I just made the most incredible score on eBay. 1/32 F-104G Revell kit for $6.99 and $5.00 to ship… Still factory sealed… I ordered the cool Mount Olympus Hellenic AF decals for it. It’s going to be great when I get to it. I love eBay. I even made a major non-modeling score this month… $1 for a high end new never used Cisco Systems managed Ethernet switch. lol We ought to start up some kind of contest for the best score each month. It would be a great way to pass along info on new sources to folks.
Rich
Hows this for the score of the month??.....A friend of mine from work decided to retire and had to lighten his load...moving to Florida. I bought his 1997 Nissan Pathfinder for $500.00!! It had $800 worth of tires on it alone. He just had the transmission replaced(30k miles ago) and had the exhaust system replaced from manifold to tailpipe! Its the 4WD, 6 cylinder model (1st foreign car Ive ever owned), has a sunroof and Bose stereo system. He was fixing it up for his wife but she was too scared to drive in New Jersey...I sometimes know that feeling myself..lol. The only problem it had was a leaking tube going to the secondary trans cooler. Since its for towing purposes and Im not going to tow anything, I bypassed it with a 20 cent piece of tubing. Got it just in time too...my F-150 just started acting up...I think shes jealous…lol.
Im sorry....you had quite a score yourself...model - wise...and that kit is usually pretty expensive. Thats a great find! With all the talk of 1/32 kits I`m thinking about picking one up. I attempted the Revell Wildcat kit about 10yrs ago…when I just started getting back into the hobby…and made a mess of it.
I have a bunch of 1/32 kits. My eyes and hands don’t work 100% anymore so the larger the parts, the happier I am. I always wanted that F104… I nearly keeled over when I realized my lowball bid won. I have a few other Revell/Monogram kits in 1/32, a couple of P47s, the obliogatory F4 Corsair, Spitfire, Hurricane, ME109, FW190 etc. With a little work they look as good as any of the mega pricey imports. This one is going to be a long term project since I want it as perfect as possible.
Rich
I used to buy up collections and sell them on Ebay. I’d often get some kits for my stash for free from the larger collections.
I started all my auctions at $0.99. The rare kits would usually have 20-30 watches on them in less than 24 hours. Sometimes I parted with a valuable kit for much less than it was worth, but I made up for it in the kits that got into bidding wars.
The most notable was a 1/1200 scale Nimitz class carrier from some cheap Asian brand (I don’t even recall the brand now). The kit was pretty crude. I think list price was about $10. I sold some others from the same collection for $4-$6, then one day two people started a bidding war on one of them and it finally sold for $120! The winner paid for it too. I never heard from him again, so I don’t know what he thought when he got it.
I’ve been on the winning side of the some good bargains too. I recall someone once selling two lots of Accurate Miniature SBDs. I had to be away when the auctions closed, so I bid what I could afford for both hoping to win one on a lark (I bid less than 1/2 what they were worth, even by Ebay prices). When I got home, I learned I had won both. I think the total was something like $40 for 6 SBDs. One of the lots was a special edition 2 in one box with partial parts to make two more SBDs (it had parts to make 2x -4s by combining parts from a -5 and a -3) . AM went out of business shortly after than and I picked up the generic SBD parts (wings, engines, etc.) to complete the last two kits in that box. I already had 1 AM SBD when I won those, so now I have 9. Total investment was about $70.
Bill