In all honesty, baseball card collecting as an investment isn’t strong as it used to be any more. The hobby is too saturated with so many baseball card companies pushing so many variation of baseball card brands (ie: Topps, Topps Stadium Club, Fleer, Fleer Ultra, well you get the idea). That hobby has gotten so bad it’s no fun anymore. Greed from these baseball card companies is what caused it to be no fun. Only the “chase cards” are worth anything - never mind a regular card or rookie card. I should know for I used to collect baseball cards years ago until I got out of it back in the mid-90s.
So just out of curiosity how many kits does it take to make your own hobby store? I might have to open a brick and mortar!
Falconmod,
Here is the store front:
And here is the back stock:
The rack with my armor kits was last counted at 125. I will guess about 400 kits in total.
This stash will not grow very much more.
.
I have a large collection, but I do not collect model kits. They have built up over the years and sometimes I am forced to sell off many kits due to limited space. I always buy kits (as others) with the intention to build them, but time is limited and many kits end up in the "kit crypt’.
there r many times to buy dup.kits .a few good examples are
the mpc dukes o hazzard police car
the amt 1970 ford police
and the 1968 johan fury police i got 4 each and each will be make into a diff city car with diff decal/paint
I have a case of the Revell Police cars, plus several Impala SS models. All can be built with different departments in mind. Same same with the above listed kits. Heck I could model a car from every district in my old department and need another case of Chevys.
The Pz III was used in North Africa in almost every variant. I have a kit of each.
You can’t ever have too many Shermans.
[:D]
I understand the variant thing, and I too love PzIII’s, I’m only referring to the exact same kit. I’ve seen pictures of some guys stashes with 6 of one kit and say 4 of another. What are the odds he’ll finish them all? I’d be bored building even 5 Pz IV variants, when there are so many other Russian, American, British and so on subjects out there. My modest 30ish stash may outlive me due to a lack of time to build.
I knew a guy who wargamed at 1/35. He bought every single Tamiya M4A3E8 he could get his hands on; the 1970’s one!. He could slap the things together 12 at a time in an evening.
(shutters)
I can definitely understand that because the kit has sentimental value. I get that.
What I don’t get is buying a kit because you like the box art and store it away because you hope it’ll become valuable at some point. To each their own I guess, but I am of the mind that you collect baseball cards, you read comic books, you spend coins, you mail stamps, and you build models.
“Kit crypt”… I like the sound of that. A new way of calling it a stash. LOL!!
The prices people ask for stuff is just crazy. You can often find a listing of a given model for $90 just above another listing of the identical model for $15 or even $3.95. I just did a quick search of C1500 Silverado “sold” listings on EBay and saw a couple that sold for $20. They seem to generally sell for $30 plus or minus a few bucks.
The secret to getting a good deal is patience. I’m presently in the marked for a 67 Corvette Coupe. Generally they are listed for maybe $25-$35 but I know from looking at the sold history that they routinely go for less than $15.
If you’ve never noticed it, completed listings is a check box on the left side of the page.
Good luck!
TomZ
Same on Amazon for books. View all other listings; other sellers have stuff at a fraction of the cost.
I don’t sell stuff online, but I’ve had an assumption based on observation that there are programs/ apps/ processes where a wide scan of online sales and even online postings can be accessed to get a picture of what people are selling thuings for. Certainly the case where real estate and cars are involved.
Wow TJ…that is one heck of a collection
My stash level typically hangs around 20 kits. I do build 10-12 kits a year. I cannot buy a kit just to keep it as an investment. I have purchased and built OOP and rare kits. For me it’s the subject not the value of a kit I look for. I can typically find rare kits of subjects in the scale I want on Ebay for a decent price. There are those that sell one in mint condition and wants big bucks for the kit. But you can find the same kit with damaged or missing box that is not valuable to a collector but at a decent price for a builder. It does take time to locate a rare kit for a decent price but it can be found.
Yeah, and it’s also called “GREED”. [:(] And one of the reasons why I wait with evil glee for the reissues which take the bottom right out of that market.
I remember looking for the Tamiya M60A2 “Starship” last year. I wanted one to build, and the only one available was listed for like, $100.00. Now, the new issue by Dragon was announced at the time, but not a definite date on it, but I messaged the guy and said basically “There’s a reissue coming, and I am willing to give you a fair price for your older model here; how about $50.00?” The guy turned me down. I don’t know if he ever got that money for the kit–I doubt it–but it was satisfying to know that the market for that kit had the bottom drop out of it two months later.
I’m currently waiting for someone to re-pop the AMC Javelin so that all the eBay gougers will feel the pinch. [6]
[dto:]
I never expect to come out ahead, when it comes to selling a kit…and never have. I’ve gotten so many kits, well below retail, that I don’t feel bad about “losing” money on a kit that I paid retail price for. I get a bit of the good “pay it forward” feeling, when I give someone else a good deal…even if it is technically a loss. Likewise…I don’t feel any loss when I build a kit that is going for an outragous price. I picked up a 1/48 Monogram A-6 from Hobby Lobby for $5.99…built it…I bet it wasn’t 2-3 months later, that same kit was going for near 100 bucks on E-bay…then, shortly there after, Kinetic came out with theirs and there was also a re-issue of the Mono kit not much later than that!
My problem is that I’m an impulse buyer. I love good deals and buy many cool subjects, but ignore my wants. I recently grabbed an Italeri Ford Maultier w/20mm flak for just $13. I couldn’t resist. I do believe that it will get built and noot end up being resold like many that I bought.
The only reason I have such a large “collection” is the fact that about 30 years ago, I bought about 750 models from the widow of a modeler (and he built a lot of kits, his local airport had about 150 1/72 models on display that his wife had donated). I kept about 400 of them, parted out 50 or so of them and sold the rest. And I still buy new ones with the intention of building (My latest is the Revell 1/72 C-54 and I have every intention of buying another one to convert into an air tanker).
And the real lie in this whole thing is that I will be 72 this year and there is no way in Hades I will complete all of the before I shuffle off. But I’m still having fun!
I buy 2-3 kits every 2 weeks, on payday. I just started building again a couple months ago so I’m not very good. Yet. When buying, I always buy two of each kit just in case I break a piece (happened 3 times), lose a piece to the carpet when cutting off the sprue and it went airborne (several times), or other screw-ups on my part (horrific paint jobs, smudges, etc. several times). This way I have backup parts.