About Myself and this Site

Helicopters are my passion. Both static models and flying R/C models. I've been a model pilot since early 1995 when I made my first $1,000 investment in my Kyosho Nexus 30 (since deceased and then discontinued by Kyosho). Since then I've logged more than 158 hours (actual flight time, yes I keep track) and had a few pretty good wrecks. Painting canopies has never been my thing, but I'm getting into scale fuses no and scale helicopters are a lot different from the smaller more simple helicopters, but I won't get into that here. Needless to say, there are more details than you can imagine.

I also am a very avid static model builder. Mostly 1:72 and 1:160 scales. I've got a whole fleet of helicopters (25 sitting on and around my desk right now) with more on the way (doesn't sound like a lot, but after many redos and family/model disasters, there are 25 worth displaying.....). And of course there's the unbuilt shelf with ~51 waiting...

I use this site often when building so I have a pretty good idea what is needed for visual and walk around references.

For the technical types, all the pages on the site are generated off line and uploaded. As you can imagine there are a lot of pages and images to keep track of. I've built a (not so small anymore) application in Delphi to manage all aspects of the site. All the helicopter data and images are in a MySQL database. When an update is warranted, I literally build the entire site and upload it. This prevents me from having to futz around with keeping track of 3,000+ images and all their data (can you imagine a small change on several thousand pages by hand???). I've even built in a "digital rights management" component if you will, that can remove images as needed if there is a problem getting permission to use it.

I hope you enjoy what is here. If you find any mistakes or any missing info please let me know!

-Jeff