This project, though unfinished, was a lot of fun. Remember, I was young at the time, full of energy and fresh new ideas. I was always jumping from one project to another, sometimes leaving one unfinished to move onto the next. I was also scrambling to make a living and create a family. In the case of this model project, my wife at the time was pregnant and we moved from Texas to Washington State. I was able to move the model but had no where to store it on arrival, so the unfinished model was disassembled and parts of it repurposed in other projects.

Recently, I completed work on a 1/350 scale model of the NX-01 Starship Enterprise model seen in the Star Trek series "Enterprise." 

This was a fun model to build - even though I didn't start it from scratch. The model kit was given to me by a friend, Sara, who had already built the engine nacelles and had done some paint work on the underside of the primary hull. 

In a previous blog post, I wrote about how I created scale models for a living early in my career. I did it for a living for two reasons: One, I've always enjoyed building scale models ; and two, because I was paid well to do it.

My inspiration were always the wonderful spaceship models I saw on television and at the movie theater. This was back before CGI, and the models used in Star Trek and in Star Wars fascinated me to no end. To keep my skills sharp, I often designed and built large models - some of them on an impressive scale.

As a kid, I grew up building scale models. Assembling ships, airplanes and logging truck models sparked my imagination and soon, I was crafting unique ways of detailing and lighting them. My logging trucks had headlights, my space ships and blinking navigation lights and my warships puffed smoke out of the gun turrets. When I discovered Star Trek as a young man, my imagination went into hyperdrive and I quickly moved from the AMT model kits of the day to designing and building my own custom space ships. Some of these were up to eight feet long!