Hi All

Just a quick question.....I used to make models when I was younger and recently gotten back into it, I find its still a good laugh like it used to be, I was just wandering does anyone know why its so fun/addictive/obsessive and why we build what we do i.e. planes, tanks or even random sci-fi characters......just a thought.......

I find it to be relaxing, and a way to keep my aging senile mind, and shaking hands active.
I actually enjoy looking for hours on hands and knees searching for a part the size of a pin head, and feel like Rocky when I find it.

Just make sure you're clear of the desk when you do th e Rocky jump!

Actually I ask the same question to myself everytime I want to smash a broken landing gear, or throw the finished bird when the anthenna wire snaps for the 3452nd time, or chop the workbench or whatever I am working distant enough from to maintain the distance between me and working surface to drop and lose the front armor of a canopy or namely little pitz of silly things, or want to kick the unfortunate loved one who accidently breaks a silly part of anything silly, or scratchbuilt the dummy purt that lost to causes above with sweating my bungalow off for the 4th time and find the original part and so on. Well the answer? Don't have any idea. We just were thinking about the answer with another plastichead a few days ago. I personaly find it challanging, when thinking I never menage to finish anything cleanly, and I don't mean weathering. I myself love the buying part which gives me a great thrill and fantasies about what possibilities can be done. And the part when I do the final touches and put the model in front of me and say "hell yeah!". Ok generally I say "Blimey you did it again, you unlearning fleek!!!, How can you do the same mistakes over and over again!!!". I think I hate the activity in between. Nevertheless there is one think I know. I ADORE MODELS!!!!

With prices going where they are, we really must enjoy this hobby.

So why do I enjoy? Each kit is so different, it never gets boring. And I challenge myself to do each one better than the last. Retirement allows me to spend the time that I need on these kits. Most of all, I enjoy the challenge of creating something.

I build models because I like building stuff dont have the space to build 1:1 aeroplanes on the kitchen table.
But yeah I like the challenges, the detail work, researching the histories. I'm trying not to succumb to the dark side
and enjoy the buying I could quite easily fill the house with a stash given half the chance.
As an adoptive scot I hate parting with money anyway.

All that and it makes you feel like a giant.

When I started building scale model aircraft, ages ago, it was because I liked making things and decorating them by painting them. Isn't this the ground level of our craft?

When I was 9 or 10 yeras old, I was given a plastic model kit, and a little later I won one in a piggy back race at my father's office picnic. It was a model of a U-Boat, and my father was in the Canadian navy in WW2 and served on a Corvette. Perhaps this was when I made a historical connection, and began to think in terms of context.

When I bought my first model kit it was a WW1 biplne because it was 69 cents, and cast in the right coulour, so I didn't have to paint it - it turned out pretty good, so then I was hooked.

I continued scale modelling for about five years and then stopped.

Now almost 40 years later, I still like to paint and decorate things, so I stared again. This time biplanes almost exclusively. I'm finishing off a 1/28 scale SPAD XIII, but I prefer 1/48 scale. I have an interst in bushplanes - though very few kits are available.

One of my favourite web sites is "Wings of Peace" which specializes in civil aviation from pre-Wtight brothers up to the late 1930's. There are some super modellers who do a lot of scratch building because there are absolutely no kits available of most civil aircraft of the early days of aviation.

I 'd love to get hold of a model of a Beech Staggerwing or a Dehavilland Dragon Rapide, or a Lockheed Vega, or a Dehavilland Fox Moth, or any of the many 1920' s and 30's aircraft.

In the end, for me, building model kits fulfills my creative urges, engages the mind vis-a-vis historcal research, and fires up the imagination.

Cheers,

well, given the aforementioned frustration levels associated with the hobby, it may seem ironic that I do it to relax.

but really, that is mostly why - I hit a zone where I am just concentrating on building the model and not any of my other worries in life, and I need that time.

Also, it is likely that i am somewhat obsessive/compulsive...

-v-

If we knew the answers to questions like this, we wouldn't be sitting here ...

I do this hobby for a number of reasons , It's very relaxing for me , when I sit down in front of the work bench I'm taking away to a different world all my troubles and worries float away .
New challenges with the skills that I'm learning as I go keep me coming back for more and more . Always improving . I still have the first WW1 aircraft I built over ten years ago now Eduards Siemans-Schuckert D.III at the time I wanted to do something different and ww1 seem to be it , I'm hook on these stringbags now and that's what I build .

Weirdly ladies seem to like the WW1 planes more. My girlfriend is also mad about the Albatross serises. She bought a Revell 1/144 Tornado ECR first and didn't like it, left it half and bought a Revell 1/72 Fokker D.VII and painted the whole Lozenge on the underside by hand acording to the colour referance in the manual(thus wrong). And I just watched her my mouth open. :] Now whenever we go to a shop selling models she goes for the Albatrosses:}