The Little World

At some stage of the game, the status of your kit stash tips over from ” modest ” to ” immodest “. Then it goes to ” blatant ” and then ” arrogant “.

This is probably about the time when your spouse starts to notice it, and you become secretive. Or it may be when the weight of the styrene shifts, the whole wardrobe of kits falls forward on you, and pins you to the floor. Many have died this way, but few regret it.

I keep my stash on low steel shelving in my photography room and so far have built fast enough to keep the danger low. Mind you, I am prepared to risk it…

I do another thing which is probably silly ( I do a lot of things that are definitely silly ) but which has proved useful; I keep the box art and the colour call-outs as well as the spare decals when I finish building a kit. These are generally small enough to store in IKEA containers.

The idea of keeping the box art is the fact that I appreciate the time and talent that has gone into the illustrations. They may be the only things left of a kit. Likewise, the colour call out or pattern information is a resource for the future – I may wish to make a variant of a kit or a similar aircraft with the same colour scheme.

The decals have been put to use in a number of ways – variants, as I mentioned, or assembled into new markings for different aircraft. I rarely buy the sets of aftermarket decals – they are not available in the shops I frequent and are expensive things anyway.

Out in the Little Workshop it gets even more organised. All excess parts are stripped from the sprue and classified. Some boxes are rarely opened thereafter, but some get ratted through on a regular basis. I suspect that as I continue to build 1:72 aircraft, I will eventually have enough styrene extras to make something without a starting kit…

Hey – that’s how the British built their interwar bombers…