Leaderboard

After a nearly 2 1/2 year hiatus from scale modeling, I chose this project to blow the dust off of my creativity. All told, I spent about a month from start to completion. This model depicts a Bf 109G-6 of 7./JG3 -White 10 + Black I, Bad Worishofen, 1944. The venerable Hasegawa kit speaks for itself, and there is no issues with assembly. In fact, there was no filler needed anywhere on the airframe. The only aftermarket I added was an Eduard PE seat harness. Chrome Bare Metal Foil was wrapped around the hydraulic oleo struts. The markings were from an 18 year-old Cutting Edge (Meteor Productions) sheet. Back in the day, Cutting Edge decals were my go-to for aftermarket markings. This sheet, however, gave me fits. The spiralschnauze would not lay down, so I substituted it with one from an old Eagle Strike sheet. After, of course, sanding the spinner clean and repainting/glossing. The meteors fractured in several spots, necessitating touch-ups with white paint. But, the strangest thing was the fuselage Balkenkreuze-both sides, after being set with Mr. Mark Softer, and clear coated, weathered, and semi-gloss coated-lifted from the plastic and bubbled up! Granted, the Mr. Mark Softer was maybe 6 or 7 years old, and there was not much left in the bottle, so that may have played a factor. So, I stripped the fuselage of those two decals, cleaned up the areas, re-painted the areas, re-glossed the areas, and used the kit’s markings. These performed well. The antennae wire is stretched sprue. Having not completed (or really worked on anything for that matter) for nearly three years made this project a humbling experience. There’s a lot of room for improvement, and I have a lot of work to do in the future. Thanks for looking…

Greetings all, I hope most of you have decompressed after a most excellent convention in Chattanooga just a few short weeks ago. As promised here is the first update of many regarding next year’s national convention in San Marcos, TX. First, the question that I know is on many people’s minds is “when do rooms open up”? The IPMS-specific room reservation links - that give you the convention rate - will go live next Saturday, September 7th at the following time: 11:00AM Eastern 10:00AM Central 9:00AM Mountain 8:00AM Pacific The links will be on the convention website: www.nats2020.com/registration_pages/hotels.html. There will be links for the Embassy Suites plus all four overflow hotels. If you missed my presentation at the Chattanooga convention, I announced that we will be providing a shuttle bus to run (free of charge) on all four days of the convention from approximately 8AM to 8PM each day (we will work to move the last time back to later in the evening on Saturday to take into account the awards banquet). This shuttle will run a loop between the Embassy Suites, the four overflow hotels, downtown San Marcos, and the Premium & Tanger outlet malls. Right now, we’re anticipating it will stop at each location at least once an hour. Speaking of shuttles, we will also be providing a free shuttle service from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (i.e., Austin, Texas) to the Embassy Suites and overflow hotels on the Wednesday and Thursday of the convention (July 29th and 30th). This shuttle will make a run once every 2-3 hours starting at noon and make the last run around 9PM. We will have a small welcoming team staffed by the IPMS Austin Scale Modelers Society to greet convention guests and direct them to the shuttle bus stop. If you make reservations with Embassy Suites there will be an option to select parking for $10 per night. Disregard this as parking is free; it is in the contract with IPMS/USA that guests will not be charged for parking. In-room Wi-Fi is also included in the price of the room as per the contract. Theme Awards: We are close to getting the wording down for the theme awards and I will post these to the web site soon (before the end of September). Theme awards will be listed under the “Contest” page of the 2020 Nationals website: www.nats2020.com/contest.html. The details on our various staff members is up on the website as well. For questions on specific areas of the show you may reach out to each of them: www.nats2020.com/staff.html. We will be diligently working on adding details to the website in the coming months once these details are ironed out. We expect show registration to begin in early 2020 to include banquet tickets, tour tickets and various seminars that will require tickets (only a few). The staff is also working on details of the t-shirts as well as the possibility of hats (still weighing this one). Of course, pins and decals are in the works and we will have final designs and products in the spring of 2020. Feel free to reach out to me at this address (director.nats2020@gmail.com) with any questions you might have. If I have an answer, I will most definitely share it. If I don’t, I will work to find the person that does. I will post updated details to the website as well as: Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/IPMSUSA-National-Convention-2020-451660115577640 Twitter: @2020Nats Please feel free to forward this e-mail to as many IPMS members that you know and that would appreciate this information to include any of your internal club e-mail distributions. I will continue to add names to my personal distro list for the 2020 show…which as of the time of this writing is over 350 members. Finally - I sent the above note to all of you that sent me your e-mail address. I got about a 10% bounce back from all the addresses I have collected. If you did not receive an e-mail check your spam filter and ensure it is set to receive e-mails from "director.nats2020@gmail.com". I will continue to add names and send out e-mails in the coming year as details are finalized. Best Regards, Len Pilhofer IPMS# 49932 Director, IPMS/USA National Convention 2020 www.nats2020.com