Category: Hobby Shops
-
Convair 440 – Part One – The Visitation
I went to a new hobby shop – Hobby Mania. It was up a flight of stairs and shared premises with an accountant’s office. No-wonder – the accountant has the shop as a personal hobby venture. He must be doing well enough – he had an employee there to show me the room of stock…
-
Serious Money For Lighthearted Spenders
When you enter a hobby shop, do you do it with a happy heart? Do you skip in with a Tra La and a happy whistle? Do you greet the proprietor as an old friend? Or do you slink in round the corner of the door and growl at the staff behind the till? Do…
-
Messerschmitt 109 – Part One – Never Let A Chance Go By…
I am indebted to a friend, Paul, for that bit of philosophy. He’s another modeller/collector/builder type and makes regular visits to hobby shops and toy stores wherever he goes. And he has the modeller’s eye that sees viable scale building materials in completely unlikely products. In my case it was a visit to a store…
-
The Bad Decision
Steel yourself – there will be some serious soul-searching in this post. You are going to have to confront your own failures. As for me, I’m going to hide mine by pretending that I never make mistakes. Anything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault – even if there is no-one within 500 yds of…
-
Repressed Desires And the Scale Modeller
I have come to this topic from writing another column dedicated to selling photographic goods. It occurred to me that if there is an id in the camera shop, there is also likely to be one in the hobby shop. I turned over the thought that Sigmund Freud might have been a model train buff,…
-
The Cost Of The Kit
I was standing in an Aisle Of Doom and calculating. The Aisle is located in my local hobby shop and is named because once I go there I am doomed to buy something. The shop has several Aisles – some dedicated to trains, some to airplanes. One is given over to paints and chemicals. All are…
-
The Aisle Of The Darned
Never mind the Isle Of The Damned or the Isle Of The Doomed – they are just comic book fiction. We have a real Aisle Of The Darned at my local hobby shop. From the start of it to the end, it is shelf after shelf of paint. No-one I know has ever successfully traversed…
-
Douglas Dakota – Part One – Ooh, It’s Started…
Okay, okay, I know. It’s just another 1:72 DC-3/C-47/Dakota. But it’s my plane and my workshop and my weblog column so I have a right to be excited. Particularly since I found a bargain. The kit is Italeri and has been out for a while. It sat on the hobby shop shelf next to other Italeri…
-
Whadaya Want In The Hobby Shop?
A good question – and one the owners of the places would desperately like to have an accurate answer to – there have been enough hobby shops that have foundered upon not being able to answer it. I often wonder if there was a way to have prevented this. Note: I realise that some shops…
-
Only Shop At the Hobby Stores That Support Your Politics
Are you a hobbyist? Are you passionate about politics? Do you want to harm anyone who disagrees with you? Well, take our simple questionnaire to your regular hobby shop and find out if they are innocent or guilty: Question One. What do you think about Trump? Question Two. What do you think about BREXIT? Question…
The Little World 