John Gray’s Modeling and Collecting

You mentioned that you started out as a collector. Do you consider yourself more of a modeler now, or more of a collector, or a little bit of everything? Well, I think a little bit of everything. The problem with collecting, there's various aspects of collecting that we're involved in. One, of course, is just trying to find particular pieces. But, more than that, is trying to encourage and incent and incent importers to produce particular models that we're interested in. We spend a lot of time on that. Oh. And getting plans, getting drawings, getting the material necessary to produce a model. And then providing that to the importer. Providing that to the importer, who then provides it to a manufacturer. Oh. Usually, of course, a Korean. Sure. That's part of it. The second aspect beyond that, is to take models and modify them to fit specific prototypes, if they don't already have the details that we like. So there's a lot of that, that both Phil and I, and a couple of others do, that you'll see in some of the equipment that we have on this layout. And I think the other part of it is to be able to create to be able to create scenes that may have occurred for which there's very little documentation. By having specific prototypes made, you can put together combinations that probably the pictures don't exist, or you can recreate it. or you can recreate it. And with digital photography that's our hope, that in a lot of these cases we can put together scenes that probably occurred, but which there's no photographic evidence for it.