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Down the rabbit hole – Scale modelling

I’ve always been a fan of watching people making “stuff” on the internet, scale models, tech items, 3d prints anything creative and have always been interested in Military/WW2 history. Up until recently my experience with scale models have been 2/3 kits purchased for me 3 Christmas’ ago that were painted assembled with gaps and painted with un-thinned paint.

  • Testing the fitment of the model painting stand I made in Fusion360 (more on that later)

My Stash

Back in 2020 my colleague mentioned how his dad was an avid scale model maker and had amassed a collection of around 300 scale models mostly in 1/72 scale, these were all kept in a shed at his Ex’s house so he had been unable to retrieve them in the 10 years since his dad passed.

Skip to 2021 May/June and I’ve finally made plans to help him move them all from the shed to his current home and in exchange he offered me some of the duplicate kits and those that weren’t of interest to him.
Over the course of one afternoon my stash has now risen from 2/3 models to over 80 kits. Needless to say I don’t think I will be buying any new model kits for a while (except a B-17 which is a notable missing kit I must have)

Box of goodies number 1
Load number 2 of goodies

Quite a few of the boxes have been damaged due to a flood they had one year as well as obviously sitting in a shed for 10 years but I went through all the boxes, wiped them down and checked the contents were still inside. The majority of the kits were still in their plastic.

Notable kits

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  • Italeri Gigant
  • Airfix TSR-2
  • Revell Blohm & Voss BV 222 V-2
  • Italeri XB-70 Valkyrie

I’m looking forward to building some of the rarer kits but only once I’m more confident in my building and airbrushing so it’ll be a while yet before we see those out of the boxes. For a current up to date list of models please have a look at my stash here

In the meantime I’ve been researching everything from paints, to airbrushes, compressors and techniques which has led me to a few new groups.

  • britmodeller.com/forums/
  • https://www.scalemates.com
  • Facebook Scale Modellers https://www.facebook.com/groups/crumblebuilders
  • ” I Love Scale Models ” https://www.facebook.com/groups/812442282225658

I highly recommend these groups for newbies and pro’s alike they are a great group of people just don’t mention RAF Interior Green to any of them.

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Quick Update – 2020 – 2021

I’m still here, and doing Homelab stuff but most of my setup is up and running so very little maintainance to do and not much being added.

As off the end of 2020 we moved house and have moved over to a Fibre connection over PPPoE. I setup a Pfsense server and have connected a Unifi access point to it running as the firewall, however, did not write my process up as it was all pretty straight forward and Lawrence Systems on Youtube covers everything ( I really do mean everything 😀 )

In addition I have added a 3D printer to my office and have been using to print bits and pieces for the lab as well as decoration.

I do have some projects planned now that the lab is settled into it’s own rack and not just scattered across the floor. So please stay tuned for some more guides hopefully.

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Running pi-hole and PIVPN on a Raspberry Pi 3b+

Today we’ll be adding pi-vpn on the same raspberry pi 3b+ that’s running my local ad blocker pi-hole.

For those of you unaware pi-hole is a dns based ad blocker, all client requests are sent through it and those belonging to ad domains are dropped.

Pi VPN is used to access your local network when you’re out and about, for me it’s useful so I can access my servers and other applications remotely, but here the purpose of its installation is to provide ad-blocking whilst out and about as well as an added layer of protection when connected to public hotspots.

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Self-hosted Email with Docker and Mailcow

Whenever someone suggests self-hosting their emails there’s always a wave of people saying it’s too difficult or too much hassle, I took this information and decided to give it a go.

In this article I am using a DigitalOceon droplet, the reason for this is my homelab is on hardware that isn’t on all the time and on internal-only access which isn’t much use when you expect emails to arrive 24/7. You can host this in your home but you would need to set up port forwarding, firewall rules and if you’re in the UK like me probably DDNS.

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Bringing life back to an old Macbook PRO

In this post, I will talk about how I upgraded my old HDD to a cheap and fast SSD, and also upgraded and installed the MacOS onto the drive.

Back in 2012 I purchased an 13″ Macbook PRO, I used it heavily for many years but as time went on it got slower and slower to the point where it was replaced by a desktop PC and an array or laptops before onto my Surface Pro.

After leaving it wrapped in bubble wrap during my last 3/4 hour moves over the course of 4 years I finally decided to bring some life back to the machine and use it as a media center for my home entertainment downstairs to access my applications to download and stream, movies, tv, and music to the different systems I have set up in the house.

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