Category: Collecting
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The Itch Builder
And I write because I am just that when the need arises. These days I build mostly model aircraft in one scale. I like to photograph them in my studio and need structures and accessories to go with the kit-built planes. The trade is pretty lax about making things for model aircraft…very much so in…
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Not Every Tool Is A Good Tool
But they won’t tell you that at the hobby shop or on the internet site. We all have more tools than we use…every toolbox I’ve ever seen has at least 10 – 20% excess in it that just gets shifted about when we look for the useful items. Yes, I’m guilty of this too. Every…
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Who Sets The Bar Over Which You Leap?
Who sets you up to fail? Is it the manufacturer who makes a 600-part kit where 50 parts would be adequate? Is it the contest judge with a God-complex who marks you down to boost himself up? Is it you, who live in perfect magazine images and internet sites and never realise that real life…
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Use It Or Hoard It?
What do you do with the valuable old kit? If you have been stashing or buying for some time, you will eventually stumble across an unbuilt kit that is actually valuable in some respect: a. It has climbed in resale value as it has aged and other similar kits fallen by the wayside. If you…
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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…
The Little World 