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Our meeting yesterday was held in a very interesting place: the store and 3D printing lab of Eric Goggans in Roseville, CA. Eric has converted the second floor of the trainstation into a first class display store of his 3D printed models and other Navy related kits. And his backroom has a multitude of mainly resin printers. He explained to us that these high quality printers take about 9 hours to print a 1250 scale model. But he also prints larger scales. His best sellers are the Titanic era ocean liners in 1/600 and 1/700.
For our meeting, Eric had prepared quite a few of his newest 1250 model: USS CORAL SEA as of the time of her decommissioning in 1990.. You might remember that for our last meeting, Eric had printed the USS MIDWAY as the museum ship. In the meantime, Eric has also prepared the USS MIDWAY as she was at the time of her decommissioning.
I have taken several photos, where you can see the difference of the MIDWAY and the CORAL SEA.
Eric has the decals for the USS MIDWAY, and in the near future, he will also have the decals for the USS CORAL Sea.
And Eric has also prepared a sprue with 10 different planes that are displayed today on the museum ship- see my photo.
We discussed with Eric the possibility of also printing some of the helicopters from the museum ship. Unfortunately, even his fine printers cannot print the heli rotors. We all agreed that at this point the rotors have to be done in PE. Unfortunately, there are no known PE makers for 1250 scale rotors that we could think of. So a challenge to all readers: can we find a PE maker for 1250 helicopter rotors.
You can order any and all of these models by contacting Eric: contact@YESTRtoys.com

The interest in 3D printing was probably the reason that the turnout for our meeting was 20---the best in a long time. Bill Werner came all the way from Pennsylvania to be with us. It was good to see Randy Short and Bill LaFerriere for the first time since Covid.

For our general meeting, we had several interesting discussions. I recommended that Eric should develop the FDR in the 1956 after her SCB-110 conversion. Paul did not agree, since a few of the "old timers" have this model as produced by Alain Picard, in a very limited edition. Eric agreed with me that this is the model that he will work on next.

A few of our participants are planning to attend next years meeting in Kassel.

Our next meeting is planned for Saturday, January 6, 2024. We are expecting another East Coast participant: Peter Gottschalk.

Here are my photos from yesterday: https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0m5GNi8ffhPPc