Good day gents.  The November meeting went well.  It was good to see members who have not been able to make the last couple of meetings.

We hope we convinced Todd to write an article for the IPMS Journal on his unmatched fiber optics and scratch building methods/results. I owe an article about our club to the Journal and will try and get that done before Thanksgiving.

Remember the December meeting will be at 2pm instead of 11.  We will need about 7 dishes, 5 deserts, and drinks.  Chad will make a sign up list on the site so food stuff can be managed.  Also remember we will have a gift exchange/gift steal event so everyone bring a wrapped gift.  

The January meeting will be on the 2nd Saturday  but thereafter the meetings will be on the 1st Saturday of each month.  Mark your calendars! Also remember the airbrush pro Tom takes lessons from will be there to show us cool stuff — bring your own airbrush for a professional exam of your brush to get any faults fixed.

I am very happy to announce Randy won big at BunkerMania in PA; he earned many awards and got Best Armor!  Way to go Randy!

Many thanks to Todd and his wife for offering up their home for the December event but for the sake of drivers coming from far south down I 81 the church venue will be a lesser drive for them.

Finally, we have been meeting for 18 months.  Is everyone happy with the meetings; any ideas for changes.  If all good then great but if folks things are stale then I am open to your thoughts!

Keep on building!
Chris

Good day Gents

The October meeting went pretty well.  Of special note was Tom Lacy speaking about an airbrush class he has been taking and the new skills he has learned from the class.  The instructor has an invitation to come to one of our meetings (likely the January 2025 meeting) to speak about airbrushing and will happily look your airbrush over if you bring it to make sure it’s in proper shape.  Tom will coordinate with him to make sure what specific meeting of ours he will attend.  The instructor lives/works in Pennsylvania so his investment in time coming to see us will be much appreciated.

Congratulations to Randy for his impressive bling at ARMORCON and for Scott for IPMS Journal seeking him out to write an article about his Woody’s Garage diorama. That article should be out in early 2025 and will be Shenandoah Valley Modeler’s second article in the magazine!

The December meeting is moved to 21 December at 2pm.  Remember, this meeting is a pot luck (bring your favorite dish) and a gift exchange event like we did last year.  At the November meeting, Scott will speak to how the gift exchange will take place.  Chad will put up a tool on the site to sign up for pot luck dishes but, in general, we will need about three deserts, drinks, paperplates/plastic forks/napkins, and five or six homemade food dishes.

We can try and sell kits at the February ODO show, but I need to know by 20 October if you have kits to donate and if so, how many.  If we do not have a “commit” of at least 40-50 kits, it will not be worth reserving a vendor table.  We have 5 kits leftover from the Roanoke show.  Email me if you have kits to donate soonest so I can make the appropriate plans/decisions.

Scott is having his annual photo show in November at the Lake Frederick community restaurant building (a rather nice place!).  Show up and check out Scott’s photographs! Speaking of photographs, today was John’s last meeting with us for a long time.  In such a short time, he has been a solid club member who has ingratiated himself within our club and I certainly will miss him.  Good luck John in your hunt for that perfect place to live in your retirement!

Chris

Good day gents.  Many thanks to Scott for running the September meeting!  The topic was on dioramas and Scott brought his Prohibition-era dio as a guide on how to lay out a good one that tells a story.

Several club members will be at PennCon 14 September.   I hope those who have not attended a show but have wanted to see or participate in one will join us!

Three of our members participated at this year’s National Capitol Model Soldiers Society contest on 7 September.  Randy took two golds for his Cobra helo and German missile tank  and  one silver for his dinosaur head (max Medal Man strikes again!).   John took a bronze for his fantastic wrecker truck!   I got two silvers for two of my figures.  Once again the Raven-hood does well!  

My thanks to John for taking my entries to the 7 September show since I was on travel to VMI to watch a military parade the Keydets  put on (my son is a “rat”).

-Chris

Notes from Chad:

The meeting was a bit less crowded than usual with only 10 of us on hand but it was still good to see the models that were brought.  Gabriel’s tanks were all impressive, as was Ben’s vignette (comprised of parts from I believe he said 14 different kits!) Andre’s Tu-95 had me considering buying a Bear of my own at Dan’s after the meeting and Jeff’s car lot helped show us visually how little difference there was between 1/24 and 1/25.

I’m going to try to make it to PennCon, so I hope to see some of you guys there.  Even if you don’t have models to bring it would still be a worthwhile trip!

-Chad

The 03 August meeting went very well.  Many thanks to Mark for his brief on Nationals and hobby industry news.  Congrats to Randy again for his two medals at Nats.

Chad’s Japanese aircraft vignette was outstanding and Ben’s robot war machine was very cool.  All the trucks were superbly built as well.

We are set to judge the car models at the Cuze-in in Charles Town WV 31 Aug.  Thanks to Jeff, Mark and Scott for volunteering.  Anyone interested in possibly doing commission builds that may come from the Cruze In?  Might be an excellent way to earn some funds for the club!

Welcome Jeff as a guest. We hope you decide to join us!

See several of you at Roanoke next week.  Happy building!

-Chris

Good day gents.  The June meeting went very well.   There were many good looking models on the table.  Scott bought several trucks he built in the past including one that was his first gold medal winner.  That particular truck did look good.  Jeff’s purple truck was equally good and John’s tanker truck for one of his clients was superb.  The rusted up front half of theTitanic was very good and will look great when mated up with the stern section and the ocean floor base.

Todd’s discussion on fiber optics was “enlightening” (see that pun there!).  The fact that he put in 1200 (or so) fiber light strands is mind numbingly impressive.  Todd clearly understands this aspect of modeling and is our official subject matter expert on lighting henceforth.

Good news all, it appears IPMS USA liked our article submission so we should be seeing it in an upcoming edition soon.  I sent the IRS the updated packet for the non profit designation, which I hope they accept and grant the request.  That was about 3 weeks ago and I eagerly check the mail each day.

The August meeting will remain at the church.  Dan’s store is too small for us to return to; I need to get word to him regarding that.  While on Dan, the idea to move the rifle range day from the 15th to the 23rd was raised.  As June 15 is next week, everyone who was going needs to chime in asap if they want the range day to stay on 15th or okay with it being moved on the 23rd.  As far as I know everyone agreed to the 23rd.  True?

Good luck to Mark and Randy at Nationals.  If anyone is thinking about going to DownEastCon by Cherry Point NC 30 July let me know. I am thinking to go and it would be good to go with a bud ro two.

Cheers all,

Chris

Wow; that was a great meeting.  There were 25 folks present so I think that is a record attendance day for us.  I really liked that.  The models on the table were great and my favorite was Jeff’s car carrier truck.  When Jeff puts on a few 1970-era cars on it, I can (sniff sniff) smell a future winner!

For June we will have our normal meeting with a talk on fiber optics by Todd, our resident master of lighting technique.  This is a subject area I have no good idea of how to do well (or at all).  A few of us will go off on a sidebar trip some day in June to do some shooting.  Anyone is welcomed to come-stay tuned via email on that event.

Congrats en masse to the club again for its bling-accumulation.  If I say so myself that cake was very tasty.  Hats off to all our 2024 bling collectors; I am sure more of you will add to the tally by December.  

Ross, many thanks for your class on painting cars.  Your cars are masterpieces so you being the teacher on this topic was very appropriate.

Keep those posts to the site coming.  Don’t worry about being a Shakespeare- just send your stuff!

– Chris

Good day gents.  The April meeting was well attended with 17 members being present.  The models on the table were nicely varied-from trucks, tanks, a jet, a boat, and several figures.  John, our long term honorary member, became an actual member at the meeting so an official welcome to him.  He brought a 1/32 F-4 Phantom that was a true masterpiece.

Randy talked about his great wins at the Myrtle Beach show in a neat category -the triathlon.   Mark talked about some shows he attended with noted smaller amounts of entries.   That was a bit concerning. 

Ross did not make the meeting and successfully avoided his public speaking gig on decals but Scott stepped up and did a superb primer on decal placement.   Ross, you owe us all donuts or cookies for the next meeting.

Best of luck to our members going to NOVA 13 April- make us proud and bring us gold (no pressure!).

– Chris

Good day Gents and good day to our newest members!  It’s great to see us growing!  The meeting was fun, with our energy bars (otherwise known as donuts) and good cheer.  It was fun to celebrate Randy and Ben’s awards at ODO 2024 – what team spirit we have.   I really enjoyed hearing Rick’s story about his dad and working on models with him.  It is nice to see how our hobby crosses generations and brings dads and kids together – as shown by 3 sets of dads and kids at our meetings. 

  Ross’s sports car, based on an actual working car, was superb.  I had no idea what pipes he was talking about but like Chad said – just don’t mention it to anyone. I don’t know about any of you guys but John’s flatbed with the bulldozer was a total stunner.  John, you should have taken that to ODO!  It was truly impressive. 

   I hope my primer on flesh tones went over well and I was able to pass some tips on.  As I mentioned in the meeting, we are a long way off from hosting a big show.  I do think we can host a smaller show to give us practice and confidence to do more shows later.  I welcome your thoughts but ones I had were to hold a “if you never competed/never won before” kind of show or an Ace of Aces show (I prefer the former as our club ethos is to teach and help each other along).  I would appreciate your thoughts on the idea and if looking to shoot for August or September 2025 is a good timeframe.

   We have three pre-orders for the grey club shirt – Ross, Jeff, and Randy.   Need 3 more for the minimum order of 6 so if you would like to have one, let me know.

   Keep building and stretch yourselves like Jeff did with his 4-at-once build or me with a motorcycle (what color is a motorcycle engine,,aaagh) .  It can be frustrating but you will learn a new aspect of modeling and you will have fun in the end.  Jeff, those trucks looked good to me brother!

– Chris

Hi all; I hope I speak for everyone in saying the February meeting was outstanding.  Applause to Randy and Marcin for giving a fantastic primer on diorama bases.  I learned a great deal about a skill set I don’t much have.  From the energetic sidebar discussions, Randy and Marcin certainly engaged all of us.  We have some very talented folks in our club.

Welcome to our two new members; it’s great to see the club continue to grow.  But really, do we need another truck modeler?  Just kidding, I know how sensitive you truck fellows are.

As mentioned, several of our meetings this year fall on the same day as an IPMS show in the region.  In particular, these dates conflict with our meeting dates:

13 April  The NOVA show

10 August  Virginia Shootout (Salem VA)

14 September  PENNCON

So, what  would you all like to do?  We can move our meeting forward or back 1 week around these dates; cancel the meeting that month for those months; or have the meeting take place as scheduled with those not attending the respective show holding the meeting as scheduled.  Please respond to the poll link below so I can see how you all lean and we’ll go with that! 

As a reminder here are the next few meeting topics:

For March, I will do skin tones

For April, let’s do effective decal placement/setting.  (Depending on the results of the poll above)

For May, how to effectively paint cars with that special kind of gloss/shine car paints have by Ross

For June, range day! bang bang!.

For July, fiber optic how-tos by Todd

For August,  industry and update Mark (depending on results of poll above) and a primer on the use of pigments by Marcin

Finally, let me know if you would like one of our grey club polo shirts.  Need 5 more shirt orders to submit the order and I’lll get that off quick.

– Chris

The January meeting was fantastic.  Scott and guest John put on a great primer on how to photograph your models and put it in layman’s terms so we could understand it better.  Thanks Scott and John.

Speaking of John, he showed off his photography talents with many works which were for sale.  I have the list of his photos and prices (50% off to club members!) if you would like a nicely done foto.  I picked up two Blue Angel F/A-18 photos and Chad picked up a photo of the plane a senior in his company owns – how neat is that? 

Thanks to those who donated stuff for the Richmond show.   I am sure we will sell most if not all of the items.  John will sell his photos there and offer 1/2 of his proceeds to the chapter.  Amazing generosity.

As I said at the end of the meeting, I was proud of how we have really come together – all the cross talk and cross help members give to each other to advance their builds is great thing to see and be a part of.  This is what the hobby is all about!

One last note. The new polo shirts are quite sharp – new members if you would like one or present members if you need more or need one with an adjusted size, let me know!  I need to get 6 shirt orders as that is the minimum order.  There is already 1 who would like a shirt with a different size so just 5 more to go!  Order for your wife!

– Chris