Category: Hobby Shops
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The Wrong Light
When I used to sell Epson inkjet printers in a camera store I was frequently asked about colour management. It’s a topic that makes or breaks photographers and more often causes tears than smiles. Fortunately at the time when some manufacturers introduced even more complex methods of operation, a few saw the need for a…
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Convair 440 – Part Two – How Much For That Busted Box?
When I was engaged in retail trade in cameras and photographic goods we would occasionally receive a shipment of equipment that had a tough passage. External cardboard cartons might have been roughly handled by the shippers and ended up dented or breached. We rarely had evidence of tampering or pilfering, but it was possible. Trucks…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
The Little World 