SPA Modeler

Quite the story! Good read, Mark.

Great interview Mark,(Duke) everybody has a great story.
My coming interview is so non newsworthy

Mark, your tale is always great to read/hear. Your mom had one of those inspirations that has kept with you to this day. Simply amazing.
Guys, I can vouch about both the Dora railway gun and the Panzerzug train that they are impressive kits in person. Especially that rail gun. Even in 1/72 it is a massive build.
As my IPMS recruiter/mentor, I truly have enjoyed our friendship and camaraderie in this great hobby!

What a great interview guys - It's real!y interesting to read your story Mark! That railgun is superb!

Great story and interview. Yeah count me in on wanting a Chitty model. They are made of unobtanium now.

midnightprowler wrote:Great story and interview. Yeah count me in on wanting a Chitty model. They are made of unobtanium now.

Very impressive interview Mark and Bruce. Thank you both again for sharing and Bruce for making it all happen.

1500+ models?? Can we get a picture of that?

Wow, thanks for all the great comments guys! I am so honored by all you've said. I have been very blessed with a fantastic mom who always supported me in this hobby after starting me on it. The friendship, support and camaraderie of my friends in IPMS Orange County, SoCal AMPS and here on these boards has been most supportive, educational and motivating to me as well. You guys are partially to blame for the current count of finished models; your comments, compliments, suggestions and pointers have kept me going all this time.

Clint, ask and ye shall receive; here are some more pics of Dora. I think these are all I have right now. My apologies for some of them; they are quite huge. I forgot to size them down:





In this pic; you can see the metallic effect I have on the barrel to some degree. I got that turned metal effect by spray painting three to four coats of Tamiya Bare Metal Silver from the rattle can. After it had dried, I wrapped a sheet of 400-grit sandpaper over the metallic paint and turned the barrel three to four times around. The wood part of the tracks below were a happy accident: I had painted the base grey color on and then applied a tan paint to the wood slats/ The tan was way too thin so a lot of grey showed through. I moved ahead and added a mahogany color to the wood slats to get a more wood grain effect and the result is what you see here and in subsequent pics:





Here's a good ground view shot showing this thing looming above you:



Another ground view shot of this with a 1/72 scale bus next to it. That bus had brought the command group that is standing near the front of this gun:



Here's some more detail pics of certain areas on Dora:









The command group next to one of Dora's shells in front of Dora:



And just for fun; when I finished my M-56 "Annie" Atomic Cannon, someone asked for a comparison shot of Annie next to Dora. Quite a difference:



To Blacksheep and Midnight Prowler who also wanted the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang kit; I feel you. I also had the diecast one from Corgi too. Don't know what ever happened to that car. MP, that is hilarious:"unobtanium"! LOL! What a scream! I gotta remember that one!

Torben, I never thought if that. Wow, you are so right. And this hobby is still working in keeping me balanced... or unbalanced as some others have believed....

Carlos, thank you. Your friendship means more to me than I can express. Thank you for the compliments on the armored train and the Dora. I have to say that Dora was the one kit that had me terrified the whole time I was building her, mostly because there was so many infinite possibilities of screwing it up beyond repair. I even found myself rushing it once and I realized that rushing this was going to cause massive, probably unrecoverable problems down the road. That's when I boxed it up and left it on the shelf for four months until that urge passed. seven months later, I was putting the finishing touches on this after a twelve-hour marathon build; broken up into eight- and four-hour blocks.

Carlos also mentioned the German Armored Train. Here's a shot of it next to Dora and all my other German railroad subjects:



Yeah, I ran of of track pieces for that whole train....

Stuart, thanks!

Joe, thanks! None of them are at a level of your quality, but I am thrilled with the finish on all of them. And it's now up to 1520 models as of today. As for getting pics, well; I can't do one pic of everything, but I can show a number of pics that capture the essence of the entire collection.

We'll start with the 700 armor models all in 1/72 scale... as of two years ago:



Those of you going to the Chattanooga IPMS Nationals will be treated to this display supplemented by most of the armor models I've completed since this pic was taken... at least 750 models total.

Moving on, Joe here are some shots of my Hobby Room ceiling holding all the largest 1/72 scale aircraft I've built that don't fit on shelves. These are the four corners, and I took these pics in 2013 so there's a few more aircraft up there now:









That last pic is what I see when I'm looking directly upward from my hobby workbench.

As for the rest of the models, here's one wall of my Hobby Room. This shows the armor models all in place before I packed them up to put on display the first time:

This is my east wall:



Imagine those shelves with all the armor removed... and still looking this full....

Here are two pics of the west wall, north side first:



Again, this is before I packed all my armor. The door to this room is right there on the right.

South side of west wall. This is directly above my workbench:



And there is most all of my 1500+ models in eight to ten pics Joe. If any of you want to see all this in real life, come on out to Cali and I'll be happy to give you a tour.

I hope you enjoyed this addition to my modeling story. I apologize again for the quantity of pics and long loading times.

That Dora is just beautiful thank you for the photos. That's also a lot of builds I don't think I'll ever reach that total.

Mark, especially after last week, I gotta ask... How did all this fare thru our last earth quake? How secure are those shelves? I remember the Landers quake in 92 caused some casualties in my builds...

But man, I still can’t get enough of that Dora. You truly knocked it out of the park on that one!

Thanks for all of these photos!