Welcome!

Twisted from the Sprue is my little corner of the internet. This site started as a simple web presence for the Three Rivers IPMS model club - as in middle-aged guys who never quite out-grew gluing together miniature cars and planes (and not a club of really good looking people who have their pictures taken for underwear ads and the like). The club now has a real web-site, and this blog is a place for me to post stuff I find interesting or just want to ramble on about.

Its reassuring to know you're not the only guy with an obsession for trivia - if you happen across something interesting here, or have a question or something to contribute, please leave a comment or drop me an email at dnschmtz@gmail.com

Don
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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Breakfast of Champions!

The Three Rivers club travels well, thanks largely to Bill and his trusty minivan, which has racked up quite a few miles hauling club members to and from contests, air shows, museums and the like.  These road-trips usually start with the co-conspirators meeting at a Bob Evans or Eat-n-Park well before sunrise for breakfast  before hitting the road.  We've been doing this for long enough that models and bacon-and-eggs are linked forever in my mind.

So I thought I'd devote a few of these blog-icles to places for breakfast in the 'burgh.  I'm starting with a place just a few miles from the Beattie Career Center, and so a perfect place to stop to fuel up for the day on your way to our show.


Chub's Place is located at 810 Ingomar Road, Wexford PA on the edge of North Park.  Hopefully you can tell from the picture that Chub's has all the ambiance of a machine shop; it several notches above "greasy spoon" but definitely on the "dive" end of the scale.  If you're counting calories or grams of fat, your calculator may not have enough digits.  If you like to think your food is being prepared in a kitchen scrubbed operating-room clean then stick to Bob Evans (or one of the other places I'll get around to reviewing later).


But don't let the negative reviews you'll find on the Internet scare you.  The food is simple and tastes good and is cooked on a big grill just behind the counter.  The waitresses are friendly and call you "Hon" and keep your coffee cup full.   I recommend their L-PO - a big plate of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes and sausage that bears absolutely no resemblance to an omelet.  Or have anything with bacon and eggs - you can't go wrong.  If you believe that frying makes everything taste better and think coffee should be strong enough to remove paint, then Chub's is your place!



Directions from A W Beattie:

- turn left out of the parking lot onto Babcock Blvd,
- in half a mile turn right on Kummer Road
- in about 1 miles turn left onto Ingomar Road
- Chub's is about half a mile a head on the left.

I'm always looking for breakfast places - if you've got a favorite, especially in the Northern 'burbs, please leave a comment here telling me where it is and I'll check it out and report back.

Don

Friday, July 6, 2012

Open Judging - Our 800 Pound Gorilla


If you've entered a model at one of the Three Rivers IPMS shows in the last 10 or so years you noticed that things were a little different as soon as you put your models down on the tables.  Instead of there being lots of small areas marked off for very specific scales and subjects (such as "1/48 Small Prop - Single Engine Aircraft), there are whole tables marked for broad categories like "1/48 and larger Aircraft".  And when it came to awards time, things probably seemed even more different as modelers were handed gold, silver and bronze medallions instead of the usual 1st, 2nd and 3rd place plaques.

Three Rivers is one a few clubs using a style of judging generally known as "Open Judging" or "Chicago Rules".  The big difference is that rather than pick the 3 best models from a small group of models, "Open Judging" scores every model into 4 tiers: gold, silver, bronze and no-award.  All of the models scoring a "gold" receive a gold medallion, all of the models scored "silver" receive a silver medallion, and so on.  If there are four really good 1/48 P51s entered; they can all receive a gold medal. In a regular 1st-2nd-3rd sort of contest, the judges would have to sort out which of the four was the best, second best, third best and which went home empty handed.  It helps eliminate the element of luck: under Open Judging a model's chance of earning an award no longer depends on what other models happened to show up that day.

Open Judging is used at a lot of big (non-IPMS) figure and model contests, including MFCA (figures),
AMPS (armor), and Wonderfest (sci-fi).

So why doesn't everyone use Open Judging?

Some of the reasons are practical. Since you don't know exactly how many models are going to win awards the club needs to buy a lot of extras.  And since the judges look closely at every model, judging takes a little longer than at a 1-2-3 event.  This is all true, but they are not impossible problems - as demonstrated by the number of big long-running shows using this system.  It took Three Rivers a few years to polish out the rough spots, but its now a point of pride in the club that we've made it work when lots of experts said it couldn't be done.

But the big reason is that some modelers think the lack of a single "winner" in every category means an Open Judged event isn't really a contest. Since more models receive an award under Open Judging some see the awards being cheapened. Open Judging gets lumped in with Outcome Based Education (whatever that is) and T-Ball leagues that don't keep score as another reason the country is going to hell in a hand basket.

Here is the straight dope on the number of medals awarded at our show:  about 10% of all models earn a gold, about 20% earn a silver and 35% earn a bronze.  So for our typical 1 day show that draws about 400 models, there will be about 40 gold medals, 80 silver and 140 bronze medals (260 total medals).  A typical 1-2-3 show with 400 models would have at least 40 categories - that means 40 first places, 40 second places and 40 third places.  To over simplify, there are about as many gold medals given at our show as first places at a 1-2-3 show, and about as many silver medals as seconds and thirds combined. An unscientific review of the results over the the past few years shows the modelers taking gold and silver medals are more or less the same folks taking the top awards at the 1-2-3 shows (which tells us the system is working to recognize top quality work).

That doesn't mean that bronze medals are some sort of pity award.  To earn a bronze medal a model must demonstrate good basic construction and finishing; it can't have glaring or systemic errors.  At a 1-2-3 show these models would have at least been in the first cut and may well have placed; I've seen models place at the IPMS Nationals that would have earned a bronze at our show.

I have to think a lot of the criticism of Open Judging is coming from people who have never tried it. Our experience is that the judging teams love it - even though they're working twice as hard - because they no longer have heated discussions as to which model is better than another.  We haven't gotten much feedback from the entrants, but we see folks coming back year after year, and no one is leaving their awards behind.

To be honest, it might be a little boring if every show used Open Judging: after you took a model to one show you'd be pretty sure what medal it would earn at all the other shows.  Eliminating luck from the results also eliminates some of the excitement.  But since there is zero chance all of IPMS is going to switch, I think the few shows that do use Open Judging provide a nice change of pace.  If you never tried it before, please give us a chance to win you over!

And if you have been to our show, please let us know what you think.  Just click on the comment link below.