Fiddlers Green

Yep, work continues- I hope to have a few more pics posted soon...

Sweeeet!!! looking great!
Jeff

Well thanks, but it's taking way longer than I expected- mainly due to my work schedule.

I finished the air conditioning units and need to post pics of those.

The hand railings are quite fragile and are testing my ability to cut-out very small things. My pudgy fingers keep messing them up!

After the railings come the roof details (antennae and lights) and it's pretty much done at that point.

I forwarded the beta stuff to Nikki who's had a go of the cab already and said things were a good fit. I'll need to clean up a few lines, but so far so good- it's just taking me awhile to finish it.

And thank You!! for making it for every one. I am trying to make up some trucks to go with it to make a neat fltline dio. My modelin is suffering a bit time wise as well. job huntin is not what I would like to call "fun",lol
Jeff

Wow! Where does the time go?!?! New job, new house, and somewhere in there I managed to finish my Reese AFB Control Tower. I took a few shots of the completed model, but I've had to relearn how to upload images, then discovered my images were too big, now must resize them, yada yada yada. Anyway I'm still around and still cardmodellin'...

So I finished this back in 2012, and won 3rd place at our County Fair. It's been sitting in my office ever since, collecting lots of dust. I remember it got rained on when I went to retrieve it from the Fairgrounds, so it's puffy and out of shape in some places. I should have included some internal bracing or bulkhead as the middle of the structure pudges out. The walls were single-sheet cardstock, and perhaps gluing them to another sheet might also help the bulge problem. Here's a shot of the air conditioning compressor units and the external fuel tank for the backup generator (which was actually located in the tower just inside the double doors). The red legs holding up the fuel tank were made from a plastic coffee stirrer, and the piping is actually small-gauge copper wiring. The door-knobs are the tops of straight pins. The copper lines from the A/C units are more copper wiring (larger gauge) with the exterior insulation removed.

Here's another shot of the air conditioning compressor units showing a bit more detail. I took lots of pics of these in the hopes that some of the detail would appear. Nothing real fancy as these are just basic shapes. Along the bottom edge of the tower in the foreground is a large cable tray. As I recall, there was quite a bit of power coming into the control tower, not just for lighting, equipment and cooling, but there are inter-connects that tie the field lighting controls up in the cab with the transformer building down the flight line. That building has the transformers which power the field and runway lights. There were power poles nearby that fed electricity to the flight shacks and adjacent classroom buildings, but the tower itself was fed power from underground presumably via this large cable tray. You can also see the corrugated effect of the wall of the tower. Yes, those were actual York compressor units, and I was pleased at how well the power boxes on them turned out. The base of the model was two pieces of heavy-duty cardboard which I covered with a cardstock sheet depicting the ground, grass and pavement. I was worried the cardboard might warp over time, so I glued 2 square pieces together with their corrugations 90-degrees to each other. The base hasn't warped so far. Also, I remember gluing some heavy decorative rocks just inside the tower base to give it some weight. With such a large base and added weight, it's not likely to tip over.

Here's a shot of the cab and ancillary detail that goes with it. I had massive trouble with the railings and they are quite fragile as you can see. I don't like how they turned out, but I managed to mangle enough paper to get the idea across. Thin items like railings do not miniaturize well, and I'm not that good a modeler either, so. The crane you see mid-shot was to lift the heavy equipment cabinets up to the cab. Most military control towers built during the cold war did not have elevators, and if they did, they certainly were not big enough to handle the bulky and heavy electronics of the period, thus the crane. I think I fabricated this one from cotton swabs with the cotton ends cut off. Next to the crane is my poor attempt at a scratch-built microwave antenna. There was no ATC Radar itself at Reese AFB (after about 1979), so Reese Tower used a microwave feed from the Radar at Lubbock International Airport, and this antenna received that feed. The coax from the antenna then ran down the outside of the tower to the radar room where the signal was then displayed on a scope up in the cab and also recorded on an early and large type of VCR. If there was an "incident", then the tower crew would have a recording of the radar feed on tape. There were several shelves of such tapes still there long after the base closed. The cab itself was a bit of geometric paper-folding fun. The cab base is a hexagon, and the cab windows and roof are a single piece that's folded to achieve the shape shown. I must admit, I had some bold plans to include various radio antennae and even some LED lights for effect on top, but I was rushed to complete the model in time for the Fair, and frankly ran out of steam after those horrible hand-rails. The roof should have had handrails too, but by then I was done...

Here's the main entrance to the Tower. The door knob is the head of a straight pin. The video camera was an extra touch- Reese closed in 1997, long before 9/11, but there were 2 little details that conveyed the seriousness of what went on inside: that camera and the sign on the door. As I recall, the warning sign mentioned that this facility was used in air traffic control and loss of life could result from service interruption, with trespassers being prosecuted to the fullest extent or such. Of course the only part of the sign readable when shrunk to scale was the WARNING part. There was a video monitor up in the cab which allowed tower controllers to see who was at the entrance. They could remotely unlock the door or an electronic keypad could be used to gain entry.

Here's another look at the base of the tower. The fuel tank stands above a concrete containment "tub" so if it leaks, there a chance to contain the spill. Like many closed military installations, Reese left a legacy of contaminated groundwater- a problem the Air Force knew long before it closed, so such containments were common, not just POL storage. The backup power generator was actually inside the building, but it had a heck of an external muffler which I dutifully tried to reproduce. The black muffler pipe is actually a piece of copper wire bent to shape and run through a simple cylinder. The pipes holding it up are cotton swabs with the ends cut off.

One last shot of some of the accessories...

Thanks for the walk around, those added details really make the model a lot more interesting, and hearing the story behind them is neat!

Beard

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More Scotch and stogies for my wingman!

Another good build! Years in the making, but that's life. I like to see some FG models in the picture for scale reference.

caddmann05

Great detail to your model. Another one I would very much enjoy adding to my modest Library. I hope you don't stip there. These are great models. Thank you for sharing. wc

This model lives at my office at work, and sadly I don't have any other FG models up there to compare it to. This tower along with my T-37 model were what I submitted to our county fair back in 2012, and while I did pick them up after the judging, I never seemed to have made it home with them! Maybe an FG model or two could do a cross-country to my office perhaps? I seem to have much more room for them there than I do at the house, but alas.

I seem to recall the tower was around 1:60 scale as that was about as big I could go and still have the large pieces fit onto a page of cardstock. My goal was to submit it to Chip for possible inclusion, but I don't think it would pass muster. I'm still researching much of the history behind it, but I do have the files. Somewhere. I think.