My, how things have changed…

After 20 plus years hiatus myself, the biggest change is prices of kits has doubled or tripled since the 70s and 80s. I remember car kits were $5 (70s era) to $10 (80s era). More paint color choices, hobby tools, PE, maskings, aftermarket parts and decals are the rage now - not that there's nothing wrong with that. LOL!

Fortunately I have only had a brief break from the hobby, 5 years (2003 to 2008). So things didn't change that much. But when I stopped building, I had just got started using PE, metal tracks, resin and the like. For me, getting back into the hobby meant being more focused on what I was building and learning how to weather properly, my weathering had been very basic before, and really improve on my modelling. I think I have improved more in the 7 years since I came back than I had done in the previous 20, and that in large part was down to this site.

Outside of two one year gaps because of my tours during Vietnam, I have been modeling since I was 5.  To give you an idea of how things have changed, back in the 50s most kits were made of wood with plastic props and decals for windows and wire for landing gear and sometimes rubber tires.  The newer plastic kits might have solid wings and molded in markings were everywhere.  You might not have any panel lines except for flaps and rudders.  A plastic kit might cost anywhere from 60 cents to almost 2.00 and sometimes even a bit more.  If I remember right, by the mid 60s the wood kits were gone, kits were getting better.  Aurora was a up and coming company on a par with Revell and Monogram.  They covered subjects that the other big two didn't  and many of them are still sought after today.

Airfix was being imported  and many of their kits were only a dollar or two.  The Japanese kits were being brought in and I believe in some areas were being shunned because of their origin and the still deep held dislike if not hatred for anything Japanese.  When you could find one a Japanese kit was cheap, sometimes not only in price.

In the mid 70s when I returned from my second tour, you could buy a 1/48th Monogram kit for under 10.00 for a big one like the P-61 or the DO-335.  The F-86, Mig-15 and P-47s were less.

I'm 66 and restarted the hobby 2 years ago ,because my mind is still good but my body says no to many things I used to do (since being in the construction industry), and I like to keep my hands busy.

I enjoyed modeling as a kid in the early 1960's and always had the hobby in the back of my mind since then, like 50 years ago.   I remember when Rattle cans for modeling first showed up at the LHS.

The differances ?  Man, too many to list !  

On the pro side, I think the best thing for the hobby now is the volume of how-to information on here and places like youtube, Non exsistant in my day, where one can instantly improve one's modeling skills with out having to figure out " how am I going to do that " through trial and error and ruining a model or two in the process.  

On the con side is the cost. back in my time you could fill a room with models for a hundred bucks. Now with AM parts and expensive paint etc. it's just one model.  As a kid, I would canvaas the neighborhood for pop bottles to return them for the deposit so I could save for  my next model.  I find myself having to do the same thing now.  LOL

The end result nowadays is that the models are incredably realistic and superbly detailed, and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

I miss being able to find  kits in your neighborhood. Every corner Mom and Pop convenience store had a few. Variety stores (Woolworth, Kress, TG&Y, etc) had them. Kmart had two isles full of models, paints, etc.

Now there are only three places in my town to carry models. Hobby Lobby and two hobby shops that cater to RC and trains. All of these have very limited and expensive selections.

I've been modeling for almost seventy years now, and have seen even more changes.  But the increase in kit prices is primarily due to something called inflation, that also increases wages.  What I have noted is that kit prices have a wider range between cheap and expensive kits these days.  There are still kits available that fit quite well with inflation from the kit prices that I remember as a kid.  

The big difference is also reflected in the parts count.  The first kits I bought had only maybe fifteen or twenty pieces.  As an example, try one of the Testors 1:48 racing planes, like the GeeBee or Mr. Mulligan.  These are the same kits as the first plastic kits I bought in the mid fifties.  But now, the expensive kits have hundreds, or even thousands of pieces, photo etch, and resin parts.

Another big thing I find now is the expansive offering of aftermarket.  The only aftermarket or third party stuff available in the old days was the paint and glue!

Forty years was the gap for me. So many things changed over that span!

If I was to pick the biggest change, I'd have to say it's the use of airbrushes. Forty years ago, only a select few had an airbrush. Airbrushing was a technique we'd only see in the pages of Scale Modeler, then we'd do our best to replicate the resulting finish using ordinary paint brushes. It never looked as good. :( I tried one of those $30 Badger airbrush kits, with the syphon bottle, canned air, and dodgy connections - complete and utter crap!

Now, coming back with the ability to afford what I need, dropping two or three hundred dollars on a fine airbrush, and buying a quality compressor is no issue at all. It's the cost of entering the hobby, and scale modelling may be the cheapest hobby I enjoy!

The biggest change for me was switching from styrene to resin. Talk about sticker shock. That said, I've been forced to upgrade my painting skills, because constructing resin kits is the easy part. If it wasn't for David Fisher's Model Mania DVDs, I'd be lost.

@ Rob, I didn't think about the financial flexibility aspect of returning to the hobby.  I agree, it’s nice to actually buy what you want.  A fringe benefit of getting older that I couldn’t enjoy when I was younger.  But alas, I have kids going to college soon so I have about as many discretionary dollars as I had at 12!  I may join Jay looking for pop bottles!  Oh the days of highlighting kits I wanted that were on sale for $5 and under in the old black and white Squadron monthly flyers!  

I really love the availability of fantastic reference material at my fingertips!  How-to videos, reference pics, and kit reviews are just a click away.  Back then, I had to convince my folks to drive me to the nearest B. Dalton Books and hope they had whatever book I needed.  I remember reading a rather confusing article about dry brushing in Military Modeler back in the mid 80’s l and thought I’d give it a go.  What I ended up with was a Panzer IV tank with all the edges painted a very rough coat silver!  A couple firecrackers took care of that mistake.  I really could have used a nice YouTube video.

I took about a 15-year hiatus (not counting a brief binge of car modeling 10 years ago), and I can say the single biggest change is, of course, the Internet.

When I was building planes and armor in the past, I had FSM, Shep Paine's books and the History Channel (back when it showed more history than reality TV - still mad about that). Now, I can sit on my couch and watch YouTube videos on how to do various techniques, I can talk to everyone on here, read blogs and follow Facebook pages dedicated to modeling, and show my builds to people who understand the work that went into them.

I remember using the Internet one time for model research as a kid - building a German half track with a canon and trying to find out if the crew wore panzer wraps or infantry uniforms. I don't think I ever got the answer, but if I were to ask now, I am sure there would be an answer within a day.

The other main difference is my willingness to spend on some of the aftermarket parts (pre-painted PE sets are just amazing) and to spend a little extra on kits themselves. I remember when the Tamiya Bf-109E3 came out, and I really wanted it, but couldn't convince my mom to buy it for me and didn't want to save for weeks to get it.

Now it looks like this on my shelf:

Of course the issue is still there as I eye those gorgeous Tamiya 1/32 Corsairs and Mustangs...

Finally, and maybe this is more a function of me not being up on things when I was 14, but it seems like airbrushing techniques have really advanced. Preshading, color modulation and especially Alclad lacquers have made a big difference to the models I've built since October and the ones I built as a kid.

Welcome back!

-BD-

Yeah, I can remember the mid- to late- 70's when I could buy a Monogram or Revel kit for just a couple of dollars. I had three paper routes (at the same time!!) to help pay for my hobby. A kid is no longer allowed to have a paper route these days. The newspaper companies mandate that you own a car to have a paper route! Ridiculous!! Anyways, I had never heard of an airbrush until in my late 20s. Photo etch? Never heard of that either. Heck, I didn't even know about scratch-building until I started reading FineScale Modeler. Just amazing what the past 30+ years have brought to our hobby. I would say that computers are the biggest reason we have all the goodies that we have nowadays. And it's only gonna get better with 3D printers.

I don't consider that I've taken a break from the hobby, but rather I build at a glacially slow pace. I started superdetailing in 1983 as a freshman in high school because I saw that the kit parts were not reasonable representatives of pictures of the real things that I saw in the Squadron, Aerofax, and Detail & Scale books that I had. I became obsessed with improving as much of the kit as possible, and hence the 20+ partially built kits in my stash.

Since that time, to me everything about this hobby has changed, and I can now pretty much get the models right out of the box (or virtually so) that I only dreamed of 2-3 decades ago. Some have called this the 'golden age' of modelling, and I agree what with the subjects available and access to information, just to name two points. All genres seem to have gotten some love, but to me the most recent big shift came in the mid- '90s when Dragon (DML) began flooding the market with increasingly accurate, detailed, and better engineered kits of WWII German and American armor. Around that basic turning point several other things have happened, of course, but I think it can be argued that this turning point has influenced everything to varying degrees.

Dave