with their ‘offspring’.  The first is the I-20, a C-1 class boat, which will have a HA-20 midget sub to lash to the deck.   The other is the very similar I-53, a C-3 boat, which will have 4 Kaiten kamikaze torpedos on deck.   The models looked pretty impressive (though the painting/weathering was way overdone); even the anti-aircraft guns looked nicely tooled and not over- or under- scale.  The HA-20 and Kaiten looked very close in detail to the ones Fine Molds has out now – and who knows, maybe that’s what they used to have something to display.  Anyway, I’m excited – now I’ll have something to go with my Revell Gato and U-Boat.  Release is scheduled for the third quarter of 2008.

Also on display was the box for Lindberg’s upcoming 1/245 Los Angeles ZR-3 airship.  Obviously it’s a variation on their nicely done Graf Zepplin (released this year).  It looks like the kit will include an itty-bitty Sparrohawk parasite fighter plane.  And coming in the last quarter of this year is a reissue of their very cool 1/48 scale Snark guided missile with ground crew and launch rail.

Revell (USA)’s Battlestar Galactica re-pops are slated for November/December of this year.  Starting in January (and continuing through May) of 2008, they will also be re-issuing the pre-painted, snap-tite Star Wars kits  in Revell Germany’s  first two series.  Retail prices are not terribly lower than what the imports were costing:  the Jedi Starfighters (for instance) are slated for $16.95 (vice $25 for imports).  There was no word on whether the third series kits (AT-AT, Y-Wing, Slave 1, TIE) would be imported as well. I presume that Revell will make that decision based on sales of these other kits.   The models will be sold through big-box retailers such as Wal-mart and Toys-R-Us because they are pre-painted snaps, and so akin to the die-casts those chains already carry.

 Moebius Models had a video of their upcoming Seaview kit running (it’s still on track for release later this year; the Voyager from Fantastic Voyage should be out soon), with the Diving Bell , Flying Sub, and Mini Sub that will come with the kit on display.  Mockups of their forthcoming (2008)  Space Pod and Chariot (which will include a Robot figure) from the original Lost in Space were also on view.  These were pretty big – 1/24scale? Also planned for next year are a Conan the Barbarian figure, based on the cover of the  first issue of Marvel’s comic;  The Invisible Man, from a design by noted illustrator Chris White, and; the Aurora Monster Scenes Giant Insect  kit.

 Monarch Models showed a resin pattern for their forthcoming (2008) Ghost of Castle Mare kit, as well as a large poster depicting their upcoming Moon Suit kit (which looks for all the world like one of the old Major Matt Mason toys). They plan to produce a new kit of The Fly as well.

Delta of Sweden was on hand with some very interesting play sand that has a lot of potential for diorama use.  The stuff is an inert, non-toxic polymer that looks like very fine-grained beach sand.  But press it together and you can sculpt it; heat that (by baking at low temp, using a heat gun or torch) and it becomes hard and retains its shape.  Coat that with a sealer and it can be painted with any paint.  If you use their proprietary sealer (which is some sort of latex-based material) you can peel it off later.  Heat/bake again, then rap with a hammer, and it crumbles back into ‘sand’.  Press the sand together and it will hold water (or, I presume, liquid resin).  I’m definitely going to have to get some to experiment with.

Mercury Adhesives  was showing off their line of CA glues, accelerator and debonder specifically designed for hobby use.  They have a rubber-toughened flexible CA that seems to be equivalent of the wave MX stuff that we all know and love.  I’ll be getting some of this to try out as well.

Finally, on the way out, we ran across BC Imports from San Francisco.  They carry  a HUGE line of Japanese ‘gashapon’/ trading kits.  Their Star Trek stuff looked very good, for what it is (cube/desk decoration, essentially), as did the various mecha, monsters and planes.  Of particular note were some 54mm-ish (1/32) Samurai figures, which had fantastic detail  and great, dynamic poses, as well as several cutaway naval ships.  The detail all around on those was spectacular.

So ….. all-in-all a good show.  And Sparky even built a model (thus endangered his standing in the club by actually finishing something!)

The Next (Little) Big Thing

Thorsten is making steady progress on the next Blue Moon offering.  This time the subject is in 1/48 scale, an Imperial Escort Fighter …… “inspired” …. by the  V-Wing seen briefly at the end of RotS.  The fuselage is pretty much done.  As always, he’s done a phenominal job with the detail and the scribing.

With the casting queue what it is, I have no idea when this will actually be available – probably early next year.  Hopefully well before Wonderfest….