Hello all!
I was wondering how you store your unbuilt kits. Is there a way to keep them safely stored without running the risk of damaging the plastic, besides carefully repack the sprues?
The weight of a sprue is not high and it's a very flexible and malleable material which usually keeps its shape, but will the pressure of a part on another deform it permanently?
Any suggestion?

I bought 3 kits once that had been travelling with a salesman from one exhibition to another airshow for quite some time and got the complete range of problems that one can have with old kits:

- broken pieces in a kit because something had fallen on the thing
- over due decals, not usuable at all anymore because very brittle and completely hardened out
- deformed pieces to the level that i had to glue fuselages together mm by mm with superglue

so my advice is:

don't make a stash that you will not be able to build withing a reasonable time. It is only costing money and it is a lot easier to let the hobby store keep the stash for you

and now i will humbly admit that i am not following my own advice

so i keep my stash in a big solid cardboard box, cold and dry

Thanks!

I keep my extra models on shelves or in cabinets. You can stack them five or six high and always be sure to not place anything too heavy on top of them. I even keep built models in the orrigional boxes with the turrets removed so that the model will not be higher than the height of the box. If higher anything placed on top of it will cause damage. I have yet to have had any problems with keeping unbuilt and built models stored for a long time........Al

Thank you Alfred!

Plastic kits are surprisingly resilient. Some of the traders I frequent at shows abuse their stock horribly, cramming eight or ten kits into a space that you'd think would take only six. Yet the contents are usually fine. The boxes are knackered, the decals and instructions maybe creased, but the plastic holds up. Parts are more likely to come away from the sprue than to break - after all, the sprue gate is (theoretically) a weak point - although clear parts are more brittle and so more vulnerable. Excessive weight will, of course, destroy anything eventually. But the thing that's most likely to cause warping is high temperature, not pressure on its own.

Having said that, I do stow my stash in small doses. I think the tallest stack is eight boxes. The reason for this isn't so much to protect the contents, it's to make it easier to pull a box out and replace it; and to leave the boxes easy to open.

One tip for stacks of any height: unless you're buying a lot of stuff from Dragon or Trumpeter, the box is likely to be bigger than the contents. This means it will deform with other boxes on top of it. If you stack boxes of the same size on top of each other, you can minimise this, as the sides of the boxes will be supporting each other. And put the lightest on top!

Allright! Thanks!

As a serious and experienced modeler, I keep my unbuilt kits in a special climate-controlled room in my house, where general access is not allowed.

I find the best shelving is the lightest you can get, I prefer the flimsy wire shelves you can get for $5 each at a local dollar store, and as a result, this limits the stacks to only so many kit boxes so they simply do not crush the lower ones.

And like the other fellows, I do not mix large and small or heavy and light kits on the same shelf.

As for decals, I simply don't worry since there are so many aftermarket sets available as well as new kit manufacturers willing to part with new sets for not much money.

On the other hand, carefully seperating and storing the decals and the clear parts seperately from the rest of the kit parts bags in the box in seperate sealed plastic bags will extend the life of the decals and clear parts as well.

Eddie

Thanks for the answer!
I guess yours is a more suitable solution for resin kits, not only for plastic, isn't it?

I have stored my models for tens of years in packing boxes from past moves, occasionally replacing boxes that start to wear out. I also have found that the boxes used to ship desk top computers are great (I got them from work, but no longer readily available after switch to laptops). I remove the decals, place them in applicablely-sized siplock bags and into binders in my modeling room. The large boxes of models have been literally moved around the world, stored in garages and attics without any damage. The boxes apparently provide resaonable insulation as the kits boxes are still cool to touch even when I am sweating bullets opening the storage box. The boxes are under the roof and not in direct sunlight....sunlight through a window can melt plastic!

Jeff

Actually for plastic, resin, and wood.

Eddie

Thanks everyone for the precious advice!