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The Myth Buster's Life as a Model Builder


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Thanks Doc, pretty interesting.

I had a very similar job, it just wasn't for the movies, it was for a custom miniatures company. The actual building (when left alone to work) is rewarding but it's dampened by short budgets, low pay, demoralizing deadlines and usually unwelcome feedback from people only peripherally associated with the project who add their 2-cents long after you needed their input.

But day to day, when things are humming and you have a wall of kits to pull parts from, a store of everything Evergreen makes, an arsenal of glues, vacu-form machines, resin, RTV rubber, lathe, every tool Micro-Mark makes and a couple fellow modelers to brainstorm with... then it's great fun. But not too many people last more than a few years.

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I did something like this for a while a few years ago. We got contracts for museum display models and a couple of oceanographic institutes. Even built for a couple of celebrities. Unfortunately the deadlines the low pay and the all-nighters to do those unwanted last minutes changes just wore me down after a while. On the plus side, I got to travel a bit and got behind the scenes tours of the Smithsonian and National Geographic museums among others, so that was cool. I also got to build a 1/12th scale proctoscope machine with Mattel style packaging for a Doctor Barbie that went to a Doctor in NYC as a joke gift from another doc! That was interesting....

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Cool. One of my first jobs was working as a draftsman for a big engineering company, drawing piping for petrochemical plants and refineries. The big dream of the drafters there was to get promoted to the model shop. Back in the early 80s, they would build actual scale models and use them to route piping and controls. The drafters would then manually draw the isometric plans of piping by referencing these. Of course all this is done on CAD today! And once the 3D model is done in CAD, the system automatically generates the iso views and most of the drawings!

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that was really cool to see, I've built models for friends and people, and i don't think i would want to do it for a living,

trying to get all the details right, and decals right,, lot of work,

Well, maybe 40 yrs ago i would of,, I have a great respect for the fine detail that goes into a model, stuff that most

people never see, or even cares about, I still think the hands on model building is going out with are generation.

Its all about computors now days, even Adam said so,,, Keep building,,

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too cool! when i was in high school, i did a ton of student films.. doug chang went to the other high school in our district and i saw what he was doing then, and it was amazing what he could do with a super 8 camera and a few model kits..

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