Schmitz

There is a very nice Packard Museum in Warren (north-east) Ohio: https://packardmuseum.org/

At past Nats automotive judges have been a bit lenient about "display bling". A woman in a bikini washing a car might be considered "crew", or some sort of mascot-figure as part of the base. These extras are common at auto-only shows, and at the Nats they were just ignored as part of the judging, although that was very much a judgement call - I wouldn't count on that going forward, especially in OOB. There are exceptions in some of the other OOB categories that make you wonder why automotive is so restrictive (e.g. seaplanes can have beaching gear, that doesn't seem all that different from jackstands, and adding antenna wires doesn't seem all that different from engine wiring). This endless debate is why I'd rather see OOB gone, than add countless rules to try to cover every possible option.

I could only find the prices for what I got without registering again: for the Banquet, the chicken was $55, the short-ribs were more and the pasta less. There is also a BBQ dinner Thursday night at a local air-and-space museum; cost was $50 including a bus-ride to the location.

I thought your name looked familiar - I've got your Datsun book, it has come in handy working on my 260Z. Welcome!

By the same reasoning, membership also declined from nearly 5000 to around 4000 during the years Chris was publishing the Journal; should we hold him responsible for that too? I think there were bigger factors than the Journal driving membership up and down. I may be reading too much into the tea leaves, but I think John Heck deciding to retire as art director meant someone had to replace him. Whether his leaving was due to politics, or he just got tired after 18 years, we have to guess. John's goodbye letter in his last Journal acknowledged that his replacements would bring their own ideas and style. I remember a similar outrage when Chris took over the publication and changed the title on the cover (the picture of the Journal I have in my mind's eye still has a big script "Journal" title across the top). A lot of commercial magazines I've subscribed to over the years have had similar "facelifts", sometimes for no apparent reason - it is the way the industry works.

Since no one buys the Journal off a store shelf, that probably doesn't matter - but maybe that was something else that didn't get done in time (and why there was so much whitespace on the cover). Something to send to the feedback email address.

If you look at the report from the business meeting - https://ipmsusa.org/sites/default/files/minutes/files/2024ipms-usaannualbusinessmeetingfinalv15jul2024approved.pdf - they show the consulting numbers for the first 6 months of both 2023 and 2024. The consulting numbers are $25,888 and $28,800, if you add those together (bear with me) you get that $54,688 number for 2023. Interestingly, 28,800/6 is a nice round 4800, that suggests it is a regular monthly payment for a service contract, where the price increased halfway thru 2023. If you look at the 2022 full year number (from the Journal), you see $27,644 - just about half of the 2023 full year number, so we probably just started paying for whatever it was halfway thru 2022. Hmm, what did IPMS start doing differently in 2022? Looking back through my email, we started using the WildApricot membership system in January 2022, and in Oct. there was a mention of changes in WildApricot (the URLs changed). Total guess work, but I'd bet this is a service contract for WA.

Remember that John Heck, the art-director quit a month ago after working with Chris for 18 years. Any differences they had were worked out long ago, they were a smoothly working team. Several volunteers took over that position. No one takes a volunteer position because they want another boring dead-end job where someone tells them what to do; I'm sure they wanted to put their own mark on the Journal (just as Chris and John had done when they took over). If you look past the problem with the font, this new issue has some neat stuff - more pictures, big full page images - the magazine might be pretty enough to encourage a few more members to contribute articles. I'll speculate that the new team tried to change too much in their first issue, and the pressure to get an already late issue out meant that they didn't have time to fix things. I'm willing to give them a few more issues to work out the bugs.

A moderators main job is basically to keep the peace in a group. That can take the form of a private message to someone who is getting a little too worked up, or a comment explaining why IPMS works the way it does, or locking down comments, or deleting a message, or blocking a member. IPMS learned long ago that you can't count on people to play nice on FB - moderators review every post before it appears in the group, and we check several times a day for people reporting inappropriate content. Deciding who can participate - be a member of the group - is expected to be a small part of the job; the Facebook philosophy seems to be to just let everyone in and deal with the troublemakers later. Being a "member" of a FB group has changed over the years, and not for the better. Because IPMS is a "public" group, anyone can "join" (become a member of the group) and can see everything that gets posted, but they have to be approved before they can be "full members" who can post or comment - the first time they try to post or make a comment triggers an approval process, that includes being asked a couple of screening questions (e.g. "what was the first model you built?"). Moderators get to review those requests and decide if they want to allow that person to post/comment (their posts are still reviewed, but not their comments). The moderators look at their answers to the screening questions, their FB profile, and what's in their post/comment and decide if they're a real person, a robot, or some sort of troll/scammer. Approving posts is pretty easy - you can see if there are pictures of models (or modeling subjects) and read a couple sentences and quickly decide if it is modeling related. Approving requests for "full membership" takes a little longer, as you have to click/scroll thru a few screens to try to figure out if the request is from a "real person". The number of requests can vary from 5 to 50+/day - the spikes can be pretty time intensive, but yes - that is part of the "job" (like all IPMS positions, it is a volunteer effort). Usually it takes less than 30 minutes a day. If we were to have an "IPMS Members Only" group, it would be a "Private" group - where you have to be a member to even see what others have posted. When someone requested to be a member, we would need a way to verify that they were truly an IPMS member. An easy way to do this would be to put an identity code - a random 6 digit number that would be different for everyone - in their Wild Apricot profile, that only the member and the group moderators could see. When that IPMS member requested to be a member of the FB group, the screening questions would ask for their IPMS number and their identity code. Then the moderator would need a way (another password protected web page) to check Wild Apricot to find out if that number-and-code were valid. And once a month, the Wild Apricot Admin would run a report of lapsed members to give to the moderator so they could cull their FB membership. None of these things exist right now; the Wild Apricot keepers would need to do some work. This glosses over a lot of details. A lot of our members aren't computer savvy; people would have problems joining the group, hackers would steal identity-codes, etc, requiring moderators to answer their questions. If there were only 10 people who wanted to be in that FB group, it wouldn't be much work - even if there were 10 scammers a day trying to sneak in. If there were 100 total members, it would be workable. If there were 1000, the turnover and "customer service" would likely make it onerous. I don't know how many members there would be. A lot of IPMS members are already on FB; there might be a much bigger turnout of IPMS members who would want to participate this way. The interesting question is, what would be discussed in this group that required being "behind closed doors" (with the expectation that anything controversial would be leaked by actual IPMS members)? A non-IPMS-member might still have good ideas, an dues-paying IPMS-member might still be an obnoxious pain in the rear.

I'm one of the Admins of the IPMSUSA Facebook page. This has been suggested many times, and it is not as easy as it sounds. Yes, we could have a private Facebook group, but there is no way to identify which FB members are actually IPMS members. Anyone can make a FB account with any name; some troll could make a FB account with the name "Phil Peterson" and the admin for that (hypothetical) private group would have no way of knowing if it was the real "IPMS President" or someone pretending to be who wanted to join and cause trouble. And no, IPMS numbers are not a secure way to identify members - at one time the numbers were published in the Journal, and appear on model registration forms and other places. There are ways we could manually verify identities outside of FB, but then multiply that manual process by 5000 members, where the membership is constantly changing as people join and leave (or just are slow to renew their membership). Its my understanding that the members-only group here on the Forum requires manual intervention by the Admin; it only works because there are a relatively small number of people participating here. Automating the Forum group membership is at least technically possible, but will require (non-trivial) work to connect the membership data in Wild Apricot to the message board software. Having a larger number of (IPMS-only) members in such a group will also create the need for more active moderation; IPMS has plenty of members with strong opinions, being IPMS-only does not insure well mannered debate. I believe there is also value in having a FB presence that is open to the public, as it gets the IPMS name out and helps promote the organization, including many chapters who use it to promote their own club and events. Even if we had a way to have a private FB group, I think there is value in keeping the public group too.

The flip side is that some of those core volunteers get tired of the drudge work with no input and no chance to change anything, because the 'mid-level management' is basically appointed for life (or maybe they just get tired after 20 years) - so again, they play the "I quit" card. An organization built on volunteers really needs to understand why those volunteers are there, try to keep them happy, and also be prepared for the inevitable turnover.

I'm pretty sure Ollie's contracts for special runs of kits - a friend pointed out that for whatever reason the kit boxes have the retail price as part of the box art, under the shrink wrap.

Models are usually moved without being picked up - if its not on a base by sliding the model on its registration form. Some judges are quick to pick models up, but the last few times I judged it was discouraged and latex gloves were passed out to those who felt they "had" to see the bottom.

The general rule is that if a model can go into more than 1 category, it is up to the modeler to decide. However it really comes down to what the head auto judge decides the policy is, and it changes from time to time. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that despite what the description says, a lot of judges and modelers see "curbside" as a sort of beginners category. Alot of judges would like to do away with curbside just because of the confusion it causes. I've seen models in that category pooh-poohed for consideration of best auto. If you've gone all out detailing and painting your rally cars, I'd put them in the competition category. If they're closer to out-of-the-box, I'd put them put them in Curbside.

A friend uses one of the commercial products, he uses it to track any aftermarket he has for the kit and reference photos (in case he ever gets around to building it).

I've had some luck stripping tamiya spray paint with 90+% isopropyl alcohol from the first aid section of the grocery store. Let it soak a while. Seems to get most of the paint off, but always a little left behind.

Modelers have been abusing the term "acrylic" for a long time - "acrylic" does not mean they're non-toxic water-based, its just the chemical family that the paint resin is drawn from. Out in the real world, there are "acrylic enamels" with petroleum-based solvents and "acrylic lacquers" with even more aggressive petroleum based solvents. Read the labels, if it comes out of a spray can you almost certainly need to wear a respirator if you're using it indoors.

For the curious, there are financial statements online for the 2016 and 2021 Nats: https://ipmsusa.org/sites/default/files/minutes/files/2021nationalconventionstatementofactivity10092021.pdf https://ipmsusa.org/sites/default/files/minutes/files/ipmsusa2017businessmeetingpresentation.pdf Remember that the 2021 Nats were unusual in many ways (no 2020 Nats and in a higher cost city than typical); the 2016 Nats (in Columbia SC) are probably closer to typical.

Quite a few medals fit in the kind of cardboard box many of us already have stacked in our basement/attic/etc - they are a small part of the contest supplies our club officers already have stashed somewhere in their homes.

About 1-foot square is pretty common; any smaller than that gets hard to include enough to "tell a story" and is more likely to become a vignette (or whatever we're calling small dioramas these days).

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.

If you like the thin elastic thread, it is available on a spool under the brand name "EZ Line" - check a hobby shop or type that into google/ebay/amazon to find an online seller. Don

In the old days, I used Krylon Dull Aluminum - about $3 for a big spray can at WalMart - to paint anything that was supposed to be non-polished aluminum. It went down smooth - even on bare plastic, dried hard, looked like cast aluminum, and and it took washes extremely well. Then Sherwin Williams reformulated the whole paint line - probably took out all the chemicals that gave people in California cancer - and now the Matte Aluminimum that took its place looks just like silver paint (I'm pretty sure the new stuff has the same part-number as the original - 1403). I've weaned myself from the other Krylon paints, but I would really like to find something as cheap and easy to use as the original Dull Aluminum. Any chance its still available under a different name, or someone has old stock? I'm ready to order a case, but I want to be sure I don't get a case of the new stuff... Thanks! Don

The hardware store paint thinner is great for cleaning brushes; whether it works to thin hobby paint (like Testors) is hit or miss; sometimes it will turn the paint to goop. In general its not a good idea to thin a whole bottle of paint at once - even if it doesn't immediately turn to goo it can happen a few days/weeks later. Don

Monogram tooled a 1:24 scale '65 Convertible and a 65 Shelby fastback back in the 1980s. These two kits are basically the same except for the body, and you can swap the parts around to build a stock fastback or convertible Shelby if you wanted. The convertible kit I remember had Indy-500 Pace Car decals. At some point (15 years ago?) Monogram was bought by Revell, so you may see the same kit in Revell and Monogram boxes. The fastback kit seems to always be in production (it comes in at least 3 versions: GT350, GT350R (with Torque-thrust wheels, front air dam and special rear window), and a GT350H (molded in black plastic and with gold stripe decals). If I remember right, the only difference between a 65 and 66 would be the chrome trim in the side-coves; you could make those with a bit of plastic strip. AMT does have a kit of a 66 Coupe (notchback) - in both 1:25 and (bigger size) 1:16th scale - but you'd have to cut the roof off and find/make a boot to get a convertible out of those kits. All of these kits were re-released recently for the 50th anniversary of the Mustang, so they should be easy to find - probably even at your local hobby shop. I typed "revell mustang convertible kit" and "amt mustang kit" into ebay and got a few hits - mostly for under $20. Good luck... Don