Modelling Gripes...What's Your's?

i agree with all of you guys
but my gripe is two fold
1 we all vent but people that COULD do something about or complaints won't listen
2 the more time we spend venting means lss time for modeling

Hey Montana-buy yourself a funnel and get your thinner at a hardware store. It's about $2.00 a quart there.

I thought of a cool Idea, Costco hobby shops. Buy in bulk, I mean 1000 #11s for $25, who can argue. I can see ailses and aisles of kits, a huge wall of paint like 200 feet long. If you buy 2 kits, get the 3rd free of equal or lesser value. Ahhh, we can dream. I just spent $45 dollars on paint, AB parts, and thinner. Speaking of witch, WHY is thinner 7-8 dollars a bottle??????

Funny, that's what the desk clerk said when I was checking out! LOL

Maybe you should only try dating models?

I'm sorry, Bgrigg, but now that you have figured out how to beat the Vegas system, we're going to have to have you killed

Seriously, yes, this can seem like an expensive hobby, but at this point in my life it is the ONLY thing that is keeping me sane. I try to buy as much as I can - so far mostly supplies - from my local hobby shop because if she goes under, the next closest one is 50 miles away!
I look at it this way (color me cynical, I know) - for what I spend to build and detail one of my 1/700 ships, that's the price of maybe two dates.

How many hours of engagement and entertainment will I get out of that model? Dozens, quite possibly hundreds.

How many hours of engagement and entertainment will I get out of those two dates? Four. At the most.

I've been to Vegas twice. Both for trade shows. The first trip I wasted $65 on slots over a 5 day period (high roller, eh?). The last trip I didn't bet at all. Not even nickel slots! Vegas wouldn't last a weekend if everybody was like me!

BG-A friend of mine just got back from Vegas and said he was pleased to have only lost $3200!! That would easily buy my stash and soul!

Oh, absolutely! I'm not complaining about the cost!

I literally started with zero paint and supplies. There are very few colours of paint I don't have in stock now, I have numerous types of glues, I have liquid masks, decal solutions, sanding sticks, puttys, pin vises, knives, lights, brushes, etc. If I did add it up I have probably spent close to $600CDN in supplies and equipment. That would include an airbrush, my spray booth and build table. I have enough "stuff" to last me years, with the occasional replacement of paint and glue. Throw in my model stash and that could double my investment. If I took only 3 months per model I won't have to buy another kit for 4 years. So say $1200 amortized over 48 months is only $25 per month. Chump change! Even if I doubled my spending that's only $50 per month. A typical golf green fee around these parts is $65. I have a friend who spends over $2500 on golf and $3-4000 on skiing per year. Yikes!

BG-I've spent $29.00 on a Verlinden figure and maybe $5.00 on supplies I didn't have and it keeps me entertained (?) for weeks-it really is a good deal.

Oh, and 50 cents for bandaids.

EDIT: I've also learned to buy or forage many supplies outside of hobby shops.

My only gripe about modeling is that I'm nowhere near as good as I wish I was.

For all those who complain about the cost. I trust you don't smoke, or drink bottled pop/water? I've met people who smoke $250 a month in cigarettes and complain about how expensive models are. The average can of pop sells for almost $10 per gallon out of a machine.

As Scott points out, it's all a matter of perspective. I just returned to modeling and had to buy lots of paints and supplies, hundreds of dollars worth (I refuse to add it up!). But now that I have all these supplies, all I have to do is use them up and replace them when they run out. My stash has grown, too. If I took the time the Scott does I wouldn't have to buy another model for years and years!

My LHS is at one end of a strip mall, and a liquor store is at the other end. I mentioned to the LHS owner that modeling wasn't as cheap as I thought it would be, he laughed and said that he sees people spending more money in one month at the liquor store than I've spent so far. Now that's an expensive hobby!

I understand the gripes about cost, but really it's one of the things I don't complain about. Not that I have an endless source of income, but let's put it into perspective in a couple of ways:

First, a lot of the aftermarket parts come from smaller "Cottage" industries, or in other words, guys like you and me making parts in their garage. I exclude the "Big Guns" like Eduard, Aires, and so on, but they have their own problems to. Just as an example let's think about someone that makes vacuformed canopies. He has to pay for his vacuum form machine, he has to pay for his materials, he has to pay for his packaging, he has to pay for his time making the master mold, and he has to leave a little room in there for profit. Then, how many copies of a canopy for a particular plane by a particular kit manufacturer in a particular scale do you think he's going to sell? 100? Maybe. 1000? Unlikely. In that perspective, $10 a copy isn't a bad price.

Second, think of it like this: You spend, say, $50 on a kit, another $50 on aftermarket parts, another $30 on paint and glue. That's $130 total for a pretty in-depth kit that is going to take some time to build. If you spend 100 hours on it, which is pretty optimistic in my opinion, that is about $1.30 an hour for a fun hobby. Compare that to the cost of fishing or hunting or golf or flying or any other hobby. Building models is comparatively dirt cheap.

This hobby tends to get expensive only when people try to blow through a kit. What's the point in finishing a kit in a few days or a week only to start another one? Take your time, do the best you can, and try something new on everything you build. I spent 16 months building my last three models, and each of them really needed some more time spent on them. Enjoy what you are doing, take your time, and do your best.

Third, you don't have to buy expensive kits and a bunch of aftermarket parts. Look around at all the scratch-built things that some people build and most of us, myself included, look at in awe. Pick up some styrene sheets and rods and some wire and give it a try. Start simple and work your way up to complex. Not only will it drive the cost of your kits down you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

A gripe of mine is when you do decide to drop some cash on an aftermarket conversion kit and it doesn't improve the finished build at all. I've seen some resin sets that I swear are just copies of the kit parts they were meant to replace or the kit part they were meant to replace was better anyway.

Mold swapping is another gripe of mine, not that is done, but that its rarely obvious until you buy the kit that you might have built it before. To me thats something of a let down when I was hoping it might be a new kit with improvements.

Case in point is Revell Germany's 1/72 S2F Tracker kit thats currently on the market; I got all excited as I've been waiting for years for a DECENT kit of that bird and it turns out to be the nearly 30 year old Hasegawa kit that gave me fits when I was a kid and I never wanted to see it again after I was done.

Richard-I remember when even hardware stores stocked models.

My gripes are the cost of models and especially the cost of PE sets etc and that scale plastic kits are almost a niche market now, that is, there are fewer and fewer stores stocking models.

I noticed at least in aircraft companies like Tamiya have a few right up your alley... you can get the 1/32 Zero with practically nothing for about $30.00 US, then the next step up is with a detailed cockpit and engine area... about $45... THEN for the whole shebang... for about $85 you can get the 'upgrade' version with metal gear struts, flaps, cowl and misc PE... I kind of like that... it allows choices...

Dragon has really done nice with thier latest releases... metal barrels, PE etc... all for a decent price.. (got my King Tiger (late) for about $27.00) complete with indie style tracks...

Just the price(of all decent models) and lack of selection of decently priced sailing ships are my two gripes.

Vehicles from a certain era/genre/country being released by every company repeatedly(even Aftermarket companies). Some armor kits are being released at the same time but by different companies, and this leads to practically ignoring other eras/vehicles or putting something out from another country/era/vehicle once every blue moon.....yet, like Pavlov's dogs, I will buy some of these kits that blanket the armor market.

Yep that's a good one.

My gripe is the release and re-release of basically the same subjects-ad nauseum.