@Pawel Your comment about working with plastic that’s close to 50 years old got me thinking.
It’s kind of remarkable how normal that is in this hobby. How many of us have kits sitting around that were tooled 30, 40, even 50 or 60 years ago, and we can still pull them out, build them, and end up with a perfectly viable model?
I’m trying to think of another hobby where something developed in the ’60s or ’70s can still be used today pretty much exactly as intended. It’s kind of amazing when you think about it.
In this case it worked OK, and there are many more cases like this. But you have to be careful, sometimes - also happens many times - something goes wrong. The decals turn yellow or wrinkly from moisture. Sometimes vinyl parts - like tracks or tyres eat through styrene parts or go brittle and crack. And sometimes the styrene itself becomes incredibly brittle - to the point where any attempt to bend it, even a little leads to part breaking - sometimes even dropping some parts from like two or three inches on the hobby table leads to damage. So it doesn’t always work, but when it works, the feeling sure is special! A couple of decades is a lot of time! But I think if somebody is building for longevity, then wooden or metal parts would still be better - then again it all depends on correct storage…
Makes me want to say that for a model to last it’s not enough to build it right - you also have to raise next generations so that they appreciate the value of models already built… That’s the hard part!
Sushi with individual grains of rice and fish eggs? Ramen? Spaghetti? There is apparently an entire branch of this hobby that I didn’t even know existed.
And the crazy part is, they actually look really realistic. I’m sitting here looking at these thinking, “Who knew somebody was out there making plastic noodles?”
This thread just keeps getting stranger, and I mean that in the best possible way.
This diorama “Walking the Wonder Weapon” will take some explaining. My wife got the full set of Tamiya dinosaurs in 1/35 scale so I was wondering how I could incorporate 1/35 scale tanks with them. The box art to the ICM 1/35 Luchs tank being set near Chernobil gave me the idea. Create a SIFI diorama with nazi zombies running a Jurassic Park to raise dinosaur wonder weapons for world domination and throw Star Trek in to top it off!
One day she was ordering paper plants to do some dinosaur dioramas and I saw they offered marijuana plants, so I knew this needed to be part of this diorama idea. Even in the zombie world, only officers get the good stuff! Later I found some toy set of Star Trek figures to beam down and hopefully save humanity. Sorry they didn’t have any no name character in the set that would not beam back up that I could have the tank run over or something crazy.
One of the Tamiya dinosaurs sets had a figure that would make a good nazi zombie scientist. My wife did the dinosaurs in the diorama and I asked her why she did the baby T-Rex purple, she said because it was a scientific experiment and I had a nice set of really pretty purple paints to try out. She even sacrificed a cheap neckless for the chain harness. For a previous diorama I had the Tamiya farm animals set and a bunch of 3D printed cats to add to it.
We entered the diorama in the fair as a personal tie breaker between our other dioramas since this was a collaboration. This diorama won first place while my other diorama which was themed for the Woodland Fair in 1982 won 2nd place and her dinosaur diorama won 3rd place. The fun part about all this madness is that when we were viewing it on display at the fair, some kids came around and got really excited about the dinosaurs on display. Now I’m thinking we need to make a sequel diorama of the wonder weapons conquering the world with nazi zombies. I will need her full-size T-Rex eating a soldier or something like that! She wants to make some of the other dinosaurs using the Vallejo shifter colors which are really fun to use. Modern science is pointing toward dinosaurs being more bird like than reptile like when we were kids, so artistic license will definitely be exploited to the max!
Maybe I watched too much Monty Python’s Flying Circus in high school! 
