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President’s Message

First of all, let me say I’m sorry for the delays in giving you all an update and getting your Boresight issues out to you all. Chuck’s time has been severely curtailed since the fall and I have stepped in to try and help out. The Sept.-Oct. issue has been completed since before Christmas, but my inexperience in getting the information to the printer cost us three or four weeks. I’ve learned my lessons and the next issue will be along very soon after you get September’s. Hopefully, we will be caught up within a month.

Elections

Well, it’s election time again. The positions of President and the four 2nd VPs are all up for grabs. Now, I know that we had problems getting candidates for the last elections and I hope that some of you have taken my words at the time to heart and are considering helping the Society. As I said before, I am not running again. The organisation needs an Executive to carry it forward and we, as a group of 450 adults, must have people who are willing to give a little of their time to promote this club that has served us all so well over the years. This is a volunteer organisation and we need volunteers. These aren’t tough jobs and can be a lot of fun. If you have any vision of what you would like your society to be then please run for one of these positions.

Officers’ duties can be found on the AMPS Constitution page of the web site.

From an election administration point of view, because of my Boresight problems, the dates in the September issue are incorrect. Nominations will close 31 Jan, 2007. Candidate statements should be included in your self-nomination letter and will be published in the next Boresight, which I will have out to the printers by the 15th of Feb and out to you all within 2 weeks. Notwithstanding that, candidate statements will be posted on the AMPS web site as of 31 Jan, 2007. Ballots will be included in the Boresight with the statements and can be mailed in to the AMPS postal address by 1 April, 2007. The announcement of new officers will be made at the convention at the AGM on April 20th.

Boresight

As mentioned above, the September Boresight is at the printer and should be in the mail to you all within a week. Our next issue will be a first for AMPS, a special issue devoted to one vehicle, in this case the Stuart family of light tanks. We will have build articles, a conversion review, an article from Ed Gilbert on Marine Corps Stuarts, walkaround photo coverage of the M2A3 and a good selection of images from Stuart manuals, including several of the wading gear trunks to help those building for the AMPS Convention theme of “Fish Tanks�.

I would love to publish more “Boresight Specials�, so if enough articles pile up to justify a full article on any particular subject, I’ll pull them together for another special. If your chapter would like to put together enough articles for a special, that would be great. It will get your special published sooner and it will promote your chapter as well.

Website

By the beginning of February (and maybe by this weekend) a new version of the AMPS website will be available for everyone to use. While the visual aspect of this new site will be the most obvious change to the general membership, for us operating the site it has new ways for more of us to update the content of the various pages. This will allow us (especially me) to keep you all better informed. Let us know what you think.

Paul Roberts
President
Armor Modelling & Preservation society