Origins
I got my start in 1987, when I was seven years old and my mom sat me down to watch the premiere of The Next Generation. She was an old-school fan from the ’60s, and she passed the bug along immediately and permanently. When a die-cast Enterprise D showed up at KB Toys, I had to have it — but something was off. The seam lines, the proportions, the details that didn’t match the schematics. For most kids, not an issue. For me, it was the beginning of a lifelong, entirely unresolvable problem.
The fix was to build my own. That same year I walked out of the local hobby store with my first Enterprise D kit, some Testors glue, a basic enamel set, a pair of frankly god-awful brushes, and an X-Acto knife I was issued on the condition I not cut myself. The scars suggest mixed results. The first build was objectively terrible. I was completely hooked.
The Long Apprenticeship
What followed was a slow, obsessive education: magazine subscriptions, failed builds, wrecked builds, rebuilt builds. Lighting models with grain-of-wheat bulbs, burning them out, switching to LEDs. Scratch-building original designs, casting resin parts, and eventually teaching myself 3D design. When I got my first 3D printer, the obsession found its final form.
The Warband Assembles
For a long time, that obsession was a solo thing — me, a workbench, and a very specific idea of how a model should look. So when I started designing my own decals, stencils, and STLs, the logic was simple. That hunch became Fallout Hobbies in 2016, funded through a successful Kickstarter. I figured a few other hobbyists might want this stuff.
Turns out there were a lot of us. The kid who couldn’t find the kit he wanted had accidentally found his people — tens of thousands of fellow heretics across Facebook and Instagram, and 23,000+ orders later, still building. The best part was never the order count. It’s the community that grew up around the bench.
Every release still starts the same way it did when I was seven, staring down a kit that wasn’t quite right — deep research, a lot of testing and refining, building something I’m genuinely proud of. The only difference now is I get to share it with a whole crew of people who feel exactly the same way.
