What do you do to "cleanse your palette" ?

After a particularly involved build, you know the kind, photoetched brass, metal tracks, resin upgrade parts, what do you do to help you regain your sanity? I perfer to build older kits strait out of the box. The only improvements i make would be with what was aviable at the time it was manafactured. This would include brass wire and plastistruct sheets. It’s really a lot of fun to just build something that takes two or three nights to finish instead of weeks or months. Sometimes in the middle of a particularly hard build i’ll put it up and come back to it later. I always include a sheet telling me where i left off and what direction i was heading. But for fun any of the old Tamiya kits or old Monogram 1/32 scale stuff. So what do you do to relax?

I build garage sale and swap meet kits for this purpose. You can often get a decent older kit for two or three dollars this way.

I’ll build something very different, usualy a car… I find it really hard to start a new AFV or aircraft without changing something to the kit… I’m a sad person!

I’m not really an armor guy, mostly 1/48 aircraft but I have this same problem. My local hobby shop has a bin full of used models and I can pick-up a 1/72 tank or aircraft for a few bucks. If I am involved in a particullarly detailed build or have just finished one I will put together one of these inexpensive kits. I usually tell myself that whatever point I am at in 4 or 5 hours I will quit building, no matter what stage of construction I am in. It is really refreshing to build with a new motivation, speed instead of perfection. It forces me to take shortcuts and leave out steps I normally would not; but if I don’t give myself a time limit I revert to my old self and I end up saying, “I’ll just scratch-build seatbelts and that will be it” or, “some brass wire and styrene strip could spruce up that plain cockpit”

THE DOWNSIDE: I am very often pleased and at the same time saddened at how well models made in this fasion turn out. I just built a 1/72 A6M Zero in three hours. All of it straight out of the box. No airbrush, one coat of paint, no masking, minimal decals. And when I was done many friends and family and I thought it was one of my nicest looking models. Making me happy they appreciate my work but sad that, what was to me, a model built more as an aide to sanity than a serious attempt at a show winner.

I usually build something completly different. Just finished the 1:350 Uss Missouri (didn’t go simple did we). But usually when I start to burn out, I’ll go simple like a car kit. I don’t get crazy with those like the “pros” do 15 coats of paint and wire up the engines etc