Monthly Meeting – May 2020

In May we pulled off our first official online meeting! We had about 20 members who were able to join, and things went off pretty smoothly. Luckily, the Zoom interface has been easy for our members to join and use.

Computer meetings not your thing? Burned out from too many work meetings? We get it. But hopefully it’s better than no meeting at all. And it’s good to check up and see some familiar faces.

One of the topics included our face-to-face meeting place, Livonia’s Pierson Center. With all of the changes going on in the world, it is uncertain when/if we will be able to meet back there again. So you may see a few more Online Meetings in our club’s immediate future.

Erik H. gave our first online demo, an introduction to CAD. Erik was able to share his computer screen, and show us the basics of using AutoCAD to draw shapes, and to scale them down for printing and/or cutting and scoring. This type of demo was perfect for an online meeting. Thanks, Erik!

May is normally a Model-of-the-Month event for our club. This led to some challenges as to how we could present and vote for models online. Facebook offers photo and polling options, but many of our members aren’t on Facebook.

In the end, we built a special page for voting. Members submitted their own photos and write-ups for models. We displayed all of the info, and used a free polling site called PollJunkie.com for vote selection. It was easy to create polling questions on PollJunkie. Then, they provide HTML code to plug into your page. We password-protected our page during voting, but we will open it up to the public now that the poll has expired.

Thanks to everyone who went through the extra steps to enter a model. We had 21 models entered, which is more than some Face-to-Face months.

The voting process seemed to go pretty smoothly! Here are some of the comments:

What did YOU think? Did you have any troubles with connecting to the Zoom meeting? With seeing the demo? With voting? If you are running into technical snags, please contact Albert. Let’s make the next one even better!

Next Month?

In June, we’ll have a mini-contest themed Hot or Cold. Entries might include desert or winter themes, lava, snow, fire engines, Star Wars snow speeders, ice giants, who knows what. Surprise us with your creativity! We’ll run the contest the same way: Get Albert your pictures and write-ups by June 9. Multiple entries are ok, and you can dust off an old model for this contest, it doesn’t have to have been recently built.

M-o-M Results

And now, here are your May 2020 Model-of-the-Month winners…

Adult 1st Place: Ian’s Cavalier bust
Adult 2nd Place: Alex’s V2 Rocket
Adult 3rd Place: Jim A.’s Phantom
Junior 1st Place: Robert H.’s CBR Dress Desert Shield figure

You can see more pics in our May Model-of-the-Month Gallery here.
And you can find the current 2020 Model-of-the-Month results here.

The top spot was a real head-to-head battle between Ian’s Cavalier bust, and Alex’s V2 Rocket. Ian D. took the top Adult entry with with only one point. Well done, Ian!

Ian Dow
Cavalier
16th scale, New World Miniatures

Junior Robert Helms entered two figures this month, and most people liked his CBR Dress figure the best. Another nice job from Robert!

Robert Helms
CBR Dress Desert Shield
1/16, Verlinden

Alex Mierzejewski
V2 Rocket with Meillerwagon and SS-100 Tractor early 1945
1/48
Wespe Models – Meillerwagon – Resin
Tamiya – SS-100 Tractor – Plastic
Pegasus – V2 Rocket – Plastic
Scratch built Base – Plaster