Tom Geiger

there's a difference between: 1. Losing interest in a project and shelving it 2. Being technically overwhelmed / frustrated and shelving it 3. Being unable to make some final decisions so it sits until you get enlightened 4. Enjoying the build so much you are reluctant to finish it! I have models in all four categories! Category 1 of losing interest is universal. Every time I get a new idea on another kit I run this risk. I have a bunch of these! Category 2 can be cured over time. For instance I have a '73 Barracuda I had shelved because I was unsure how to make drip rails. Now that I've learned to do that on several models since, I would be confident to pull this down from the shelf and do so. Right now my Dodge Camper went from category 3 to 4. I got some help from others on the color issue and got it painted. Now I'm doing a little detail a day and dreaming up new details to keep the build alive. When I have a project like this one, I think about it when I'm not working on it and it makes me happy. Sometimes once a model is finished, I feel a sense of emptiness since it's over! Maybe I need to go on Dr Phil! I keep my unfinished stuff in boxes on the shelves over my work bench so I have to look at them. No putting them in a deep dark closet to forget them! Every so often I'll rummage through the boxes and get interested in one. I'll complete some next step or detail, or see a solution I hadn't before. I sometimes do a few things and lose interest again, or I'll go all the way and finish it. Some of these are finished after a decade or more! I realized that I needed to do something to get the unfinished projects off my shelf, so I started my Christmas Model Amnesty Program many years ago. I had the week between Christmas and New Years off at a company I used to work for, so just like the president will pardon a turkey for Thanksgiving, I'd choose a deserving model and actually finish it during this time period. I've managed to do this successfully many years, and failed on a few too!

"We expect pristine plastic or else we're not even going to mess with it, period! If the tooling for some of the rare kits exist and was able to produce a halfway decent casting. " Here's the tough part for the model companies. When they reissue an older kit that's not up to contemporary standards we, as a group remember the originals and know what to expect.. stuff like one piece interiors, one piece chassis and wire axles through the engine block! But new modelers, especially young folks, see that new kit as a brand new release. They have just bought a great AMT kit like the '55-'57 Chevy pickup or '58 Plymouth and then they open the box to their brand new '62 Buick! They wonder what the heck happened and feel duped. So it's difficult for the model companies, no doubt why AMT went to showing the sprue contents etc on the bottom of the box. I never had given this any thought until a guy in his 20s posted on another board how disappointed he was with the Killer Bee VW. He had no idea it was a repop of an older kit from less demanding times! But I see his point.

Today? I got a flu shot!

I have seen it all! You know you spend too much time on the Internet when you've seen all those pictures before! I never had the cash and time to get one 1:1 car done nicely. Makes you wonder about the folks who build this crazy stuff.

My old model room before I moved from NJ to PA. Here's the left side of the main model closet. Kits are two deep, the closet is about six or eight feet long. When I converted this to model use, I thought I'd never out grow it! The right side. Note that good stuff like old Craftsman kits and my resins were all tucked away in cabinets. And what happened years later! I certainly did outgrow the closet! Today my stuff is mainly in model cases that are all marked with the contents. Pretty much marked "Chevy", "Ford", "1930s" etc. all stored in a basement room. Sometimes it's a chore to find something specific, and I will organize it all on shelves in the future. I really do need to go through it all as I have multiples of some kits and things I'll never use. And like many of us when I go digging I find stuff I never saw before!

My name was something my parents came up with. My original name I used on forums was my AOL screen name modlcitizn from back when they limited names to 10 characters. I still have that email address! My avatar is my '55 Chevy Christmas Tree truck I built back in the early 1990s, still one of my favorite models!

Wrong! It's not about profits at all. The model companies are conspiring against me personally! Actually they are watching the demographics and the aging baby boomers. We are retiring at a fast rate with more people who will need leisure activities in the future. As the stock market and economy comes back, more people will retire once the conditions are favorable. There will be this big mass of guys with a lot of time on their hands for the next 30-40 years or so. That's why we're getting these great new tools from Revell and Moebius aimed specifically at our age group!

AMT holds the cards to a lot of possibilities, especially because they have the AMT / MPC history of annuals. The problem is that if the molds still exist, they exist as the last variant of that model, where in most cases the earlier model would be preferred by us guys. For instance AMT just reissued the Gremlin kit, last issue where we'd like the '71 model. Resin has come to the rescue on this one. AMC Pacer? The last release was the later big hood bump model. Same with Volares - the ugly 1980 model can be reissued, but the nicer looking 76-77s cannot without some mold work. And we don't know how much else was revised. Did they update interiors or other details that would need to be backdated? Another example is the MPC Dodge van run. People seem to think that all you'd need to do would be to update the tail lights and grill to go back to the original issue. I pulled out a run of this kit and was amazed at how much they retooled year to year for the annuals. Even the roof stiffening ridges changed several times. The kit also came with a mess of different accessories over the years, everything from funny car like mid engines, to rolling bedroom interior to built in work benches. It would be fun to see what accessories still exist in different inserts or maybe even welded off sprues still in the mold. But the best we could hope for is a back date one issue to the version with the stacked rectangular headlights. I'd be happy with that!

Remembering back to when I was maybe 11 in 1969, I was one of the kids playing on the living room floor of my grandmother's house after Thanksgiving dinner. My two uncles, then in their 60s were talking and my Uncle Dan said, "Isn't it interesting that all these kids will be alive to see the next century?" I had never thought of that before, and 2000 seemed so very far away back then. I remember this like it was yesterday. My Uncle Tom died shortly after that but my Uncle Dan died last year at 93. He too lived to see the year 2000!

1 Pal Drive, Wayne, New Jersey 9 am to 3 pm. Check out our website for more information and hotel rates. http://www.nnleast.com

Nearly everything in this picture is scratch built. The bed and cabinets are all basswood. The mattress is two thicknesses of basswood covered with tissue. The pillow is just wadded up tissue. The blankets are painted paper towel. The coffee maker and coffee pot are both made from bits of plastic. The sink is half a fuel tank from the parts box, repurposed.

John- the '66 Valiants are gone too! I also sold the '60 Buick and parted out the '63 Stude once we realized it was way too rusty to restore. Right now all I have left are the 2000 Jaguar and '91 Geo Tracker convertible, which are in daily driver status. I also have the '95 Celica convertible tucked away in my garage. Once I get myself in order here in PA, I'm going to search out a decent collector car. Something like a 1950s pickup or rat rod roadster pickup. Something that I can hop in and enjoy. I spent too many years owning a bunch of restorables that just collected dust!

This week I got two of the new Revell '57 Fords! And today I will buy myself a new pack of single edge razor blades to replace the blade in my Chopper II cutting tool!

You moving into the house is a big change in this young man's life. He has been the man of the house and suddenly you are there! You didn't say just how old he is, or what your relationship has been with him. There is a chance that he is acting out his frustrations by taking your possessions. You may need to reach out to him and find out his feelings.

There's nothing wrong with using a sniping service! Nor is it expensive. I have used eSnipe.com for years. You schedule your bids when ever you want and I have mine set for a six second snipe. I buy the 'bid points' about once a year and I spend $10 at a time. You only pay if you win an auction. Average cost is about 25 cents per won auction. It's a no brainer for me!

Beyond Wow! I just went through all 21 pages. Friggin amazing work!

Fun project. I have all the mini pickup kits and hope to have fun with them someday! I don't believe any of them LUV or Courier came with stepside beds. I don't know where these kits came from! The LUV is actually an Isuzu pickup. The Courier was a Mazda. Back in the day I was working for a large homebuilder. I bought a fleet of Ford Couriers for our home service guys. I used to borrow them for personal tasks like moving. They drove nice and were trouble free. All were still in service when I left the company.

Let's call the interior DONE! Finished this up last evening. Here's the overall scene. I was very careful not to over do it. I wanted it to look like a camper one of us was using, say to travel to Hershey and Carslile, not something from "Hoarders". The counter doesn't look much worse than the one in my house in the morning! At this point everything is glued in place. I dirtied up the floor a bit, it was just too white. I added the single shoe, simply because I only had one! You know those big bags of random parts and junk you find at model shows? Don't throw away the pure junk and broken parts. One of those was a 1/25 scale leg. I liberated the shoe from it. Counter view... the coffee maker is in place. I made the coffee pot last night. I didn't know what to use for the clear section and was looking for clear sprue, but nothing was big enough. Then it hit me.. a clear drinking straw was just the right size! I added some painted coffee in the bottom. The top is some round thing from my parts box that was the right size and the top had an interesting indent, not a lot different from my own 1:1 coffee pot. I added half a staple for the handle and sprayed it flat black. The inside is full of clear window glue right now. It will be hazy until it dries clear. I used the dishes and cups from that 1/35 scale military detail set. Silverware... there's a fork on the plate, knife and bottle opener on the counter top and a spoon in the sink. They came from a Detail Master photo etch sheet. They are tiny! Do you know how tough it is to make a knife that small look dirty? LOL The food on the plate is just green putty. The napkin is scrunched up rolling paper. I think it was Terry Jessee that once gave the tip that rolling paper is thin enough to be 1/25 scale paper. I will add a roll of paper towels to the wall above the sink and she's done. Last view for today.. the sink has two plates and a cup, along with the spoon. Note that you will look at all of this through the windows, and the top section will come off too. There are a few things I'm trying not to redo since they'll look fine through glass. Other than that, I'm pretty pleased with the project. The above was done last evening. I was too busy today and through the weekend, so I will move on to weathering the body next week. Until then!

I like Aaron's storage ideas. I have all mine in a shallow beer case, the kind that holds 24 cans, a few inches deep.

Today's work... I concentrated on finishing up some interior details. There was a spot on the counter just screaming for a coffee maker. So I took a measuring tape to ours and duplicated it in scale. The only difference is that ours is black and I decided to paint this one antique white to show off the details that would've gotten lost if I painted it black. Also, I wanted to contrast with the microwave next to it. The coffeemaker is nothing more than some Evergreen sheet scraps. The bottom of it is a bit of basswood. The printed controls came from Jim's Mini Site, they were on a microwave oven so I cut out what I needed. The burner is a small headlight lens painted flat black. I like to take pictures because I see things I don't in person. I will need to sand down the lid handle on top a bit. The coffee cup is lead from a mess set cast for 1/35 scale military modelers. I went to an IPMS show to look for neat stuff and found it. I also have the coffee pot that I'm working on from the same set. There are also dishes that will make it onto the counter and into the sink. I have two cups and just didn't want to have two white ones on the counter so I found this tiny little decal. I don't know what it is, but it passes for a character cup. I didn't get a ton done today, but I'm pleased with what I've got. I'm not working by the hour, I enjoyed my afternoon.

I asked for suggestions on colors last evening and Dan and Jacky came to my aid on the Spotlight board. Using their ideas, here we are in beige and green. Everything is just mocked up, you can even see the blue tape in some of the shots. And I haven't started weathering and final detailing, but I now am in the home stretch. I am especially stoked about the 'dog house'. These projects take a life of their own. TJ is my dog and the roof shingles are sand paper cut into individual shingles and glued on just like you'd do a 1:1 house roof. TJ is my dog. I did glue everything in the interior today, no pictures because it looks just like the mockup only you can dump it upside down and nothing falls. I still am having fun creating a lot of little details. A far cry from my original scope of a curbside with blacked out windows. I decided to leave the roof rack white. It will get a bit of rust. Originally I was going to do the area below the windows in green, but went for the wider lower section instead. It's not exactly straight around the wheel well, it's supposed to be brush paint. Front view shows the completed air conditioner taped in place. The tool box was also scratchbuilt as was the gas can holder. I modified the cans a bit to make the two of them different. Rear view includes the little back porch. I will leave the diamond plate white, but it will get dirtied up. I painted the bike today and just placed it there for the photo. It is larger than I imagined. It's the one that came in the old Dodge van kit. Is it to scale? So that's today's progress. It's coming along and once I added color it came alive for me. There is still a lot of work to do, but it's fun again!

Since you guys liked the first photo and mentioned the Traveler in the background... From my rust reference library!

Sorry to say I did sell it this year. I had to move it from my garage in NJ when the house sold, so I moved it over to the house my daughters live in, in the same town. I had planned on keeping it in the garage there, but had to clean it out, so I parked it in the driveway. A local guy saw it and said he had been looking for one to restore for years. He offered me a fair amount and assured me he'd start the resto immediately, so I let it go. It went directly to a resto shop. I felt it was better for the car since I have no time table that I'd get around to working on it, and for what he paid me, I can buy something rust free and finished later on!

Waay beyond the call of friendship! Great job and you are a good friend. I started with your build thread and finished up here so I took the entire journey this afternoon. Great read! The only suggestion is to make sure he has somewhere to display it dust free and out of harm. You did say he has rugrats! The big question... did you give it to your friend yet and what was his reaction??

Oh I didn't need to see that web page! Here's one that's been in my queue for years. Still looks exactly like this!