Well put Woody, sometimes being able to help someone out is worth all the hassle of storing these things.
The missus decided to have a yard sale last summer, and this older gent came to the house with his wife, and was wearing a LIberty ship cap. I asked all the usual questions, and of course he says he served on them, but was having trouble finding an affordable model of his ship. At that point, I got up, went into the garage, and came back with a Pit-Road 1/700 scale LIberty ship which I handed to him and thanked him.
He got all teary-eyed, but a few days later, he came back with model completed. Not spectacular, but to him, it was the best thing in the world.
That’s a part of this hobby that people often overlook.
As the quote in my profile sez: “It’s only plastic, so build it!”. I too have many many unbuilt models just waiting for the mood to strike me. Sometimes I think I oughta stick a sign in front of the house (Bob’s hobby shop) and unload some of the excess !!
one thing i have never had is the money to buy the extra kits on a regular basis. when i got extra money that i could spend on kits i would buy 8 or 9 at a time. but this happens so rarely that these kits are usually built long before i get the money to do it again. the only way i can invest in this consistantly is to be knowledgable enough to be able to get my children hooked with my words. as children are by nature curious with a short attention span, if you can hook them early you have them for life. that is the best investment i can make.
Walks into room, sits and grabs a cup of coffee - listens for a while, then decides to stand up and speak
Hi, my name is wibhi2 - any three to four lettered word for short. I need to be in UKA.
I have close to 200 unbuilt kits and rising. My intent is to build them all as a testiment to historical technical achievements and stories I have heard from various people. But alas, RL has a tendency (plus my own impulsive nature) to keep me from concentrating on all those kits. I don’t buy kits to sell or hoard and I have no duplicates (well except for a couple of f4’s and ah1g’s), but I buy kits to build eventhough I know it will be several years before I can attempt to build them. I love opening a box and staring at the parts imagining what could be.
I used to collect as well, but eventually realized that this was a bad thing. I only collected stuff I was interested in. Only problem being: I was interested in a whole lotta stuff! [:p]
I gave up collecting and decided to grab stuff that I intended to build. I went back and forth, to varying degrees, between stuff to build and stuff ‘just to have’, but I now buy things which I intend to build and only collect Curtiss aircraft.
However, when my Dad died I was the instant owner of a huge collection. So much for giving up collecting… [V]
Besides the Curtiss stuff I collect and the kits which I’d like to build, I also buy to resell. There’s alotta folks who think that the buying/trading/selling scene is a waste of time and perhaps, for them, it would be. For me it’s second nature, and I’ve done very well so far…
I buy to build or to simply play around with a Kit.
Like everybody else I got more kits than is heathy for me, hence the “For Sale” section on my Web-site where I off-load unlikely kits to be build and similar.
That is a great story Jeff! You sound like about 99.999% of the collectors that I have had the pleasure of knowing. Maybe the fortune has been mine, but I have never met a bad apple in the collector community. At one time I traded quite a bit with collectors from Czech. ,Poland ,England , and Italy to name afew. I find the templet of the collector nearly universal. A great bunch of guys! [:D]