Hello, everyone! I'm new to this community and I haven't posted anything on Hive in the past three weeks, or even checked my feed in that amount of time - I've been otherwise occupied. Anyway, this post is meant to be something of a follow-up to one from 
One of the first toys I made, at the age of eight, was a samovar for a dollhouse. I had just moved into a new house, and the previous owners left behind all sorts of old stuff, including board games, so I glued some draughts (checkers), dice, push-pins (thumbtacks), finger pulls for pocket doors and a picture hook (the teapot handle) together, then painted it gold.
Of course, I vastly preferred playing RTS games over playing with dolls, and the first one I ever owned was the original Age of Empires, which was a gift from my older sister, along with Starcraft and Heroes of Might and Magic II (which isn't an RTS game, but hey, details). I thought triremes looked really cool, so I tried my hand at making one of my own.
It's not in the best shape, but to be fair, this wood and cardboard toy is over twenty years old. I made some smaller ones out of cardboard some time later, just to see if I could do better.
Since I have always been rather impatient, I like to use hot glue for everything, which is quite messy. Mind you, I didn't just make things that looked good, I also tried my hand at making some functional toy boats as well, which aren't nearly as fancy.
In the background, you can see a little wooden model of a modern missile frigate, not a specific one, mind you, since I didn't quite care enough about that sort of thing. As with most other toys I've made, this was also inspired by a game, in this case Fleet Command. I was probably ten when I made this.
By this time, my family had settled (as much as we're physically capable of, anyway) into the new place, and I started to make use of the workshop.
The ship has a single gun turret, which rotates on account of the fact that it is held in place by a nail, but never had a barrel. I tried my hand at making turrets with gun barrels, but for whatever reason, it was a choice between having gun barrels or being able to rotate, this next example being the former.
I also made lots of little foam rubber models of fighter jets, but I can't find any of them, and all I have left is the aircraft carrier that I made for them, along with a larger missile frigate.
I combined whatever scraps I could find, for instance a suction cup and a nail made a rather convincing radar dish.
I'm honestly not sure if I cut these pieces of wood or I simply found them and thought "that looks like an aircraft carrier deck, I could use it," since this was so long ago. I couldn't have been more than twelve years old, and I'm basing that on later toys that I made with more sophisticated techniques, as you'll see in a moment.
One of my favourite materials to work with was craft foam, though "craft foam" is too vague a term, since I used multiple types, and I don't even know what they are properly called in English, much less Russian. This articulated Zerg Hydralisk is made of three different types of foam, one of which is a piece of pipe insulation.
I couldn't find the missing claw. The whole thing stands up quite nicely, since it has a "spine" of steel wire inside its body. The "arms" are also fully poseable, held together by hidden pieces of copper wire.
This next model I made when I was thirteen or fourteen, based on the fact that Revenge of the Sith came out when I was thirteen, but since I've never been to a cinema once in my life, there's no way that I watched it immediately.
In case you can't tell, it's made of painted wood. My previous wooden toys, with very few exceptions, were all coloured with permanent marker or some other type of ink, because I was really impatient, and I didn't like having to wait for paint to dry before I could play with a toy that I had just made. I didn't start to develop any sense of patience until I was in college, by which time my projects were becoming so complicated that any idea of instant gratification was thoroughly defenestrated.
These are some components for models that I never finished. Most of what you see are scraps of cloth that I've stiffened with glue and used to make sails, but there are also some crude metal components for miniature World War I-era warships. Maybe this will give you an idea of what I was going for:
While I was in trade school and engineering school immediately after that, I was too busy making practical devices to make toys - the only "toy" that I made while learning to become a machinist was a fully functioning pneumatic rotary valve engine. I made one out of aluminium, and one out of steel. I finally resumed toymaking when I was introduced to 3D printing during my senior year of college, though benchtop machines available today are both cheaper and produce better results than the industrial machines I had access to at the time. I received a Makerbot Replicator as a graduation present, and I immediately put it to use making toy boats again - this was ten years ago.
This model of a cargo steamer was printed directly on the build platform, hence the smooth and shiny bottom, but it began to lift up at the stern, which is why the top layers are so mangled there. Luckily, once I started my first job in industry, nearly a year after I graduated, I had money to burn paying Shapeways to make my toys for me, but in a strange turn of events, my own capabilities have since passed them by.
On the left is a model that was printed at Shapeways, on the right is one that I printed, though it didn't finish because my machine lost power in the middle of the print job. My countrymen will undoubtedly recognise this ship, for the rest of you, this is a Pallada-class armoured cruiser (its formal classification is actually "protected" cruiser, but that's a distinction that almost no-one cares about). I took pictures of the only survivor, the Avrora, when I last visited St. Petersburg.
Of course, I like tanks and aeroplanes as well as ships, so if you are curious about my more recent toymaking activities and you can spare about half an hour, feel free to check out this video:
A month ago, I thought I'd be able to resume making content more regularly, but either I jinxed it, or my time in the doldrums is finally over... actually, it's both, considering that I fell into a spell of severe depression before having a whole bunch of work dumped on me. Anyway, I'm back for now, but I can't guarantee I'll be able to stick around!