By Grayson Zoller
Building a helicopter is hard. It would be especially hard for one person. But senior Connor Hobbs has built more than just a helicopter. He’s built the Millennium Falcon, an X-Wing, an AT-ST, and more.
How has he done all this? They’re all to-scale models that he’s constructed.
A scale model is an accurate recreation of an object at a smaller size (such as a 1/24th scale model, which would be one twenty-fourth the size of the original object).
Hobbs got into the hobby during his freshman year of high school.
“I played with Legos a lot when I was a kid, [but this] is a little more complicated [and a] little more fun,” Hobbs says.
Hobbs gets the models as kits and assembles them piece by piece. Some of them can simply be pressed together (like Legos), while others require parts to be glued together so they hold in place.
Some models require paint, while some come pre-painted. The models come in tiers of difficulty which roughly correlate with the size of the model. Hobbs has a model of an AH-64 Apache helicopter that he estimates is about as long and wide as a Chromebook.
One of the more complex models Hobbs has made is a 1/12 model of the character Boba Fett from Star Wars. He said that assembling a human figure was different from doing a ship or vehicle, because it’s a model of a person.
Hobbs said that he enjoys building things, and plans on going to Ivy Tech to study HVAC and welding.
