Brent Gair

I've finished my FS stand with the magnetic attachment. The model mounts with no holes or slots...the lower hatch can be mounted (which you can't do with the factory stand). Basic model construction is also finished but I still need warmer weather for the exterior paint job.

I'm back from the dead! Not quite dead. I was posting here regularly last summer/fall but I got stuck in a strange cycle of non-recognized passwords and a non-recognized user account. Don't know what happenned. I just re-registered from scratch. I just closed up my Moebius Flying sub yesterday. Once you do that, there's nothing left but painting. However, I'm in Canada so it's not painting weather yet. In the meantime, I'm just finishing up a display stand. I've made my own stand that will support the sub without changing the complete stock configuration. I built the Seaview last fall...had

My often unpopular opinion about stands is that I don't like to see models impaled on vertical posts like big bugs from an insect collection. Many modelers have just developed the practice of using a vertical rod simply because it's easy. I think it takes away from the "professional" quality of a lot of work. Most modelers I see on these forums do OUTSTANDING work. I think that work is diminished by stands that scream "cheap and easy". If you look at the long history of professional display and manufacturers models, the vertical post is almost never used. If you look at amateur builders on the

The first thing I'd ask you before I offerred any advice would be, "What kind of tools do you have?" Big projects for a guy with an Xacto knife and a Dremel tool are a bit different than big projects for a guy with a bandsaw and a lathe . Anything can be scratchbuilt in any size. I made a 102" ship from wood, a .5" flying saucer from aluminum and few things in the 30" range from foam and fiberglass. And I have some big opinions about display stands (actually, I can be obnoxiously opinionated about stands ! )

Funny thing...as soon as I posted it, I thought, "I forgot to tell people how big it is". It's about 18" tall. My woodshop has gotten better over the years but it's still rudimentary. I don't have anything that any regular Joe couldn't pick up cheap. My wood lathe is just something I ordered out of the Sears catalogue 15 years ago. I bought a book to teach myself how turn wood. Most of the stuff I have is just light duty equipment from Sears or Home Depot. The only seriously imposing piece of gear I have is a 14" Delta bandsaw. I'd love to make a simple kit someday. I keep telling myself th

Here's what I did with my old living room couch in 2003. I had just bought a big screen TV and I had to toss out the old couch to fit everything into my modest living room. Being too cheap to have it hauled to the dump. I decided to dismantle it and throw it out in the regular trash...one piece at a time. In the process of taking it apart, I found a very nice maple frame and good maple is too expensive to throw away. So I glued some old couch frame into a block and started doing some woodwork. The MARS-1 is one of the most ubiquitous classic spaceships of the 1950's. In one form or another,

I have just read that Moebius now does believe that the "burn" is caused by a reaction triggered by the metallic styrene. They intend to end the use of that plastic and will use plain grey styrene from now on.

Moebius thinks that the problem may not be in the vinyl but in a compound in the plastic which is reacting to the vinyl. According to Dave Metzner (a product development guy whose name appears on Moebius products), he has checked his old stash of Polar Lights cars (he used to work for PL) which use the same vinyl compound in the tires. According to him, none of them show this problem. Early suspicion has fallen on a coloring agent used in the plastic for the Chariot. The thought is that the coloring agent is triggering the reaction. No final word yet.

I've not personally dealt with this problem myself so I'm not entirely sure how to handle it. My initial concern is with the storage of the kit because the vinyl parts are not packed separately but are inside a bag with the chassis parts (I don't have the kit yet). Once assembled, I don't THINK there will be more than a small area of contact. The vinyl tread will touch a drive gear. And I guess the tires are mounted on plastic wheels (?). I beleive the tread and tires will be in contact so it will be mostly vinyl to vinyl. Foil between the surfaces should certainly work. Sounds like a good

As a huge Lost in Space fan, I look forward to this. One thing...get the treads and tires away from the plastic. I have read multiple reports of contact damage where the flexible tires and treads are in contact with parts of the chassis. Right now, this is not a critical problem. Moebius has been made aware of the issue. This type of problem has been found in other models in the past (thinking of the great debacle of the AMT Tigercats with vinyl tires). If you separate the parts now, you should be ok. I have fears about these kits being saved in boxes as this problem will get continously wo

That's the guy, Jose/

I expect your grandkids will never asked about the days when color TV was new...because they'll probably have no concept that B&W ever existed! Funny thing, I'm NOT a fan of Star Trek (it's been done to death) but I actually own the first season on HD DVD so I watch it in high defintion on a 51" HDTV. Oh, I also have a Blu-ray player but a Blu-ray version hasn't been released yet. The great irony is that most of the classic shows (including the Irwin Allen stuff) were shot on 35mm film and can be transferred in high defintion. But some of the later shows in the 70's and following years we

I think 1/32 scale would make it about 12" across. I haven't really investigated the specs but I look at this way. The average diameter ofa U.S. sub at the time the Seaview was designed was 33'. The Seaview is about in proportion to a normal sub. Given that the Flying Sub would fit inside the Seaview, near the wider forward fins, I would figure it to be 32' across. So figure a 1/32 model to be a foot across...give or take. Yeah, that screen cap WOULD have been handy a week ago. Oh well. As I've said, I try to be accurate but it's not practical to screen every episode looking for every possib

Rusty, I'm "this close" to acquiring the Moebius Seaview (I took at look at your sprue shot thread). At the moment, I'm still mulling over options...since I'm in Canada and local shops have dried up. But it may be only hours until I have the issue resolved. I don't mean to sound cryptic but whenever I open my mouth too early, something usually goes wrong like an item being out of stock. I'm at the point where I don't a rat's behind about continuity problems bewteen various Irwin Allen miniatures and full size sets. The Spindrift was crazy. the Two main miniatures didn't match each other and t

I’m a big fan of all the Irwin Allen shows and I wanted to do a scratchbuild of one of the vessels. I ordered Seaview plans…and they were useless. They looked like scaled up amateur drawings of the Aurora kit. Lost in Space is my favorite show but there were already plenty of LIS vehicles available. The SPINDRIFT from Land of the Giants won almost by default. Ironically, I haven’t seen the show in 38 years and I have few specific memories of it. It’s the only Allen show I don’t own on DVD (too expensive). But the ship is gorgeous and I thought it would be a great project. It was a v

Hey. I'm just ribbing the competition a bit. Nothing to be taken really seriously. If I got in a real snit everytime I lost, I'd be a very unhappy guy. I've had my butt kicked by a lot of women over the years...I don't worry about a little butt kicking in the model world! I like old time sci-fi. I'm a fan of silver ships with silver wings. I figure a space ship should look swoopy...and not swoopy like a bicycle helmet . I've scratch built a few classic movie and TV ships and I'll post another one soon.

Oh yeah, some guys were cranking them out as fast as their graphics programs could render them. Sort of a shotgun approach. Start with the basic Viper from Battlestar Galactica circa 1978 and see how many ways you can disguise it as something else .

Equal time. Here's the winning entry:

Thanks guys. I do have to say that my entry was RADICALLY different from anything else so I wasn't expecting great things...an honorable mention would have been nice. But, like most model builders, I use a contest as an excuse to build...I don't worry much about how I place. This model went together very fast. By the time I found out about the contest, there wasn't much time left. I think I did the whole thing from design to photography in about 6 days! And it does look pretty. Sometimes a model just look "right". When I submitted my entry, there were probably 10 other designs submitted. I

I entered an online contest last winter to design a “space fighter†that could be reproduced in 1/72 scale. Assuming that everyone else would design one of those trendy, free-form shapes (like the flying coat hanger style of Andromeda), I went totally retro. I designed this UFO fighter with the backstory that it’s a 1950’s design intended to combat UFO’s in near Earth orbit. It’s a design based on a combination of WWII German research and Northrop style engineering. It was to be launched on top of a booster and carried a variety of weapons in the ventral pod. It had an internal roc

Top figure is the styrene kit of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA from Polar Lights. The bottom figure is the METALUNA MUTANT from This Island Earth. The Mutant is a small resin figure about 3.25" tall.