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Just a little history about myself and my modeling (Nascar and otherwise)!
I am 44 (For 2 more months anyway) and was born here in the western NC area and lived here for about 6 months! My family then moved to Cleveland, OH when my dad went to work for Ford Motor Company in Brookpark, OH. We lived "up there" for 26 years until we moved back in 1983. I loved the lifestyle "down here" so much more than the "big city"!!!
I have been building models since I was 11 or 12... the first model I remember was a 727 jetliner that my dad built for me when I was about 8. I started out on planes, then when star trek came on I got into sci-fi... I still remember the U.S.S. Enterprise with the little light bulbs in the bridge and the navigational dome (Had to dig out the blueprints for that one!) powered by batteries in the secondary hull and the phaser tricorder and communicator kits. Then in early 70's I was at my granny's house and saw some magazines my uncle had left. They were Car Craft and Popular Hotrodding funny car issues! That was my first taste of cars of any kind. Then in 1973 or 74 I saw something on the magazine shelf that started me on the road to building these stockcar models! It was a magazine with Richard Petty's Dodge Charger on the cover! I was hooked!!!
I built stockcars ...yes all of those MPC kits that get such outrageous prices on ebay, including a 1:16 scale clear body Petty Charger! I built drag cars also and went to the NHRA Spring Nationals several times when I lived in Ohio. As the years went by I gradually got away from the stockcars... mostly because of the lack of coverage in those days I guess. Then in the mid 80's as the funny cars began to look more and more funny to me I also lost interest in the drags as well.
I went back to more of the planes, ships and sci-fi that I loved so much to start with and didn't do much in the way of cars except for a 1:16 Dukes Charger and some 1:8 Monogram cars (TransAm, Camaro and a ford streetrod) also 2 or 3 1:8 F1 cars ...yes that's right, F1 Cars... but after building these big boys I got burned out on the high detail Japanese kits and stopped on a Lancia Stratos on about step 10 and never finished it! It was sold on ebay year before last for I think it was about $70-80.
Anyway... we had finally got cable in our area here in mid 1994 and I really got into watching the stockcar races! Then in may of 1995 I was in a model shop here in the Asheville NC area and saw a #3 and a #4 Monte Carlo kit!!! That did it ...I was hooked on Nascar modeling again! Since then I have built 80+ Nascar kits and have many more unbuilt kits and decals! The 2 kits mentioned above are here on the Other Models site.
A little about this site and my main site Randy Ayers' Nascar Modeling Center! I Started this site first in 1997. It started as a 1 page site with 1 picture and a writeup! Then Someone asked me on the Speedworld (Now SpeedFX) message forum if they could see more of my models. I replied that 1 was all I could post. I than received an offer from my good friend Bob Hanner to put them all up on his site The Stockcar Gallery. This is where the Modeling Center site was born! Ir started with pictures of my 1996 and later Nascar models. I then added tips and instructions as to how I built my models. Then Bob added the message forum and chat and that is where it is at today! The little 1 page site became The Other Models site when go.com took over the service it was on and they offered unlimited homepage space for free! Well... I had it built up pretty well with my pre 1996 models which you see here now and also my 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 Martinsville practice pictures of Winston Cup and some trucks. Plus I had many, many video caps from races on tv and video captures from my trips to the Winston cup previews in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
To make this long story shorter, go.com decided to discontinue their free homepages without any notice and one day I went to load The Other Models site and it was gone! So here I am rebuilding it on Tripod with 50 megs of free space and I hope to restore many of the old features soon including the Martinsville pics and Preview pics! Hope everybody enjoys this site and will visit it often!
Randy Ayers
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