I dunno -- I think I must be entering my second childhood now that I've reached retirement age. I've recently gotten this itch to try my hand at building plastic models after -- geez, I guess it must have been 55 years or so since the last time I build a model. Not much has changed, it would appear, except maybe that it isn't as easy to find modelling glue as it used to.
I built lots of models as a kid, mostly WWII era airplanes and cars from the 60s. I didn't have much patience back then and made a hash out of most of my kits, as I dimly recall. Mostly sloppy glue joints and not bothering to assemble things in the correct order. The airplanes I hung from the ceiling of my room and I recall them getting dinged up, even suspended out of easy reach. Not sure how I managed that. With the cars, I got bored with them after a while and -- this was when the whole dune buggy concept first starting getting popular -- so I'd strip them down to a bare frame and motor and then mix and match between the various cars. Say, I liked a particular model's frame and another's motor and another's tires and wheels. So I'd manage to fuse together these parts from separate models and get them to fit more or less correctly. I had a lot of fun "creating" my own cars doing that.
These days, I plan to do things like exert a bit of patience when I tackle a model project and see how good of a job I can do -- rather than see how fast I can complete something so I can play with it. One of my specialties is I'm a luthier -- I build guitars, specifically, and I build them from base materials. Over the years, I've accumulated a lot of hand tools, some of them I think might be useful in building models. Like tiny chisels and files, precision measurement tools, and others. Another of my interests is I paint with oils on canvas, so I've assembled a good collection of all sorts of brushes and oil paints -- dunno how good the latter would be on plastic models, though. I was given a Badger brand airbrush kit, but I've never used it. I can see where it will come in really handy for model builds, though. So I'm gonna have to break it out and get familiar with it if I'm gonna get serious about model building.
Recently, I've picked up a few old kits from online sellers. Revell and Monogram mostly. They're all in boxes, all but one was still in the original wrap. And the one that wasn't, the pieces were still inside plastic, so I'm sure the kits are all complete. I picked up an F6F Hellcat, a P-51B Mustang, an FW-190 Focke Wulfe, a P-38 Lightning, and an F-14 Tomcat. I bought the Tomcat model because I'm working on an oil painting project of an F-14 on take-off from a carrier with the catapult steam wafting everywhere. The main inspiration is from a photo I found, but the problem I ran into with this photo and most of the others I found was that the plane's parts were cropped out -- specifically the wings. So it dawned on me that, if I picked up a decent model of an F-14, I could use the model as a "model" for my painting. All these models are 1:48 scale. Back when I was a kid, most of the models I built were 1:48, but I recall one nice P-51D Mustang i put together that was a 1:24 scale model. That one was special to me and, as I recall, I did a better job of assembling it than I did the others.
So anyway, that's pretty much where I'm at. Looking forward to getting back into the hobby after all these years, and I'm looking forward to checking out all the resources that this site provides.