Making Models

I have always been a curious person about how things work. Coupled with that curiosity is trying to make a duplicate of them, which is basically what model making is about. When I was quite young in the 1930's, family radios were large instruments relegated to the living room. Personal radios were rare. One early type of personal radio was the crystal set. In its most basic form all that was needed was a crystalline mineral such as galena and a sensitive earphone. The crystal was "poked" with a wire called a cat's whisker. The crystal picked up the vibration of radio signals of very nearby radio stations. It had no power source. Many a night I laid in bed listening to the radio on my crystal set. This is a diagram of the basic crystal set. As time went on, I learned to solder and contructed a more advanced crystal set. I built one that was powered and the crystal was amplified with a radio tube and the sound delivered through a speaker. About the same time, I also got interested in airplanes. My father would often take my sister and me to the airport to look at airplane activity. It's interesting that years later I would join the U.S. Air Force. Airplanes and air events were much in fashion back then. American aviator Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared while flying over the Pacific in 1937. Charles Lindbergh who flew the Atlantic on a solo flight in 1927 and later lost his son who was kidnapped and murdered. The trial was in 1935. So the 30's had much aiviation news connected to it. When the Second World War was heating up, search lights scanned the skies for enemy aircraft. I was a sudent in Junior High School and in one craft class we made wooden aircraft silhouettess for the education of the search light crews and daylight scanners. The aircraft models I built were patterned after real aircraft construction. This is what one made to that point before covering it with its "skin" which was bamboo paper. This is a photo of another plane model I made to completion. It has a rubber-band powered propeller and could fly. I also liked building boat models. This photo is my of my favorites and sits in the sunroom of my home. It's a static model...doesn't move. The photo doesn't do it justice because it doesn't show the deck detail. Oh well. This photo below is of a radio controlled boat model that can move about on the water through commands by someone onshore. In and about my teens, I fell in love with trains. That was in great measure because I could leave the house with my parents' approval, making neighborhood trips that would often take me over to the train tracks to watch the trains pass. My hometown of Schenectady during the 30's and 40's was an extremely industrialized area. The manufacturing plants of the General Electric and American Locomotive were located in Schenectady. The neighbood I was raised in, Mont Pleasant, was only about a half mile from the main rail line of the New York Central Railroad constisting of four tracks. The sound of a huffing steam locomotive followed by its steam whistle in the middle of the night when other sounds are muted because of the night are sounds that never leave one's head. After my parents converted to an oil fueled furnace, our basement became a pleasant place for a model train hobby. I began to build "HO" scale railroad cars and a few locomotives. The old time scale for model trains was "O" scale...pretty large although they are still used today. HO stood for Half Scale meaning half the scale of "O" scale. Model railroad cars were reasonably priced and with my wages working in an auto repair garage I could purchase one every so often. Model locomotives were expensive so those came as gifts from my parents. I've probably built six locomotives in my time. I built a very elaborate HO train layout in our basement, but, alas I don't have any photos but one that I can remember but have not been able to find it yet. After marriage and children that had heard about Daddy's railroad layout, I decided to build them one for use at Christmas time. Our home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana does not have a basement which presented a space problem. However, there is a train model scale smaller than HO which is "N" scale. This is a photo taken at one Christmas season. I built the layout and placed it in the attic when Christmas passed. The children are now gone and the layout has been in the attic undisturbed for some 30 years.   Here is a present-day photo taken in the attic. What's my favorite hobby pastime? Laying track! It's really fun creating the rail lines of a model railroad. Designing where the switches should be placed, and where they should direct traffic. It can make one's imagination go wild. Perhaps there is one more model plane or model railroad in my life. It would be fun.