Dear friends,
I'm sorry to say that I'm going to stop working on this project.
There are several reasons for this.
When I started this (I began collecting data back in 2016), I knew how large this model would become, but at the time it didn't seem like a problem to me. Ten years later, my life and the world look very different.
Over the years, my health has slowly declined, and osteoarthritis in particular is starting to take its toll, especially in my feet and hands. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to climb stairs, which is something I have to do frequently in this house. My hands are also becoming more painful, and it's getting harder and harder to work with and assemble the small parts. I simply no longer have the necessary strength in my hands.
My wife Karin had a stroke in 2021, and I've been her caregiver ever since. She's paralyzed on one side, and that's not going to change. We have a lot of help, but most of it falls on me. I also work three days a week, and it's getting harder and harder to "recharge my batteries". I'm retiring next January, and although I have a great job with wonderful colleagues, I m really starting to look forward to it'
We've applied for a single-story home, which automatically means we'll be downsizing. It'll be about half the size of our current place. There won't be room for a model of these dimensions (120cm span) there.
My partner in crime was David Hall, and I am very grateful to him for his help. He converted the immense number of factory drawings we were allowed to view at the RAF Museum in London into construction drawings for the model.
I would also like to thank Rob Mulder and Colin Owers for providing high-resolution photos.
In the US, Joshua Flory found rare documents in various museums. These are mostly test reports from flights conducted in the UK with the V/1500.
Without the support and encouragement from you, my fellow forum members, I probably would have given up long ago.
Nonetheless, this project has given me a tremendous amount of pleasure. Even though I didn't reach my destination of my journey, I learned an awful lot along the way.
I hadn't built a model in 40 years, and of all the models I built before that, not a single one survived the 12 moves I made all over the Netherlands.
The Handley Page V/1500 was my first -and unfortunately also my last- attempt at building a scratch-built model. In hindsight, I bit off more than I could chew with this project, and I think there are forum members who saw this coming. But it allowed me to temporarily forget the crazy world around me by focusing on fiddling with 0.5 mm styrene, brass, and wood.
Of course, I'll remain a member of this wonderful forum and continue to follow your fantastic build logs. I also plan to build a smaller model (1/72) from a kit in the not-too-distant future, but scratch-building is no longer an option. I still have plenty of small kits in my stash that ARE within my capabilities, so maybe, one day, I'll build something worth showing.
So, this is by no means goodbye, just a step back, and you're not rid of me yet!
I'll be back
Willem
