2024 ended up being a pretty good year for my model builds. I completed 9 models this year. Well, almost. The final two models of the year did take a few days into 2025 to get finished, mainly because of the weather.
First up was the 1/72 Ban Dai B-Wing Starfighter. It was a pretty fast build, particularly because of the excellent parts fit of Ban Dai kits. It was the Comic-Con Special Edition so it had slightly different markings from the regular kit.
The 1/72 Hasegawa F-117 Nighthawk kit was a companion the the 1/72 Have Blue kit I had done the year before. I used aftermarket decals to help create a different example of the plane. It is now on a base alongside the Have Blue.
I then decided to build basically the same model in three different scales. The 1/48 Mercury Redstone was a composite build consisting of the 1/48 Revell Mercury Spacecraft, the 1/48 Glencoe Jupiter-C and an aftermarket upgrade for the Jupiter-C to turn it into a Redstone booster. I built it to represent Gus Grissom’s MR-4 flight.
The 1/72 Mercury Redstone was the Horizon Models Mercury Redstone kit. It was a very good kit with nice fitting parts and good decals. I built it to depict the MR-2 flight which has the distinction of being the shortest flight of any Mercury Redstone, 4 inches off the pad. We must also say goodbye to Horizon Models. They went out of business in late 2024. I and many other space modelers will miss them.
The final one of the three was the 1/200 Mercury Redstone from the AMT Man In Space kit. It was built to represent the MR-BD flight which immediately preceded Alan Shepard’s first flight and according to him and some others, cost the US from being the first to put a man into space.
Next up was the Lindberg Space Base. It was a model kit from 1959 of what a future space station might look like. Being such an old kit, it proved to be a challenge to get a good parts fit. It actually ended up being a nice looking model and I quite like the way it turned out.
Along those same lines came the next build of the year. The Glencoe Nuclear Powered Space Station. It too was a kit from the late 1950’s. The main problem with this kit was the poor state of the molds. They had not fared well over the years and had quite a bit of surface roughness that had to be dealt with. Then there were the 90 tiny spokes that went from the core to the main ring. It too turned out to produce a good looking model of a future that was not to be.
I ended the year with a double build. Once again both kits were from the late 1950’s. They were the Willy Ley Passenger Rocket and Orbital Rocket. The Passenger Rocket was re-released a few years ago by Monogram, the original producer of both of the kits. The Orbital Rocket was re-released just this past year by Atlantic, which had somehow obtained the molds for the very rare Orbital Rocket. They were fairly simple kits that I added a tiny bit of scratch work to make the cockpits a little less sparse.
By the way, I think I’m done with vintage kits for a while. They are interesting subjects, but they require a lot of clean-up and modifications to make them look good. For a while at least, I’m going to focus on more modern kits (relatively speaking) or some other subjects.
In between all that, in April of 2024, we traveled to Fredericksburg, Texas to view the total solar eclipse with the Planetary Society. It was fun, we made a few new friends and the clouds parted just in time to see about 4 minutes of totality. This was my second total eclipse and it was just as amazing as the first one.
Maybe 2025 will allow time to build a similar number of kits. I don’t know what they will be yet but the stash in the closet is so large there is no shortage of subjects to build. We also have our first grandchild coming in 2025 so we’re looking forward to that as well.
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Luhman-ations 