First completed model was a Testors 1/48 F/A-18B, which I still have. Have come a long way since that kit.
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I wish I had pictures of my first models. I started back in '67. No one back then thought about taking pictures of models.
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It was definitely one of the old Aurora monster kits, probably Godzilla.
When I got back into modeling 25 years ago, I built it again, but this time with a resin replacement head (could never stand the original head).
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That would be epic! You need to do that for sure.
Wow! I have built that but forgot all about it until just now because it has been about 50 years since then.
I don’t have a daguerreotype of my first model ever because that was more than a half century ago. But I recently started again and this was my first build since the 1960s. It’s an ICM 1:24 Renault taxi.
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Not my first ever because we didn’t have a camera back then and I was never interested enough as a kid to take a picture of my model, but, here is the earliest picture I have (2020) which was my unofficial comeback to the hobby since being a kid. Not bad for tube glue, a testors 5 or ten piece paint set and a can of spray paint, oh and those horrible testors paint brushes, and the kitchen table.
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The Lindberg LCT, or what is left of it. Don’t remember the scale, could look it up. Lost the tank and other parts, as you can see.
Built in Lake George, NY, at my grandparents’ house. Bought at the downtown drug store, painted with nail enamels because they didn’t have paints. I’d thought I’d lost it but my parents had most of it, so I cleaned it up and reglued what was left as a pleasant reminder.
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My first model ever was built 40+ years ago and is in the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Here’s a picture of the first model I built after coming back to the hobby in 2022. It was a fun build. I even tried to show some exhaust and gun powder stains.
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My first kit was the early 70’s Monogram B-58 Hustler, the one with the button on top just aft of the cockpit that would eject the big fuel/weapon pod slung underneath. My dad and I must’ve applied some glue where it didn’t belong though, because that damn thing would never eject. I don’t have a photo of it, or of most of my early models. But I did manage to save some of my first scratch-built models.
I was in second grade when the original Star Wars was released. Classmates would bring Star Wars toys to class for ‘show and tell’, and I was hooked - but those toys were too expensive. My siblings and I were lucky to get some action figures. So if I wanted a Millennium Falcon then I was going to have to make one.
Two pie tins, some cardboard, white acrylic paint, lots of masking tape, and a marker. Pretty sure I also made some Colonial Vipers and Cylon Raiders using this same technique. My sister called them my ‘tape machines’.
By the time The Empire Strikes Back came out, I had figured out how to use white cardboard (from dry instant milk boxes), paper strips, and white glue to assemble a model without the masking tape. I think the only references I had for my second Falcon were photos from this book.
I also built an X-wing, a Star Destroyer, and when Jedi came out, a B-wing, all out of cardboard, but I didn’t save any of them. I was well into my college years before I discovered that you can buy sheets of styrene. 
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Impressive work for a 2nd grader!
My teenage model building ended when I got interested in photography. Sadly, I never even thought to photograph the models I had made (at least a dozen various aircraft, ships, boats, cars, and trucks), but I do have this photo of me in my bedroom with a few models in the background and a stamp albums on my desk. The photo was probably taken circa 1959.
The print on the wall? It’s from a 1947 calendar by the aviation artist Charles Hubbell that my father brought home from work in 1947. That set disappeared decades ago, but recently I bought a complete set and ordered a custom frame that lets me change prints whenever I wish.
I have no idea what my first model was. In addition to the aircraft in the photo, I made a Revell model of the hospital ship U.S.S. Haven (about a decade later, I would become a patient on Haven’s sister ship, U.S.S. Repose, after I was wounded in Vietnam. The first or perhaps the second model I built as a “serious” adult built was of Repose, kit bashed from three Haven kits; it was a very badly designed kit with tons of flash and sink marks. The store owner I bought it from told me I shouldn’t bother with it, but I did, and I’m glad I did:
I took the photo in the background of the coast of South Vietnam, from the deck of U.S.S. Paul Revere, the evening before my Marine Corps battalion went ashore in Operation Double Eagle.
Other models I remember:
• The guided-missile cruiser Indianapolis, if I recall correctly
• A Ford “concept car”
• A Chris Craft yacht
• A sailboat (don’t remember what kind, just the it had a plastic mainsail and jib)
• H.M.S. Bounty
• U.S.S. Nautilus
• A Grumman Hellcat
Bob
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