Slam Fest with IPMS/Gateway

I was at Calvary Presbyterian Church (http://calvarypresbyterianchurch.org/) this past Tuesday night (16 July) for this month's meeting of IPMS/Gateway (https://sites.google.com/view/ipmsgatewaychapter/home). The meeting featured the annual Slam Fest, in which members had two hours to build and finish a model kit. It started at 7:00 pm--30 minutes earlier than usual--to fit in this event.

Before building got underway, I was recognized by club President Rick Keasey for editing the club's newsletter, The Arch Scaler News, which was just awarded the IPMS/USA Region 5 Newsletter of the Year Award. I showed off the plaque that I received the day before for this honor.

I worked on an old kit I had won a few years ago at the club's Kit Auction. It's a 1:50 scale M.B. 326, an Italian jet trainer and light attack aircraft. It had few parts, so I selected this as my build this night. It came together fairly well, though one of the wings had a hard time staying attached to the fuselage, even with using "super glue." Fortunately, Keasey had some "super glue" accelerator, which I borrowed, and the wing stayed attached. However, I misjudged the wing to fuselage join, so this wing had a different dihedral than it should have. Oh, well.

At the end of the two hours, five of us--including me--had completed models, and these were judged by popular vote of the attendees. Mine missed out on the top three, and those three leading vote getters earned their builders gift certificates to a hobby shop.

At the meeting, we also got some word about next month's IPMS/USA National Convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee (http://ipmsusanationals.com/). I will be going there--in fact, I made my hotel reservations this past Sunday--and we were trying to tie down who will bring models for the contest and who will bring models for the display-only area. I will do both.

Later.