Sometime late this year or early next, N Scale Ships will be moving permanently to Decatur, Alabama. The new space for operations will be far larger, with much better environmental controls, storage, work stations, organizational bins, power and plumbing, lighting and everything else needed to build even better models for the future.

This will eliminate the yearly winter hiatus, as I will no longer have to pack up part of my shop and move it to Alabama in November and back to Ohio in April. Building accurate ship models in two scales requires a sometimes uncontrollable variety of parts and fitments, as well as a wide range of tools and an extraordinary variety of materials. And there is expansion space to boot.

There will be some disruption of schedules for larger projects as I move and settle in. Also, I intend to trim the product line to eliminate the disappointing sellers (and reduce that inventory a little bit) so, if you are sitting on the fence about a model, perhaps you could write me an email expressing interest. No obligation–I just don’t want to drop the inventory if a few folks are interested in a particular model.

I can’t even tally the numbers of individual winches, anchors, life rafts, life boats, bitts, chocks, cleats, davits, smoke stacks, hatches, walkways, railings, stairs–let alone the strip stock, tubing and flat stock–that I’ve developed or am carrying. And then there are the molds, molding materials, and resins. I’m not complaining–I utterly enjoy doing this business–but I now have to gain some control.

We are excited about this move. Having a permanent space will allow much more experimentation into how far I can push this area of modeling. I’m somewhat impressed with how far I’ve come in the last 2.5 years in introducing some products (like minuscule pipe brackets) that I thought were beyond my reach.

So, onward in Alabama!