Category: Collecting
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The Glaring Omissions
In hobby shops full of Messerspitstang kits and the space ships of the latest franchise movie, it is actually painful to stride the aisles looking for the missing links. I concentrate most effort on 1:72 scale aircraft and have long built the standards. I’ve built the semi-standards, and a fair few of the obscurities as…
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Eat All Your Peas
And one of several things will happen: a. You will earn dessert. b. You will be too full of peas to want dessert. c. More peas will served, as you obviously enjoy them. d. You will come to hate peas. e. You will fart like a dog for hours. I like peas, as it happens,…
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The Temptation To Re-Stash
And just when they thought you were cleaning out the old one… Many people I know go through a cycle where they alternately empty and replenish their stashes This conforms to the universal rule of physics that you can never have a completely full shelf nor a completely empty one. There must always be either…
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Minimalist Modelling
Paint everything white. Corbusier Kits: sheets of foamcore board and you just glue them together in slabs. I have been experimenting with a less complex approach to scale model building these last few months. Not that kit building can ever be truly simple…or for that matter neither can Lego or Meccano work. Doll houses are…
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Who Judges The Fantasy Model?
And how do they do it? Okay, if you are tasked with reproducing a model of a Willy Ley space ship as seen on a 1950’s Disneyland show, it is still fantasy – but the responsibility for the imagination has been taken out of your hands. Ley and Disney are the ones setting the pace…
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The Old Kid Modeller
As a young kid, your scale model building is limited by one thing: money. You have little of it and are largely dependent upon birthdays and Christmas to supply you with your kits. You may have desires, but you recognise that you’re going to be building whatever you are given. If you are articulate and…
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The Toy Makers
Some scale model builders look askance at people who deal with toys – whether these are wooden horses or cast-metal cars or life-like figurines. There is more than a hint of condescension when they are compared to the latest Tamigawafix 1:200 kit of the Prince Of Huddersfield. The one with the 1200 separate parts and…
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Convair F-106 – Part One – The Workshop Drawer
This baggie was found in an old workshop drawer by a friend in the eastern states, He kindly thought of me and sent it along unbuilt. I suspect it was an repackage of an old LS kit that Revell did in the 1980’s. A modest item, but surprisingly detailed. The instructions were classic fold-over baggie…
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If You Don’t Want To Have A Good Time…
Tell us now – we’ve got kits that we’ve been saving for just such an occasion… As a kid, I saw kits in shops that I knew were a mistake. The shop might have been a hardware store in a Canadian bush town, a news agency in an Australian country town, or the leftovers in…
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It’s Fun To Be Ignorant…
Until something even more fun comes along. For years I have avoided building in scales other than 1/72 and 1/76. My model airfields were this size and I needed goods for them. I could shop in the OO model railway shelves and the plastic model shelves for a long time. Then shopping got harder as…
The Little World 