OWLS HEAD — Things were bright and lively April 1 and 2 at Owls Head Transportation Museum with the Midcoast Model Festival. The festival attracted area model builders of all ages and numerous model clubs from around the region. One of the more unusual model displays came from J.R. Pelletes of Sabattus. Question was, is it art or models?

“This is more of an ensemble art than steam punk,” said Pelletes.

He was happy to be at the show and his tables garnered quite a bit of interest.

“Its everyday items, stuff from yard sales,” he said. “Flea markets, garage sales and Aunt Bernie’s kitchen drawers. People like to drop stuff off. I hang it all in my cellar. It has to be as I find it, it if happens to be tarnished or scratched so be it, I don’t paint anything.”

 Pelletes said he’s always looking.

“I do a lot of planes,” he said The wings of this one are picnic basket lids. I never know what I’m going to use, but chances are if it’s hanging down in my cellar I’m going to use it. I’m always looking for old carriage wheels. Old brass coat hangers make great exhaust systems. I sold my first piece about three years ago and I’m going to do a couple of displays in museums.”

The family-oriented event featured demonstrations and activities including flight simulators, indoor flying demonstrations, and hands-on activities. The popular "Make-and-Take" model workshop was held on April 2. The workshop allows each participant to build their own sans-glue snap kit model and take it home with them.

Ethan Yankura, education director and curator for the museum, said it was a nice show this year.

“We’ve had a great turnout,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of faces I haven’t seen before, which is good, both in the spectators and the exhibitors. My favorite are the ‘penny-planes,’ what you would call stick planes — ultra light, their weight is measured in grams. They’re built for endurance flight. I think the record is over an hour.”

Yankura said this is the second event to kick off the 2016 season and they are looking forward to a great summer.

“Our first event was the snowmobile event back in February,” he said. “Traditionally, this is our first big event, but we usurped that with the snowmobiles this year.”

Yankura said the museum will come alive on June 4-5.

“This idea was actually our last event last year and we decided to repeat it,” he said. “We’re going to see how many pieces from our collection we can get to run, drive and fly. We hit 77 last year, so we want to start the season that way this year. History Comes Alive runs the whole weekend, so we will see how many pieces we can better ourselves by this year.”

Eric Guilmet had to take his plane outside if he planned to fly it. The plane was called an Extra 260 and it is set up for aerobatic flying.  

“I spend most of my time with it in competition and in training for competition,” he said. “The pane comes already built, but you have to set it up and it takes a lot of time to do that. We like for the plane to fly very precisely, so it takes anywhere for 12 to 15 flights to dial it in.”

Ara Dedekian, of Yarmouth, was fueling his plane by winding the rubber band.  

“Winding the rubber, as it’s called,” he said. “These planes are just the old-fashioned stick and tissue and rubber. We buy the rubber by the skein; they’re not door knob rubber bands. We gauge it by the number of turns more then length and because we’re in a small space, I just put 300 turns on it and that should keep it up about 20 seconds. When we’re flying outdoors we’ll pack in as many as 2,000 turns and just try to keep it up as long as we can.”

Margaret Hoffman is the executive director at the Boothbay Railway Village. She said her purpose at the festival was to educate people about the village. She said the railway village turned 50 last summer.

“We have a full size steam engine that we operate on narrow gauge track,” she said. “It recreates how it happened here in Maine. We have 24 buildings full of collections. Everything from kitchen wares, rolling stock and vehicles. Fourteen of the buildings are historic railroad buildings from around the state. Thorndike Station is one of the historic buildings we have.”

Jeff Jacobs, of Bath, was at the festival with the Maine Freewheelers, a railroading organization.

“We’ve tried to bring a lot of the wooden structures that people had built and we brought a lot of the cars that were hand-painted,” he said. “This is a feature of this show today; for instance, this shed was hand-built, the lumber company was hand-built, and the log cabin was hand-built. The show is intricate in the details of it. We have out of the box stuff, too, but for this show we try to bring the prime stuff.”