INTRODUCTION



Papers and Plastics:

 

The typical types of cheap figures and vehicles my mother use to bring home to me from her Sunday market rituals, if I can still remember  they cost about "Ph" five cents for five pieces (it was the 70's), I will usually receive them wrapped in old newspapers like "dried fish"; Soldier figures, vehicles and the occasional animals are staples, Cowboys vs Indians themes are favorite subjects in a boy's role playing plays during my time as a "Joey" in the early 70's. some of the figures on the photo are from that bygone era while some are more recent find.

 
FROM SCHOOL TO WORK :

 

Well, this one is a model I made in Architecture school, its one of those surprise special project assignments, it has no designated scale because its meant to represent a form of roofing. I don't know if architectural students of today is still exposed to old-school model building with the advent of  3D modelling softwares and with the introduction of 3D printing; I guess practical effects model building will eventually become an extinct art and a medium of presentation when as much as time constraint and mass productivity is concerned. 

 The Instructor told us to research on different forms of roofing from around the world and present them as miniature models, many of my classmates submitted complete diorama presentation of full structures complete with walling with doors and windows, lawns, driveways, cars and even figures. I decided to concentrate on presenting the different geometric form possibilities of roofs, I already forgot what inspired me to use this form, its either one from my fathers old Architecture books or an actual building that I observed, one thing is for sure though its the roof of some kind of  chapel or mausoleum,  I'm  surprised to find this piece still fairly intact in the most dimly visited corner of an overhead cabinet given the severity of termite infestation of its location, always though I've trown this away a long time ago. It was during college days many years ago, I recall that on submission day after seeing how elaborately embellished my classmates creations where , I'm quite surprise I was given an above my expectation grade for this model. Maybe after  this posting is the right time to really finally send this cabinet ghost of my past to cardboard heaven. In my era you will make several scale models during your time in college, this is the only one small enough to survive indefinite storage.

THE CELLSITE TOWER

The “high-lighted” area of the photo is the only remaining image of a model “Cellsite Tower” I've built and  helped conceptualize while working as a Network Planning Draftsman in a Telecom Company during the mid-90’s, I built the main structure while the assorted exterior transmitting and receiving devices was done by a co-draftsman; like parabolic antennas, disc antennas etc…the scale model was use for presentation and demo purposes, and most of the time as paper-weight on our supervisor’s cubicle desk. It saddens me to think that all its “close-up Photos” and complete construction plans and drawings  was destroyed during a disastrous flood in the place were it was kept,..the model is only 1:50 in metric scale, in reality; the structure is to be  less than 3 square meters in floor area and about three meters linear height from the floor line where the the stand-post is mounted to the top of the equipment control housing roof.  I know it will never be featured on Popular Mechanics or Architectural Digest magazines; but it would have been a “unique” introductory feature for this blog.

                                                                                                            

   Our company eventually build one (that I know of) of this on the roofdeck of a 35 – storey building in which one of the penthouse unit serves as the main control room and operational office, “the tower” actually looks like a covered metal “ booth”  with stilts on steroids that serves as mounting platform for the wide assortment of antennas our network engineers are experimenting with back then. The “booth” serves as protective housing for different kind of monitoring and controlling instruments. Don’t know what happened to the scale model; I left it to my cadre when I left the company ... with regards to its "real world" version, I can still see its "silhouette" on the western skyline of the city whenever I will ride the elevated commuter train to my new work a few years ago, as of this blogging I haven’t check though; its been 5 years since I last rode the train.

Past scale model kit builds :

A 1:800 scale USS Enterprise (CVN65) the first nuclear powered warship (aircraft carrier) in the world, A 1:350 Chinese Quin Dao Destroyer, and a 1:72 WWII German U-Boat (submarine) from top to bottom respectively, this are some of the ships that I built from my boyhood up to my early Thirties,. There was a time that I though I’ve outgrown my interest with his kind of past time, all the three model ships shown in the photo was "sold online" in an attempt to permanently transition  myself  into indulging to a more culturally acceptable adult activity … judging by this blog I had a relapse …

 A trunk Airforce :

Airplanes particularly “historical” machines are my favorite subjects for scale model building, they do have a “blogstory” of their own ….


 Still a normal warm blooded man:

Being a  single man at his late 40’s still, this is just to remind me of some of the “real”  good things in life ….   maybe I will still find a pleasant and sensible  woman that will enchant me to the real world of family and responsibilities and  away  from the inanimate miniature universe of cold casted metals and mold sculpted plastics.