The Little World

Either the ones that are given to you on birthdays and holidays or the acquisitions from abandoned stashes.

The fact that they are an uncontrolled occurrence doesn’t lessen their value; it actually enhances it. There is a sense of surprise that you don’t get wandering the shelves of your usual hobby shop.

Come to that, there is a similar sense of adventure at a swap meet or stash sale – and the chance to go into a hobby shop in a strange city that you’ve never seen before is never to be missed. You might never get there again, so look at everything and buy the strange stuff.

I also recommend op shops, country stores, and crap shops for adventure. There may be no kits, but there can certainly be toys that are convertible to models and materials that you would never see in the standard places. The very best places are the ones where a rep has connedthe owner with unsaleable goods from other shops and they might have stuck around for literally decades.

Don’t go too big on old paints…they can dry out in their tins. Ditto old decals.