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I agree. Back in 2003 when I chaired the Nats in OKC, everyone I talked to said a slide show at the awards ceremony just couldn't work with programs available at the time. Guess what. We figured it out and the slide show came off without a hitch, WITH the program everyone had failed with before OKC Metro. Never be afraid to try something new and different.

No one asked us to try anything regarding the slide show in '03. Everything we did was of our own accord and we kept the 2nd VP informed. I agree that host chapters should not be "lab rats". We chose to be "lab rats", because we knew where the problems occurred previously. I was so concerned about the show failing that we held a Saturday 2000 slide (2000 slides) show at a local church using the exact set up we would be using at the Nats. It went flawlessly and we got to see some cool model slides.

Okay, are you talking about the many small individual track links that make up one side of the tank track, you know, like gluing 100 of them together to form one side? Or are you talking about two long pieces of vinyl tracks which uses two per side for a total of 4 pieces of vinyl track? I'm not familiar with that particular kit. Many current kits include the tiny multiple pieces that form the track. Here is a link to an old track tutorial. https://armorama.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=1737 But there are several kits that use two long pieces of vinyl track to make up one side of the track. Italeri's Leopard 2 comes to mind.

I heard "if it ain't broke don't fix it" from my Dad starting about age 12. He was a mechanic and that was his frame of mind: cars either worked or were broke, and if they were broke you put them back the way the manufacturer built them. He sent me off to engineering school, where we learned that the people who designed things were constantly innovating and making tradeoffs trying to make things work better, because their competitors were doing the same thing. It's not obvious to me that everyone who didn't win would leave on Saturday morning. Many attendees would have already made travel plans, bought banquet tickets, raffle tickets, tour tickets, have non-refundable hotel reservations, be waiting for the vendor clearance-sale, or want to take one more circuit through the contest room. A modeler with vendor-money left in their wallet isn't about to leave. As long as there is stuff to do on Saturday afternoon there is no real reason to pack up early. There would be a tendency for non-winners to start packing up around 3-4:00 PM Saturday afternoon to beat the rush, but you could minimize that by having some "big event" about that time: a big name seminar or a pre-awards happy hour that was already included in the price of registration, so that people would want to stay for what they had already paid for. I'll be the first to admit trying this would be an experiment; we wouldn't know if it would work or not. That is the nature of innovation: you study it as well as you can and make contingency plans, but in the end you don't know if it works until you flip the switch and see what happens.

Work continues on the PZL-23B. This week the cockpit and interior are together. The kit comes with a few resin parts like parachutes and radio equipment. Putting the walls and cockpit tub into the fuselage was a little tedious keeping the sections aligned but everything fit well. I added some 32 awg wire for cables and wires to the equipment. One thing to note is the rear gun. I had built up the rear gunner seat with the gun but once it was installed in the fuselage it was difficult working on the kit because of how delicate the assembly was. I would recommend leaving the actual gun off until near the end. With the interior completed I am now working on the lower gondola and the landing gear. You can see all the photos and details from the start in my build log at https://davidsscalemodels.com/build-log/1-48-pzl-23b-karas/