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2010 IPMS/USA National Convention - Phoenix, Arizona

As I live in the Phoenix suburbs I am a member of one of the chapters that hosted this years Nationals.  My role was to organize and manage the seminars.  We wound up with about 40 sessions over four days.  One idea that Dick Christ, our event chair, came up with was the Adult Building Classes (ABC).  This is an idea he got from the model railroaders.  We did four classes and they were very well received for the most part.

So all that kept me pretty busy.  The show ran well overall and I sensed that attendees had a good time.  It was not the biggest show ever, as we had about 1700 entries in the model contest and a little over 600 people register.  When we did this in 2004 we had 2300+ entries and about 730 people.  I know some folks could not attend due to family or work issues, and certainly the poor economy had its affect on attendance. 

The space entries and attendance by the "usual crew" was also down.  We only had ten people show up for the usually well-attended space seminar (someone scheduled it against Daniel Martinez - oh, wait that was me...).  And I was too busy to socialize much with the folks who did attend.  But David Weeks won judges best in show with his scratchbuilt 1/48th scale Saturn IB (which he gave a seminar on building and researching it).  So that was cool. 

Photos

For photos see http://www.ipmsusa.org and follow the links to their photo gallery from the show.  Else we have this photo of the judging team from Manny Gutsche.
judges
Left to right:  Mike Mackowski, Mike Ronnau, Dave Weeks, Manny Gutsche, Shawn Gehling, Nelson Davis Jr., Walter Reuter, Jim Werth, Tom Gaston, and Jay Andry.
dave's saturn IB
David Weeks amazing scratchbuilt Saturn IB.
dave
Dave with his award after the ceremony Saturday evening, August 7, 2010.
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This page revised Aug. 22, 2010