Updated: February 22, 2023

As a life long model builder and Lost in Space fan, I started watching the show in syndication as a kid in the early 1970s, I was aware of some of Irwin Allen's other series back then and may have watched an episode or two of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea but Lost in Space has always been my favorite. As everyone knows, there was never a commercially produced plastic model kit of the Jupiter-2 by any of the model companies in the 60's or 70' so I made my own out of paper plates and I thought that I was the only one who had done that. It wasn't until many years later that I found out that many of us did the same thing. I was born in 1966 so I didn't have the Aurora Robot or Cyclops dioramas. By the time I started building at age 7 or 8, they were no longer available.

My first experience building Irwin Allen Models was in the mid 1980's with the 6" SFMA and 16" Lunar Models vacuform Jupiter-2 model kits. As far as general science fiction goes, I had been building Planet of the Apes figures and Star Trek spaceships for years but the early vacuform and resin kits were the first Irwin Allen related models I ever built.

I started building professionally in college doing display pieces and commissions for a local sci-fi store. A few years later I took out my first advertisement in Starlog Magazine and Fine Scale Modeler and the results were very good. In the pre-internet days it was a lot more difficult to get reference materials for projects. If you didn't have photographs of what you needed, you had to go to the video store and rent a tape of a TV episode or movie and hoped it had what you were looking for. Of course, today all you have to do is a Google search.

I began Gemini Model Build-Up Studios in the mid 2000's after several years of rehabilitation and recovery from an illness and brain surgery which abruptly ended my earlier cruise ship career.

Gemini Model Build-Up Studios offers professional full service custom model building services to collectors of science fiction TV & Movie related model kits, vintage Aurora model figure kits.

I work with injection molded & vacuformed plastic, resin, vinyl and 3D printed models straight from the box or customized with LED/fiber optic lighting, aftermarket parts, sound effects and custom dioramas.

Irwin Allen models such as customized Jupiter-2, Lost in Space Robot, Seaview and the Flying Sub are among my most requested projects.

For more information and photos of my work, please visit the website:

www.geminibuildupstudios.com

You can contact me at geminibuildups@gmail.com for any build-up inquiries.