I was a scale modeler back in jr. high and high school. Growing up on a farm, when it was a rainy day or often a winter day, one of the hobbies I went to most was scale modeling.

I’d loved all kinds of things that flew (birds, paper airplanes, frisbees, jarts, real airplanes, superman, batman in his various flying options) since I was very little. It was a natural progression to building model airplanes, but not a simple progression.

In the summer after 5th grade, I started to build a motorcycle model kit my brother had gotten as a gift in our damp cool basement on rainy days. It was a nice enough kit with flexible vinyl brake & clutch cables and shiny chrome engine. But between the chrome and thin vinyl tubes that were both mysteriously resistant to glue, and my complete lack of experience (my older brother’s had build car and rocket models around my age, surely I could too), going was slow.

Eventually, so slow it stopped.

None of this worked, there was no advice or anyone to guide me, everything was tedious or didn’t work at all how I expected; this clearly wasn’t for me.

Again, later in early jr. high someone gave me a model of stormtroopers on a speeder bike from Return of the Jedi. It was a much more complex model and far beyond my capabilities. I knew my limitations. I talked my brother into building it for me.

Then I helped a nephew put together a snap-tite kit. I can’t remember what it was, but that thing was pre-painted, all the sprue connections were hidden in the snap areas (I didn’t even know to call this “sprue” back then), it was pretty toy-like after being built, but by god, we built it. This small success tempted me onward.

The spring of my 7th grade year I bought my first model. A 1:48 scale F-15 Eagle by Monogram. I was determined to take my time, be patient, and simply do my best, but to finish. Between the ever more gloppy Testors gloss white to the Testors model glue, to the very challenging fit of the intakes, to the dozens of decals, it was a battle. I kept at it slow and steady, even free-hand painting the canopy lines (a serious achievement for me, and I didn’t think there was another way).

The end product looked a little sloppy by current standards, but I was not only pleased – I was hooked. Even then I had many hobbies, drawing, painting, guitar, writing, gardening, so there were plenty of creative avenues. Modeling was officially my new obsession, as all hobbies have been for me.

As I kept building (using whatever free funds I had from summer hay baling and eventually working at the local country club), I realized the joy that came from not only building, but by keeping to one scale (1:48 became my scale of choice), I could enjoy a level of understanding and detail about aircraft I couldn’t get in a book. I also loved reading about the aircraft in the small description at the start of every set of instructions. This usually led to more research where I could get it. Growing up rural, before the internet, that wasn’t always easy to come by, but local book stores helped.

When I went off to college, I thought I’d somehow keep adding to my collection of twenty or so finished models, each one a bit more polished than the last. But college was busy, far away, and too cramped in a dorm room to finish or safely store a model.

Maybe when I when back for Christmas or summer breaks? Those breaks went fast and involved lots of work to earn more money for college. Getting married my junior year, I moved into married student housing and eventually felt permanent enough with enough space to maybe try again. I’d saved a portion of my desk area to build a model – this time a pretty large version of the Cutty Sark with gorgeous detailed rigging and sails.

I’d never built anything like it, but I was super excited to get back to my old friend, scale modeling. Once the rigging started, I realized, this was way beyond me. My giant fingers, small, poorly-lit space, and nearly 4 year hiatus from modeling weren’t helping. Nothing worked the way I wanted, it all started to fail miserably from just starting the roped railings. It got boxed, shelved, moved houses twice, and finally tossed out. An expensive kit that had gone horribly wrong and haunted me for years.

Married life, work life, all started to take or bend my time in new and different ways. I still had many hobbies, but often they had become hobbies where I did something for someone else or made something for the express purpose of showing I could do it. These hobbies had become much more external and were less and less for my personal enjoyment.

Lots of changes in my life had happened over the years since that first F-15 model in 1983. I started to think more often about the group of airplanes that I’d enjoyed such quiet time building. I remembered what it was to take time to do something that was just for me, essentially thinking of how nice it was to take time just for me, no matter the thing. Scale modeling is slow, meditative, and at least has an output at the end to show for your time (something key to a growing-up-rural mindset). Maybe I could model something again, not the incredibly complex Cutty Sark, but something simple, and enjoy that joy of making something with my hands.

I knew what I wanted to build. A poorly executed Revell model of the Millennium Falcon had thwarted me in it’s frustrating inaccuracy (that got eventually given to another modeler who was more on the ball than me). I had recently seen a snap-tite version that looked really accurate. Snap-tite. That’s the type of kit that got me comfortable the first time. Yes.

And so it begins again. Will snap-tite help me get started again? We’ll see.