Mid-Life Modelling Crisis? ( or A Not So Brief History of Me, Vol. 1)

Writing up my '67 Camaro Z28 article recently re-awakened my thoughts about just how long I've been doing this modelling thing and how my attitudes towards it have evolved (or devolved) in that time. I guess what really brought on this latest wave of nostalgia was the realisation that it has been at least 25 years since I built a car model. 25 years! A quarter of a freakin' century!! It doesn't seem like all that long ago that I was 25 years old, never mind sticking bits of plastic together for that amount of time.

Now I don't really think I'm having a mid-life crisis here. Though I'm not sure at what age it's supposed to happen - if at all - I can still say I'm not yet 40 (barely), I don't have a sudden urge to buy a Porsche, get my hair highlighted or date a 19 year old bimbo with big tits.

But I do seem to be doing a lot of self-appraisal these days regarding this hobby which has all but obsessed me since I were a wee lad. Perhaps it was my recent move that really began this line of thought and the shocking realisation of just how many unbuilt kits I have accumulated over the years. I mean, I knew it was a lot, but until I had them all together in one gargantuan pile waiting to be packed and moved I didn't know just how bad it was. It's a lot. It's a roomful in fact. And I'm finding that a bit disturbing to be honest.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this or what my point is so I hope you won't be disappointed if you get to the end (if you haven't nodded off by then!) and find that there isn't a point. That's an entirely possible outcome I'm afraid so feel free to jet on over to eBay at this point to eye up your next must-have kit. I know I will. ;-)

I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kits

Like many modellers I'm sure, it was my dad who introduced me to the world of plastic models. His unbuilt collection consisted of one kit, a Lindberg Line Curtiss Goshawk, but it was that box of models he'd built in England and had shipped to the wilds of Canada that fascinated me. The majority was odd scale stuff, though I had no concept of scale at the time of course. A DC-3, a Ford Tri-Motor, a B-58 Hustler, a Curtiss Condor on floats, a larger Laird-Turner racer in bright blue plastic with moving control surfaces, and a Gee Bee with its black painted solid canopy, made back in the days when clear plastic wasn't an option. I still have that Gee Bee, the white paint having long ago turned into a dark cream colour and the red paint flaking off the cowling to reveal the silver plastic underneath. It is I believe, the old Hawk 1/4" scale kit but I didn't know that then nor did I care.

The first kit I remember him buying specifically for me to build when I was, I think, about 5 or 6 years old was a Frog Boston, moulded in an insipid pea green plastic. Alas it was badly warped and way beyond my capabilities so he bravely built it for me. The next one (why do I feel like I should be lying on a leather couch right about now?) was a much wiser choice. It was, if I remember correctly, a small and very simple russian airliner kit (and I a small and very simple child); the company which manufactured it having long been forgotten or more likely never noted by me in the first place. I built it with no help from the studio audience or any parental types and I built it very quickly and very poorly as you might expect a 5 or 6 year old to. I'm sure it's life span was extremely short thereafter. Painting and detailing was not a factor, realism was not in my vocabulary. It wasn't a patch on the airplanes dad was turning out, but I enjoyed every minute of it anyway, and it was the start of a life long fascination.

A year or two down the road and I have fond memories of my Uncle Lou who would always have a kit stashed away for me whenever we went to visit, and I went home with a Hawk Plated Lysander or that cool Monogram Tri-Pacer with the opening doors and detailed engine tucked under my arm. I found out in later years that Lou was not my uncle at all but just a family friend, a tradition I wish my parents had never perpetuated because it left me extremely confused about the whole aunt/uncle thing for a good long while. Turns out I had far fewer relatives than I had previously thought.

By this time I had discovered the wonderful world of model paints, silver and black specifically because that was pretty much all you needed for the wheels, engines and propellors, the rest being left in whatever garish plastic came out of the box. And that was part of the excitement too, opening that box up to see what colour plastic was in there. Wonderfully lurid colours like bright orange, red, yellow, blue, that hideous turquoise that Hawk seemed to favour, or those fantastic Matchbox kits - two lurid colours in one box! If aircraft kits had been moulded in that same boring nondescript gray we get these days I wonder if it would have dampened my enthusiasm somewhat? Quite possibly.

Of course, aircraft weren't the only things I built though they were always my first love. Cars, tanks, the occasional ship, and those great horror kits from Aurora. Man, they were a blast and they had glow in the dark bits too - it just didn't get any cooler than that!! And by now I had added different colours of paint to my repertoire and even started to experiment with camouflage, my initial attempt being a marvelous gloss brown and orange(!) small scale B-52. Call it a personal renaissance if you will, but that was a bit of a revelation to me. Like that scene in 2001 (sans imposing black obelisk) where our ancestors discovered they could bash each others' skulls in, suddenly I could branch out from the plastic colour dictated by the model company and finish them in a more realistic fashion. Realistic in a gloss orange and brown kind of way at least. I actually started paying attention to the painting & marking instructions and tried to finish the kit the way it was "supposed" to be, within the limits of my meagre paint collection and talent, or lack thereof. No more of this picking and choosing the best looking decals (or better yet, just sticking them all on!), from now on I was going to follow the instructions. Was that the turning point? Was that where they stopped being toys and I started being "a modeller"?? Probably not, but it's as good a place as any to place the blame.

Unleash The Monster

From this point on the evolution is easy to see. When I was twelve dad bought me my first airbrush, a single-action Badger 200 which I still have and use. No more brush marks in my paint jobs thank-you-very-much. In my teenage years I started getting serious about this modelling thing. I began to buy the magazines, the specialist tools, decals, glues & paints. I researched my subjects to try and find that different paint scheme or a photo of the cockpit so I could put something more realistic than Mr. Blobby the pilot in there. I began to realise how short lived models were on the hobby shop shelves - that Aurora Gotha that I really wanted last month but couldn't afford was now gone and before I could say "Damn, I really wanted that Aurora Gotha", the company was gone too. And that's when the hoarding mentality crept in. Buy it now if you want it then it'll always be there when you want to build it. Problem is, I wanted them all and I wasn't putting them together in 20 minutes anymore. The monster was born....

A few kits stashed in the closet in my late teens turned into quite a few kits stashed in a couple of closets by the time I started college. When I joined IPMS Canada in 1988 the kit stash was now taking up more room in my apartment than the major appliances and I discovered that not only was I not alone in my hoarding habit, my collection actually paled in comparison to some of the other club members'! Woo-hoo!! Justification to buy more! And what's more, they had swap meets and shows where I could find all those long lost kits from my childhood that I desperately had to have. My spending was legendary, even in hell!!

By the time the wife and I decided to move to England in 1997 I had over 600 kits stashed away and they were beginning to feel like an Albatross around my neck. I sold a good many before we left but there were still enough that I just couldn't part with to fill three large trunks (and that's with all boxes broken down and kits put into plastic bags), plus of course the accompanying tools, books, magazines, decals and other assorted paraphernalia. Oh and the two boxes of kits that I had actually built.

And when the wife decided she had had enough of marriage 4 years later one of the parting comments has stuck with me ever since: "When I look around at all these models I just see a down payment on a house". How could I argue with that? She was, and is, absolutely right.

Where does it all end?

So here I am, with an entire room dedicated to building models and the loft above me nicely insulated by a thick layer of unbuilt kits plus every available closet overflowing with them. A room, loft and closets in a house I don't own I might add. I stopped trying to count them so I have no idea how many kits there are. And still I buy more! Ebay is an Aladdin's cave of plastic treasure. Limited run kits (insidious marketing tool that one!) must be bought before they disappear forever. New releases of subjects I never thought I'd see and absolutely must have. A particularly attractive set of decals catches my eye, and then of course I have to buy the kit that goes with them. A state-of-the-art offering to replace that ancient Frog or Airfix kit that will now never get built (a fate which probably awaits the replacement kit as well). Model shows where the buying fever runs high and kits are snapped up because the price was right or the one on display looked good. And then of course I have to buy the resin, photo etch, decals and research material to go with them.

Will there come a point I wonder, when I can say "The collection is complete, now I can concentrate on building"? I somehow doubt it, and I can't help thinking that a good many of the kits in my hoard came from estate sales; vast personal hobby shops owned by guys just like me, full of grand plans for each and every model. Alas, science failed to find the secret of immortality that they needed to realise those grand plans.

Have I missed the point of the whole thing? Maybe it's just having them that's important and it really doesn't matter whether I build them or not. And even if I could build them all, where would I put them? Kit boxes are a lot more storage friendly than fragile built-up models.

Perhaps I need a 12 step group, or I need to start one. "Hi my name is Andy and I'm a kitaholic". "HI ANDY!" "It's been three hours since my last model purchase and I don't know if I can hold out any longer. My wife left me, my cat was crushed by a stack of Hasegawa Zeros and I've sold both my kidneys to pay for that Academy F-18. Help me... Oh, and does anyone know when the new Revell Popemobile kit will be released? I really must have one...." Well, I was right. There wasn't a point to this. Sorry about that. But I feel much better if that's any use to you. Maybe I'll go get my hair highlighted.... :-)

No model airplanes, cats, kidneys or 12 step groups were harmed in the making of this article.