What I am selling

I've recently completed my first full HO scale kit, Kowalski & Smith Welding. It is based on a Z-scale scratch build that I did a while back which was based roughly on bits and pieces of real buildings. The HO version is the smaller, "original" part of the building gussied up a bit for a larger scale. I added a shed to one side, some awnings over the doors, and, being a good Southern boy, a big old 2, 10, 4 sign on one wall.

The design, I like to think, is appealing. The building fits on a roughly 4" x 6" rectangle of real estate. The siding is Northeastern's aged clapboard. I've included metal roofing: both standing seam and corrugated metal. You get: Tichy windows and doors; laser cut glazing for the windows; laser cut tar-paper for the shed; Masonite bases and jigs; strip wood galore; bracing galore; Bollinger Edgerly Scale Trains castings of pigeons, vent, oxygen tanks, acetylene tanks, an oil tank, and a welding cart; paper signs; plywood bracing; and material to make window shades. In short, everything you need to make the kit minus the tools, glue, paint, scenery, and time.

But that's not really what I'm selling. To tell you what I’m selling, I have to go back to when I was in my twenties working as a carpenter’s helper for AHIP, a local community housing program. I was making minimum wage. My wife, Tami, was just starting out as a secretary with a big construction company. Dollars were tight and hobby money was especially tight. Tami and I were visiting her folks in Dallas and she was indulging my desire to hit every model railroad shop in the metropolitan area. After careful consideration, I bought a craftsman kit of an old frame house. Now, this was pre laser cut kits and I knew that I was basically buying a box of wood and sticks with some templates, but I was curious. I winced, then plunked down fifty dollars for the kit and thanked my lovely, supportive wife.

When I got home to Virginia and pulled the kit out to build, it was pretty much what I expected. Die cut wood walls, strip-wood, and templates. But I quickly discovered a problem. The house was designed to have a wrap-around porch. This was a feature that gave it character and drew me to the little kit. The template for the wrap around porch was an L shape with a score line drawing off the forty-five degree angle from the outside corner to the inside corner. Now this is all well and good if you are building a flat roof. However, if you intend to angle the roof even just a little, that forty-five degree angle quickly turns the ninety degree inside angle into something a little sharper.

You might imagine that I uttered some unkind remarks in the privacy of my workshop upon making this discovery. Of course it was easy enough to fix but it galled me that I had to fix that problem. It was clear to me that I’d paid fifty dollars for a kit that the manufacturer had never put together himself.

So how does this story relate to what I’m selling? I’m not selling a box of materials. I’m selling the design; the engineering; the skull sweat; the fact that I’ve built all my kits over and over and stopped to fix the problems; worked out elegant solutions to make the kits easy for you to build. I’m selling the clearly written and clearly illustrated directions. In short, I’m selling a porch roof that fits.

Patience

Not the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The virtue.

Over and over, people tell me, "You must have an incredible amount of patience to do this detailed work". Frankly, I'm always surprised to think of myself as a patient person. When in the express lane at the grocery, I have to remind myself over and over that I'm not really in any sort of a hurry. When my daughters can't find their cleats and we're late for their soccer practice, I often glower at them and sigh with frustration. When my family was traveling, one of my father's favorite phrases was "Come on people. We've got to make time!". This usually uttered to hurry my mother and me as we ate.

Patience isn't a virtue of mine. Not really. To me, virtue implies some active goodness, some force of will to overcome the fundamental and sinful impatience that is, as humans, our birthright.

Instead when I sit down to build a model, I lose track of time. I sit down at 9:30am; work for half an hour; look up and it is 5:30 in the afternoon. This total absorption in the task at hand is utterly pleasing to me. Stories run through my head as I build. Problems of shape and color. Lost tweezers. Intense pleasure in creation. But patience? How can there be patience without a sense of time passing?

In fact, the failure to sense time has become a problem for me. Now that I am trying to build models for sale, I have to be able to track my time. When people ask, "How much time do you have in that building?", I need to be able to answer them with something more than "Um, about 40 hours?"

To solve this problem, my first thought was to purchase a chess clock. Then my dear wife pointed out, "Surely someone makes some software to help with this exact problem". As usual, she was right. After spending too much time on the Apple site, I found an application that should do the trick. TaskTime4 is a shareware program from ToThePointSoftware.

Now the trick will be to remember to start and stop the clock.