Hello there fellow model builders!

Hi all, I'm Alister, based here in sunny Nelson, NZ. My history with the hobby started in the early 90s as a young teenager, building model planes and hanging them from my ceiling (even a 1/48 AC-130 for a while! That was fun to hand paint with enamels and a tiny paint brush I tell ya). I left it all behind as I grew up, but in 2016 now as a husband and father of four young children (soon to be five) I decided I needed something new to do, to help pass the time at home, since we were spending a lot more time at home with the young family. So I visited the local toy shop, bought a 1/72 Airfix Zero, three Tamiya paints, one paint brush, and one bottle of Tamiya glue. I was hooked again! I made my way onto Facebook looking for tips and advice, and found there were so many other people doing this hobby as well! Given my social isolation that being a busy parent brought me, the new friends I made online in the hobby really helped me out of a dark time in my life, while helping me grow my skills with great advice, freely offered. I have co-founded the Nelson Scale Model Builders group, and we have regular meetups, and I’ve made great new friends here in town through that group. It's a real pleasure to share the hobby with like minded people, quite the change from the 90s when I did this hobby with no one to enjoy it with. Facebook is good for some things, but I like a forum functionality much better than that of Facebook, where an algorithm will choose what I see (and let's not mention all the adverts!). So I'm really pleased Gary is giving this forum a reboot, and I look forward to this being another great way to virtually hang out with other kiwi modellers. Like in the 90s, today I am still primarily a model aircraft builder, preferring 1/48 scale since coming back to the hobby. I build a bit of everything in the aircraft genre from the 1940s to today. I have just started the path on diversifying away from the aircraft theme though, I completed my first 1/24 scale car just last month. I hope to build my first 1/350 ship this year as well. Current projects on the bench are a 1/48 TR-1A from Italeri, and I am exploring what's in the box of my 1/350 USS Cole from Trumpeter.

Hi Alister… Glad to meet you and I look forward to seeing your work and learning more about you. I like that you’re diversifying subjects, and it really does add spice to your modeling growth…keep pushing that envelope!

Thank you Em! It's been great for me actually, the model car was a real breath of fresh air, and I feel really inspired again. Cheers!