2024 marks two anniversaries I’d not really thought about before.

In the autumn of 1994 I was 16, just entered Sixth Form at school, and unlike everybody else, was still cranking out the models. For at least ten years I’d built anything I could get my hands on – ships, tanks, figures, cars – but aeroplanes were always my favourite. I can’t explain why: they just were.

In the summer of 1991 I knuckled down and focused. A particularly memorable bike ride from my home to Toys R Us in Woking, and then to the Model Aerodrome in Guildford netted ten Hasegawa 1/72 jets and a load of Mr Hobby Aqueous paint. This was a seminal moment and I restricted myself to only making US Navy jets in 1/72 boxed by Hasegawa. This happy situation continued for a long time until I acquired a Hasegawa 1/72 F-15 and I branched out into any US military jet made by this company in this scale. And then I got an airbrush and I was away.

The occasional tank or car still rumbled across the workbench, and a good few 1/35 Dragon figures, but 1/72 aircraft were My Thing, until it was all disrupted by a certain Jonathan Mock and his review of Airfix’s first attempt at a 1/48 Buccaneer in 1994 in Scale Models International.

I really have no idea why I bought this kit. Mock gave a fair review and showed something nice could be made from what was, in all honesty, a rough moulding. It certainly wasn’t a patch on the Hasegawa 1/72 F-111 I recall having recently made. Maybe it was the colour scheme: I was 12 when Desert Storm kicked off, it made a big impression on me, and I wanted a desert pink aeroplane. Maybe that was what sparked a subject and scale change.

And I’ve never looked back. Everything since then has been a 1/48 post-war military aircraft, and I’ve loved this modelling journey I’m on. The second model was an Airfix Jaguar with my first experience of aftermarket: Xtraparts resin and PE details. In 30 years I’ve made 168 aircraft in this collection with no duplicates. Two have been started and abandoned (a Revell 1/48 F-14D in 1994 and a Revell 1/48 A-6E in 2024) and 203 now sit in the loft un-started (although in all honesty, am I ever going to build the Italeri G.91R? No.) I’m 46, I could live for another 30 years, and I could make a decent dent in that stash.

Fast forward 10 years to December 2004. I had 68 built models in the collection, all stored in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. I’d just submitted my PhD thesis, I was exhausted, took the month off in said parents’ house, and needed a project to fill my time. What better than to photograph all these models, learn html4, start a website and move the collection online?

This launched jonbryon.com (I think I might have had jonbryon.net at some point as well), a somewhat pretentious URL in 2024, but back then nothing special. Social Media wasn’t a thing and blogs were only just getting going. Mine was written from scratch and featured a gallery of photographs of each of those aircraft and a paragraph to go with it. In hindsight they’re embarrassing in quality and the text is very naïve, but I keep them as a marker of where I’ve come from. It’s been a very long and gradual journey. Some people wrote nice things to me (including a couple of ‘names’) and there were pages on there a bit more MySpace-y and the basics of my PhD thesis. I’m glad Shell never came across it as I was probably posting proprietary data…

The website has evolved and moved to WordPress about ten years ago. The photos have slowly got better, and more uniform, although I still wish I knew how to get a decent white background. (However much light I dump onto the model, it’s still too dark.) The models have slowly got better. I don’t think I have a ‘level-up’ build and it’s been an incremental improvement with some dips and troughs. The text has slowly got longer, and in-progress photos are now a feature. Some of those articles are now genuinely useful if you’re making the same kit!

It’s kind of a virtual showcase. Abby is generous enough to allow three IKEA display cases in the living room with 91 models on show to all and sundry, and there’s another in the model room with a further 19, which means 58 models have been binned. I still get to enjoy them online. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it running as it costs a fair amount of money and generates no income, and no one really visits blogs anymore, but it’s a been a labour of love, and love it I do. It’ll be interesting to see how things look in 2034…which when you write it down, looks like a pretty scary number!

I’m interested to know if anyone else is narcissistic enough to have done this as well. Are there any other complete collections online, documenting every project over a protracted period of time? If so, let me know – I’d love to give them a follow.

Anyway, thanks to all who’ve visited, commented and written to me over the years, and the few who’ve dropped me a pound or two via PayPal. Your support has been much appreciated 🙂