Ive been modeling since 1976 when I was in college and an art professor asked me to pick up a model for him when I went into the closest town in our rural state that had a hobby shop. It was a Tamiya hanomag 251 C. I was intrigued and bought one myself. Ive never participated in a model show or competition due to the fact that there are no competitions where I live, and never wanted to go to one for the facts that they were far away and I had a lovely family that I wanted to spend time with as I not only had the two jobs but also spent a lot of evenings working on models.
When I first became interested in military modeling, I built everything I could that was in 1/35, but after years of that, and my first interest being history, I settled on vehicles and weaponry of June 6th, 1944 NW Europe up until late November 1944.
While there has been so many Golden Ages of Modeling since I started, and that includes plastic kit moulding advances, resin and now 3D printed, which I will say will never replace the others, but can only enhance them, the biggest thing to me is when Border Models started producing air craft from WW2 in 1/35. That will allow seamless inclusion of both vehicles troops with planes. A lot of people say that it is acceptable to use 1/32 planes with 1/35 figures and vehicles but not to me. Ive read articles on how to do that to downplay the different and the only one that made sense was to do a long diorama where the 1/35 can be on one side and the 1/32 on the other but the example showed a diorama that was about 3 feet or more wide.
I like to build vehilcles with interiors and was doing that since before Takom started making those available. Now I am experimenting with leaving the engine compartments out and using that as battery/on/off compartment and putting little lights in tank interiors so and keeping it to scale with lights I have found at Evan’s Designs. Lights so small you have trouble seeing them and would lose them if there were not wires attached to them. I do not like building out of the box kits as much as I like taking a kit and turning it into something like a fact based blown up Tiger E from the 503 Heavy Panzer Brigade which was destroyed by the RAF. I spent 3 years on that one build doing research to know what was where and how to make it blown up. For that build I got my information from three photos of that one vehicle from one of the Panzerwreck books on Normandy.