Who am I?

My interest in emergency vehicles began when I started as a volunteer firefighter in 1992. I am currently working as a Fire Captain for the National Park Service. In between I've worked for a private ambulance service, as a civilian firefighter at Army and Navy base fire departments and for the US Forest Service. 

I've been building models off an on since I was a child. Since there are so few emergency vehicle kits available I decided to start learning about scratch building my own, but without any assistance my attempts were not very successful. In 2002 I discovered how model sites had grown on the internet, I also met another firefighter who had been building fire apparatus for many years. Between these sources I learned a lot more about customizing models. I learned about working with styrene, how to make my own decals and even how to to do some simple resin casting. I created this site to encourage others to start building their own emergency vehicles and hopefully to repay those who have assisted me.

One thing I have found about emergency vehicle builders is not all have experience with actual emergency vehicles, I started to notice this when I found people who had great model building skills often had trouble with some of the smaller details. They didn't know how tools were carried, or they were looking for examples of equipment that might be carried. That is how this site began, I started taking photos of equipment at work to use for reference, I then started to branch out and collected photos from other departments, ambulances, police cars, search and rescue units etc. Another issue was the common practice of taking apparatus photos as a 3/4 view from the drivers side. As a result the rear and left side often were mysteries for many, it is not uncommon to see builds with a lot of detail on the right side and very little detail on the left side. That is when I started to collect apparatus photos, there are many variations in apparatus but there are also similarities. While a photo of a different engine may not allow for a perfect copy of another engine, it will provide examples of what that might be on the other side.