The Little World

There’s all sorts of equivalencies that steer us around our lives. How many hours should you work to pay someone for working those same hours doing something you cannot do? How many if it is something you will not do. If you have good fortune, is it subtracted from their lives, or vice versa? Deep stuff.

In the case of a hobby, I’ll give you equivalencies based upon beer. Which brand you drink is up to you, but I restrict myself to local brewers and smaller prices.

a. Hobby Boss basic model. This equates, once you take into account glue and paint, to a six-pack of full-strength beer. With modest hot weather consumption this is three days’ supply, which surprisingly is about the building time for an OOTB Hobby Boss fighter plane.  Spend your money as you will – you’ll get three days of fun.

b. Airfix twin-engine kit. This generally amounts to 2.5 sixpacks of Alby beer. That’s just over a week for either drinking or building, and again is pretty accurate timing. Note that if other things intervene like having to go out or go to work, the build or consumption time increases proportionally.

c. Czech limited-run kit. Here you may be asked for 3 six-packs of Asahi. If you elect to make it without being decoyed down the photo-etch rabbit hole, the equivalence holds, but once you start bending and supergluing, the build time stretches. And you get thirstier and more desperate as you go on as a natural consequence of frustration. This is the sort of kit that needs either a zen approach or a good deal of savagery.

Now, if you spend your hobby money in the book store you may get better value for it – a longer reading time vs a longer building or drinking time. But there is a possibility that you will encounter a book that starts well but runs out of steam halfway through. Once you start to guess the next plot twist – or worse; start to not care what is going to happen to the hero – the whole thing becomes a chore rather than a pleasure, and you wish that you could trade it for the plastic kit. Too bad – you’ve spent your money. The one thing about a good book is that it is a damn sight easier to store after reading than it is to store a model after building.