A shout-out to Doug at FOS Scale Models, and Art and company at Bar Mills: both of these gentlemen (and, Art’s crew) are master designers of structure kits. In the last two yrs, I’ve built ~three dozen kits from these two kit manufacturers (and, one, so far, from Kenny Crump’s KCWorkshop), and I just love the “character” of their designs. It just makes building the kits a lot more fun, and also challenges you to develop, and increase your skill set (whether it’s weathering skills, or staining/painting skills, adding on detail parts to make it “pop”, realistic lighting, or whatever else you can think of).
While, like many of you, I have “a few” kits from both FSM, and SRMW on my shelf, I just don’t have the necessary skills (yet) to work on those types of kits at this time – but, by building the intermediate, and more advanced “single building” kits from Doug, Art, and Kenny, these kits are helping me to learn, and acquire the skills (and, most especially, the patience) for their more complex kits (as well as the ones from FSM, and SRMW).
I was an arm chair model railroader for most of my life, always “wanting” to build an N-scale layout, and actually built a half dozen N-scale structures (at age ~45-50), but, it just was NOT fun – just due to the smaller size of the buildings – you can’t add “character” to a structure, if you aren’t able to see it. Two yrs ago (age ~58), I became an HO-scale “convert”, and I’ve not looked back, in fact, I’m kicking myself for not “converting” earlier – lol.
I figure I’ve got enough of an “old” kit backlog, as well as a “new kit” supply chain (FOS, Bar Mills, KCW, CarolinaCraftsmanKits, Downtown Deco) that I’ll still be building kits for at least the next ten yrs. This is at the current rate of ~two (single building) kits per month. I fully realize, when I start building Doug’s, Kenny’s, or Art’s multi-structure sets, that that kit building rate will decrease. But, I’m still looking forward to working on these kits – they will be the next challenge for me, in about two or three yrs from now.
I also want to thank a few guys that have inspired many of us “recently”, with their postings of their kit builds; each of them share their experience and knowledge, with photos, videos or just by answering our questions:
Jason Jensen
Rich Westerman
Vilius Bileisis
Frank Varga
Craig Brotman
Two or three of the above gentlemen have taken the time to personally encourage me – and, I find that to be awesome.
Thanks a bunch to all of you.
