Fundamentally, I don’t understand kit collecting for the sake of simply owning a box of plastic parts…
28th April 2025
What a glorious day it’s been! Wall to wall sunshine, two walks along the canal, lunch with friends and time at the bench: I could get used to this!
But of course being the start of the working week, all good things come to an end, so focus returns to the day job and then next month, an involved commission. This will take me away from then world of military vehicles and aircraft, and into the realm of scratchbuilt structures as has been the case with other buildings over the last few years.
My upcoming commission will be a complete change of pace but one that I am very much looking forward to. This is partly because it will involve 3D design, learning Fusion 360 as part of an active project, and then working with Drewe on the printing of the parts. None of this is likely to be easy, but I hope will lay the foundations for more involved work later in the year, a build project morphing into an extended period of learning.
Away from that project, today, I was taken by a memory that cropped up on my personal Book Of Faces. Published over 10 years ago, the post in question discussed older kits, kit collecting and whether some kits are simply too important, nay, too valuable to build. My take then as now, is that kits are utterly worthless unless they are built. I don’t care how old how rare or how sort-after a kit is, unless it is used for the purpose it was created, to result in a miniature you can look at, that kit has zero value to me.
Fundamentally, I don’t understand kit collecting for the sake of simply owning a box of plastic parts. It has never made any sense to me because every kit that I have ever owned I have built, or planned to build. Over the years I have owned a huge huge number of plastic kits (indeed, I still do) most of them newly released but latterly, a lot that are rare, ancient, and in some cases, valuable. Not once have I ever thought for a second that a kit was too rare to build. All of them have been bought to open, examine and build. That’s it.
Maybe I’m an outlier in all of this and there is pleasure in collecting for the sake of it. After all, I have no right to tell anyone how to enjoy their hobby and nor would I try. If you want to buy old kits and then squirrel them away that’s your prerogative, I just can’t see the pleasure in it.
As this is being written I’m in the planning stages for a cluster of F-18 Hornets, one of which will be a prototype, built from a Monogram F-18 test shot. That’s right, I have one of the very first kits that Monogram fired out of the mould – it’s even signed by the designer with ‘Please return to…’ – so an extremely rare beast indeed. That won’t stop me using it though, because I want to build that jet and that’s the only way I can do it! Sacrilegious it might be, but what choice do I have?
So those rare kits in the loft will occasionally come to the top of the pile and I’ll enjoy them just as much as I will the newer offerings. Ultimately, everything that I own will go to others at some point, so I’m damned sure I’m going to enjoy as many of them as I can, while I can. Maybe there’s a lesson in that for all of us along the way.
See you tomorrow.
SPENCER POLLARD'S KIT BOX 
Total agreement on this, Spence. I have never figured out kit collecting, other than one guy who likes plastic models and couldn’t build one successfully if you held a gun to his head (name withheld) – he could start his own hobby shop! I am in fact about to start a “rare kit” – the Monogram F-100 with Thunderbirds markings. I also have the only 1/32 B-17E kit in the world – an H-K test shot sent to me five years ago that they decided not to proceed with. When I get moved to Oregon next year, that goes to top of the pile. Fortunately, I too have a huge stash, which should get me through however long we have to put up with the crazy tariffs.
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I agree kits are for building, it’s just that some of us (many I suspect lol) plan to build so many more than reality will allow!
Steve
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I couldn’t fail to disagree with you less. 😁Kits are made to be built, however well, (or in my case badly), that may be and as long as someone has had the pleasure of slapping glue and paint at it, it’s fulfilled it’s purpose. My current stash will, at my current rate of building will outlast me, but hopefully my youngest daughter will take at least some of them; (she n her partner do warhammer and ww2 wargamming).
Just my tuppeny’urth.
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I don’t collect kits. I have just collected a fair few kits!!!! – each one is a future project. Problem is the newest kit I buy goes to the top of the next project list!!!
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I too feel kits should be built, though I can see the attraction of collecting, as I have known collectors – sometimes a collection is valuable just in its existence. I knew one fellow who collected Mauser rifles, all the post-WWI models the Kar 98K. He had one example of such rifles from every manufacturer, for every year of production, with all the variations. That collection, as a history of Mauser production, was valuable because it was complete. And I can see how a collection of one of every model kit ever produced in plastic would have a similar value is showing the history of injection-molded plastic kits. But then, how to explain the groaning shelves in my attic, laden with the hundreds of kits that I had every intention of building – all the variations, dioramas, all the schemes and markings – a sea of kits, many now OOP and thus valuable, washing up on the unforgiving shores of my age and building pace….. And so, a new birth of freedom – having so many kits that I can never build gives me the chance to let go of the ones that I know I’ll never touch, and keep only those that fit into the new schedule, one pared down from the lofty heights of unlimited imagination and decades of time to build. Those kits that make this “final cut” will be even more dear – a surfeit of choices, but still within the realm of possibility. And so, a new future of perhaps better planned research and building, a chance to march to my own drummer – through the mud and the blood to the green fields beyond…..
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I do have this same kit. Top antenna is broken it will be a easy fix. I built some of there other issues. There is a tooling problem mainly the front the rear is a bit of a problem. the elevators are nice but easy broken. I beefed up mine. This kit decals go on not too bad for a 45 yr old kit.
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I too agree. I purchase kits that I plan to build. Sometimes I’ll see a kit I want oneBay, but it’s part of a bundle, if it’s a fair price I buy it, if the other kits look good in hand, I keep them, if not, back on eBay for someone else to build.
I never understood collecting anything just for the sake of collecting.
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Ah, an opportunity to confess my affliction: collecting old kits. First of all, I admit I am a hoarder, and it is definitely in my gene pool. Second, I admit an affinity for staying connected with the past; hence, a tendency to surround myself with objects that remind me of that past. I have been building plastic models since 1953 (my first model: Revell’s USS Missouri, fondly built by my dad and me on my seventh birthday). I think I built just about every Revell, Monogram, and Aurora kit that came out in the fifties (most of them retailed for under $1, and you could find them at hardware stores, camera shops, variety stores, etc.).
When I reached my sixties, I got the yearn to reconnect with these old kits, so I started buying them off of Ebay. Before I knew it, I had amassed some 340 vintage Revell, Aurora, Monogram, etc. kits. I am still an active modeler, and have 2 or 3 kits in work at any given time. When the nostalgic desire gets strong enough, I will build one of the older kits (my most recent ones: Revell’s B-24 and Renwal’s Nike Launcher). I will raid my vintage kit collection on occasion, but companies like Atlantis makes it possible to build some of these kits without dipping into the vintage collection. I am amazed at just how good some of these kits look when constructed using more modern modeling techniques (e.g., airbrushes and filler putties) than were available to me as a kid.
Of course, I also have a stash of “modern” kits, even after selling over 1000 kits from my stash at the loving “urging” of my wife. The problem with my historical collection is that when I am ready to get rid of them, no one will want them. But that seems to be true of just about anything old these days!
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I have no problem with collectors. Life is short and often filled with pain, so if you get pleasure from any innocent activity I encourage that.
As a former manufacturer of plastic conversion sets I welcome collectors for other reasons. If you get pleasure from simply owning one of my products, might I suggest you’ll get more pleasure owning ten?
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Well I have a big stash, but every kit I buy is mean to be built. I have no interest in buying kits just to buy them, but some do, and that’s fine. Nobody gets out alive, so one day all of our stashes will be on the market again. 🙂
I find my more pressing problem is keeping up with all the superb 1/72 kits that keep coming out faster than I can build them. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to my flying retirement, so that I’ll have more bench time! 🙂
Joe Youngerman
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I have to agree. What is the point of collecting them without the intention to build. Kits were made to be built. I have a huge stash including a Monogram 1/72 B1-B that I bought in 1983 which I plan on building one of these days. My problem is I probably won’t be able to complete them all but the intention is there.
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I tend to agree, even though I have a good-sized stash. Every kit on the shelf was purchased with an end goal in mind. However as the years rattle by and the eyesight and coordination continue to slide, I’ve found that a hefty thinning out was necessary. I still intend to build what’s left, but with the proviso that future culling might be necessary.
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