Back to the bench
Now that is a cool time capsule! I suspect you can remember exactly where you were when you built that kit.
Of course. Based on the date of the sales receipt (7/84), I was at my parents' house in Vermont. The kit was bought at a nearby store called Ames in New Hampshire (no sales tax). As a college student, National Guardsman and ROTC cadet, it is rather easy to extrapolate my location during any particular span of time from 1982 to 1987.
From September through December, I'm at college on Long Island. Home in Vermont from mid-December to early January. Back in college January through late May. And back in Vermont May through August.
I know I still have my National Guard annual training pay statement for the summer of 1984 and could look up the exact dates for that 2-week span. It was most likely in June or July when I would have been at Fort Drum, New York.
Anyway, I would have been in my room or building it on the dining room table. It might have taken a day or two. I built it, put it back inside the original box, put the box in my closet and it sat there for almost 20 years.
I was stationed in Massachusetts from August 2001 to January 2005, only about 100 miles from home. My parents were planning on moving to Florida so I collected up all my old model kits from their home to my quarters in 2004.
All of those kits were in a moving box from Hanscom AFB to Fort Knox to Elizabethtown, Kentucky. I dug it out when I was looking for an old Batmobile model.