Page one story about our shared passion in todays Wall Street Journal

[Luc Janssens]

first of all thanks for the heads-up Bob Daykin

https://www.wsj.com/articles/model-citizens-building-miniatures-is-not-childs-play-11578065533?shareToken=stb0824b52ef2e4604add17b702dfc007b&reflink=article_email_share

Link courtesy of Tim Boyd

Hope it gets through cuz normaly it's a paying feature.

 

Luc

Edited January 4, 2020 by Luc Janssens

[stitchdup]

it worked for me

[peteski]

The link works but only shows couple of paragraphs. To read the full story I would need to sign in or subscribe.

[Classicgas]

Only got the first 2 paragraphs.

[tim boyd]

30 minutes ago, Classicgas said:

Only got the first 2 paragraphs.

Entire article at the above link loads for me.  Sounds like it works completely for some, not for others.  I accessed on Chrome. 

Recommend everyone try the link at least.  Or you could go to the store today and buy a copy of the newspaper itself....TIM

[iamsuperdan]

Hey Luc, can you copy/paste the article? Looks like its subscription only.

[DonW]

2 hours ago, iamsuperdan said:

Hey Luc, can you copy/paste the article? Looks like its subscription only.

Sounds a bit dodgy in copyright terms?

[Luc Janssens]

2 hours ago, iamsuperdan said:

Hey Luc, can you copy/paste the article? Looks like its subscription only.

Strangely enough, I no longer can access it either, bummer!

 

[tim boyd]

30 minutes ago, Luc Janssens said:

Strangely enough, I no longer can access it either, bummer!

 

Weird...mine still works.  Plus there is conversation  /discussion. at the end of the online-article....31 responses as of this evening.  Interesting comments....most do seem to "get it".   TB 

[Luc Janssens]

23 minutes ago, tim boyd said:

Weird...mine still works.  Plus there is conversation  /discussion. at the end of the online-article....31 responses as of this evening.  Interesting comments....most do seem to "get it".   TB 

The word is out, and that is important...do hope it will generate renewed interest in the hobby.

[Tom Geiger]

I was interviewed about NNL East but didn't make it into the article.  Nice article but we could've done without the reference to "whack jobs".  

[russosborne]

Only two paragraphs for me, also.

Russ

[OldNYJim]

Two paragraphs for me too - but I’d really like to see what $5ks worth of model looks like!

[Snake45]

4 hours ago, Tom Geiger said:

I was interviewed about NNL East but didn't make it into the article.  Nice article but we could've done without the reference to "whack jobs".  

You DID get mentioned in Tim Boyd's story in the new issue of the Other Magazine, though. 

[Perspect Scale Modelworks]

Try using duckduckgo.com. Copy and paste the link in the first post into the duckduckgo search and you should get in the full story.

[SfanGoch]

No-go. It's the "finding the corner in a round room" routine. It provides a single match which is the same link to the article you can't read without paying for a subscription.

[Motor City]

The Wall Street Journal wanted me to take a survey after I couldn't get past the 2nd paragraph.  I stopped at the local library to read it.  It's the Saturday/Sunday edition and starts on the bottom of p. 1 of the front section.  Page 10 is too large to fit on a typical sheet-fed multi-function, so I couldn't post it here.

Edited January 7, 2020 by Motor City

[Michael Bloes]

Full article:

By day, Mark Gustavson is a lawyer in Salt Lake City. In his free time, he makes model cars. His current project is a 1/25th-scale version of a car that exists only in his imagination—a 1964 Mustang with elements of a Mercury Cougar.

 

The 69-year-old Mr. Gustavson expects to spend about $5,000 on supplies, including a tiny cylinder head he will pay a machinist to produce. That doesn’t count the 900 or more hours of labor Mr. Gustavson expects to put into a car he will be able to hold in the palm of his hand.

He insists on clarifying one point about his hobby: “I’m not the only whack job.” Tens of thousands of other grown men, and some women, build model cars, tanks, rockets and airplanes. They have taken what was once a boys’ hobby to levels that might strike the uninitiated as a bit crazy.

For boys in the 1960s, building a model was a rite of passage. Many gave the hobby up after discovering how tricky it was to glue bits of molded plastic together without creating a sticky mess. Then videogames and other electronic toys virtually killed children’s interest in model kits.

“This is like the old-guys thing,” says David Henk, president of the South Hills Modelers Association in suburban Pittsburgh. “We hate to say it.”

“It’s almost like a secret society hobby or something,” says James Fullingim, president of the Central Texas Scale Modeling Society, which has a couple dozen members and meets monthly in Killeen, Texas.

The number of model makers is hard to estimate, partly because not all of them join clubs, enter contests or attend conventions. One indication of the hobby’s breadth: Scale Auto and FineScale Modeler, magazines for modelers, have a combined circulation of more than 43,000 in North America, according to their publisher, Kalmbach Media Co.

Modelers are up against the indifference of their children and the difficulty of explaining the appeal of their hobby to those who have never tried it.

Bill Murray, a retired electrical engineer who lives on Long Island, N.Y., has filled his basement with hundreds of models and tools for assembling them. What will happen to all those treasures after he dies? “My offspring keep saying they’re going to have a massive garage sale—anything for $5,” Mr. Murray says. “If that’s what they want to do, that’s fine.”

That wouldn’t be fine with Mr. Gustavson. He is the founder of a model museum in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. It occupies 1,200 square feet inside an office building and has run out of space for new models. Mr. Gustavson and friends are trying to raise money for larger premises.

“These are not toys,” he says.

Mr. Gustavson’s wife of 46 years, Janet Gustavson, says his hobby “does seem a little obsessional at times,” but she sees it as a creative pursuit that has led to many friendships. “After a while you kind of catch the vision and think, well, I can support this,” she says.

Ken Hamilton, 71, of Charleston, S.C., thinks of modeling as a lifestyle, not just a hobby, and displays some of his models in an art gallery, alongside other artists’ paintings and sculptures. For one creation, he started with a kit for a camping trailer. From scratch, he then created an adjacent rabbit pen, featuring rabbit droppings made of poppy seeds and hay derived from dried asparagus ferns.

Mr. Hamilton’s modeling tools include tweezers, forceps and hand-me-down scrapers from his dentist.

Recently he has been working on a diorama featuring an abandoned school bus converted into a camper. Inside are ashtrays made from seashells, containing real cigarette ash. Mr. Hamilton painted snippets of wire to resemble cigarette butts. A TV set has a rabbit-ears antenna capped with bits of aluminum foil to improve reception.

“I remember doing that as a kid,” Mr. Hamilton says of the foil-enhanced antenna. In building a model, “you’re able to convey a story. I like to give the work a sense of the past and the present and possibly even a future.”

When he created an 8-inch replica of a 1970 Mustang Boss 302, Tim Boyd, a retired Ford Motor Co. executive, peered under the hoods of the originals he was modeling to make sure he was accurately reproducing the wiring and emissions equipment. Like many modelers, he sweats over interior details that can’t even be seen once the model is complete.

In a quest for accuracy, modelers examine old photographs and search archives. While making a model of a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, Mr. Fullingim tracked down a pilot who had flown the propeller plane to ask for a description of the cockpit.

In Pittsburgh, Jason Malenky favors an authentically beat-up look for his miniature cars and trucks. He uses a jeweler’s drill bit to create rust holes; he once scraped lint from an old white sock to mimic the stuffing spilling from a worn-out car seat. With a mixture of dust and Elmer’s glue, he created mud to insert behind a truck’s bumper.

Mr. Hamilton has dipped aluminum parts in ferric chloride acid. “It eats away the metal in a realistic manner,” he says.

This sort of “weathering,” or showing the effects of time, can be controversial in modeling circles. Joe Reiman of Tucson, Ariz., wrote to FineScale Modeler magazine in 2017 to condemn what he saw as excessive weathering of model military planes. “These are elite organizations that would never allow aircraft to get this grungy,” Mr. Reiman wrote in the letter, published under the headline “Overweathering has to stop.”

Another debate among modelers is how far they should go in the quest for authenticity. Some rebel against perfectionism. Scott Zasadil, a 62-year-old data scientist in Pittsburgh, says he sometimes throws away the tiniest pieces from model kits. “If with a magnifying glass you can’t tell what it is, I’m not going to put it on there,” he says.

Even Mr. Hamilton, a legend in the modeling world, needs a break now and then from the pressures of high performance. Sometimes he makes a model entirely out of a kit, with no added parts built from scratch. “It just kind of reminds me of all the fun I had as a kid,” he says, “building something right out of the box that you don’t have to think about.”

[SfanGoch]

That cinches it. We're mental cases.

[Bucky]

50 minutes ago, SfanGoch said:

That cinches it. We're mental cases.

If that's the case, I have been since I was 8 years old! Hahahahahahaha!

(See? Whad eye tale ewe?)

[ChrisBcritter]

6 hours ago, SfanGoch said:

That cinches it. We're mental cases.

"He was a loony, but he was a happy loony."

[Rocking Rodney Rat]

I'm proud to be a "whack job"....-RRR

[Jon Cole]

I also can only access the first two paragraphs. Probably because I have clicked on their articles so many times in social media. We get limited views, then no more. Welcome to the paywall. Remember when it used to be free?

[drodg]

I started another post on the article and I read the article but I had the paper not the digital version,  I was saying that I was telling my wife about the article Saturday and she didn't think it was funny,  I wonder why. Lol.   

[peteski]

Well guys, if you look few posts above yours, the test of the article has been posted here.