The Consolidated Model 16 Commodore…Mini Version

I have a suspicion. I suspect that someone reading this actually once built a model airplane. There was a survey done back in the Apollo days that asked the astronauts if they ever built a model. All of them responded “Yes.” Maybe us mere mortals did too. I know I did. And still do.
Part of that suspicion is that this publication has been seen by, dare I say, thousands of model building fellow readers. Yet, going back to that first issue of the AAHS Journal on my shelves (back to 1956), I can’t ever recall seeing a single example or article about "model building" in these pages.1 Personally, I think that’s a shame, as there is so much we AAHS "historians" have in common with model builders. Both groups enjoy the historic record. Historians, to learn the stories, modelers to help to “get it right,” and view it in three dimensions.

Here’s my personal experience with just one project I have done over my years of building/reading that you might relate to. I’ve been a model builder since the age of 6 or 7. I started with gluing together pieces of wood that claimed to resemble some sort of airplane. That was good enough for me at the time. As that time passed, these wooden wonders began to better resemble aircraft and the kits that came along started looking more like the real things. Later on kits started to be offered in this new material – plastic. I remember being a little put off since this new stuff didn’t require anything but the addition of glue. They didn’t seem to be as much fun since it was an assembly process without much personal skill involved.

Oh, was I ever wrong about that! "Plastic" brought the hobby to the masses! Now people whose parents would never allow their child to wield a "sharp object" could trust them to build something without injury. They obviously didn’t know anything about X-ACTO® knives! And those plastic kits were a lot more than paint-by-numbers pieces in three dimensions.

Those plastic kits were bought and built by the thousands. Planes, cars, boats, tanks – there was something for every interest. And most were treated like fancy toys. A lot of them were. But a few actually crossed over into the realm of historically accurate representations of the real things. With a little more attention and a careful application of paint and a bit of "artistry," some of the results went well beyond "toy."

The hobby changed. Many builders left active participation to raise families, etc. Some stayed, and many returned after things in life "quieted down." But the evolved hobby now brought expectations that weren’t present at the beginning of the mass marketed hobby kits. It was now expected that new kits would be accurate representations of the real things, not just facsimiles, as in the past. And the builders now got "involved" beyond gluing, painting, and kind of-sort of representing the real thing. So, where did modelers now turn to for confirming those accuracies?

For me it was a two-pronged process. I had turned to trying my hand at scratch building after doing a few modifications to existing plastic kits and then having an incredible lasting friendship with two masters of the scratch building approach, George Lee and John Alcorn. Their "calling cards" to this sort of model building? You’ll find ample evidence of their passion/work in stunning models on display in places like the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of the United States Air Force, and the National Naval Air Museum, to name a few. I was blessed to have their friendship and tutoring.

Then there was the research. This was long before the internet. You wrote letters. You visited museums, you read the printed stuff – British aviation magazines, British modeling publications. You made contacts with people in the know. I built a network of sources for my projects. All these folks were always willing to point me to sources . . .