Lately, I’ve been reflecting upon the kits I’ve built. While thinking about what I enjoyed building as a kid and what I’m enjoying now, I wondered how much of my choice has been personal interest and how much was dictated by the kits available. As a kid, many were gifts, too.
I’ve been using Scalemates‘ stash manager to track which kits I built over the years, and managed to find pretty much everything, although it doesn’t show the many duplicates I built. If you’re really bored, you can (probably) see my list here.
It was interesting to see the release dates of many of those old kits. I started building in the early 90’s, through to about 2003-4, then picked up again in 2009. Surprising then, that so many of those kits were apparently tooled during the 90’s. In some cases, I’m sure I even built them during the year the kit was released. Not bad for just picking up what Manor had in stock. It’s also interesting just how many of these kits I recognised purely from the box art.
These days I like to get newly released kits, especially as I’m increasingly enjoying building in 1/32. There is a wonderful wealth of them these days, and across genres it often seems that barely a month goes by without a new kit being released.
If I were the sort to take cheap shots, I’d make a joke about AMK’s F-14 here, but fortunately I’m not.
I don’t really have a point here, but conducting that exercise has made me more aware of just how fortunate we are to be building when the choice of kits is exploding like this.
