PHPaul

Just to give you an idea of working in 1/64th scale. The scene is an inside joke among farmers. Certain years of International tractors were prone to failures of the Torque Amplifier which required splitting the tractor to repair. Much like Chevy vs. Ford, farmers will argue for hours about IH vs. John Deere.

Nice! It's the little details like that that make or break a model IMHO.

Thanks, Landman. This is the farm I grew up on in the 50's and 60's. (Pic is from late 40's as near as I can tell). I spent a lot of time looking for that house kit, it's quite similar to the one I grew up in as well.

My youngest daughter is a pretty talented artist. She's going to do a backdrop scene for me. I'll mention that! ?

Thanks, all! My experience with HO helps a lot, but being dang near 70 isn't helping as much as I'd hoped...? More patience, but less visual acuity... One of my little joys is making detail items out of whatever I have laying around. For instance the cattail leaves are little slices of green insulation off some 18 gauge wire, and the seed heads are dabs of brown "puffy paint" on some magnet wire. Reeds/dead weeds are snipped off the end of a whisk broom. The corrugated portion of a plastic (gasp!) drinking straw makes a great culvert when stretched out and hit with some silver paint. House, barn and grain bins are kits, all the other structures are scratch built. Trees are stranded copper wire armatures, a little solder, some brown paint, some spray adhesive and static grass. Little dabs of red enamel for the apples.

Thank you!

Little better focus.

I see I need to figure out how to manually focus...

As mentioned in my New Member Intro, this Winter's project is a 2' by 4' farm diorama in 1/64th scale to take advantage of my collection of 1/64 farm toys. It's pretty obvious that neither my building skills nor my photography skills are on a par with some of the stunning examples posted here, but practice makes perfect. I'm trying to dust off what little photography skills I have and take my Nikon P510 out of Auto/Snapshot mode. It's coming back to me, but slowly...very slowly. Here are a couple of the not completely horrible shots I've managed so far. Constructive criticism of both the diorama and the photography are invited.

Since you insist....? Some of my favorites in farm toys. A 1/16 Ertl John Deere Compact kit-bashed to match my 1:1 JD750. Loader and rotary mower scratch built. Backhoe also scratch built. A Tonka truck resto-mod with scratch built snowplow. Current pastime, a 2 foot by 4 foot 1/64 scale farm diorama

Hi, Paul from Downeast Maine here. I'm 69 and twice retired. Once from the Navy 1969-1990, and completely in 2012 after a career in various forms of maintenance. As a kid in the Golden Era of Muscle Cars (graduated High School in 1968) I built a lot of 1/24 and 1/32 cars and trucks. As an adult I was into HO scale model railroading for several years. For the last couple of years, I've been building 1/16th farm equipment out of brass and restoring/resto-modding Tonka toys. I enjoyed the scenery and structures part of model railroading more than actually running trains (one reason I got out of it) and this Winter decided to try my hand at a diorama in 1/64 using the Ertl farm toys I've collected over the years. I hope it's okay that I joined for the diorama forum rather than any extensive interest in model cars. I've been perusing the diorama section as a guest and I can already see I'm WAY out of my league here. Fantastic stuff folks! I've already stol...uh..."borrowed" a few ideas. I can post a few pictures of my humble efforts if/when anyone is interested.