My name is Luca, but to friends of long standing I’m Poncho. By trade I’m a senior IT consultant, sometimes too much so. Whatever time is left over from work and family goes into my tiny model-making studio, doing small things with a lot of patience and mixed results.
How I got here
I was eight. It all started with a second-hand present: a neighbour had a stack of Second World War aircraft kits her son used to buy with the monthly issues from the newsstand. Then he left for military service and lost interest. They ended up with me, an eight-year-old with glue, brushes and no idea what he was doing. A whole world opened up.
Shortly after came the little carpenter’s set, one of the few presents of my childhood: fretsaw, hacksaw, hand drill, a small hammer and a few other tools. I still have the hammer, and I don’t lend it.
With those tools, at 11, I built my first wooden ship: the Cutty Sark, the nineteenth-century British clipper, scratch-built from the plans. At 12 it was the turn of the Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian Navy training ship that still sails today, again from the plans and with no kit. I built two, because the first one didn’t quite convince me.
Between one ship and the next, at 11, a change of element: a plywood and balsa glider with a two-and-a-half-metre wingspan. Beautiful. It lasted until its maiden flight at the parish youth centre, where the local bullies shot it down with firecrackers. First lesson in applied aerodynamics: some skies need clearing before take-off.
At 15, my first real kit: HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, 1805. It survived months of work but not my mother, who destroyed it by accident while I was away on military service. Apparently in this story military service always does some damage.
What you’ll find here
Plastic kits, mostly mecha and spaceships: Gundam, Mazinger, Jeeg, the Battlestar Galactica fleet. Wooden ship models, back to where it all began. Making: filament and resin 3D printing, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, printed robots and RC cars. And workshop gear, because before the models you have to make the tools to make them: right now on the bench there’s the water-curtain cascade for my spray booth, designed in 3D, with a working prototype already built entirely by hand.
Almost everything is a work in progress. I write about the builds while I’m doing them, mistakes included: they’re the most useful part to read. Some projects I’ve been picking up and putting down for thirty years. My airbrush spray booth, for instance, is the first one I ever built, twenty-five years ago: adapted, modified, evolved and then modified again.
The bench
FreeCAD for 3D design, which I’ve only recently learned. Before that I tried Blender and Fusion and gave up on both: the first was too complex for my habits, the second went back to being paid after a short spell of free non-commercial use. For printing: Bambu Lab P2S, Ender 3 and Anycubic Photon Mono X2. Then an airbrush and a home-made spray booth.
Then there’s the strategic reserve: a few hundred paints, acrylic and otherwise, from various brands, jealously guarded. Some Tamiya jars are forty years old: give them a good shake and they still work beautifully.
Contact
No social media for now. A contact form will come later, with a captcha to keep the robots out. The ones I didn’t build myself, at least.