lost past. models you made as kids.

I've made thing for as long as I can remember but like all of us these early model can get lost in time. My percents got divorced moved houses and I moved about so never had a permanent place to stay so models got thrown away. the worst one was when my sister was moving my mum, she rang me to say there was no way to move my model and no where to put them so would I mind if she go rid of them. I wasn't in the county or even if I was had no where to put them so I had to se "do it."
Now you have to remember that back when i was a kid 70ys 80ys there was no digital cameras I did have an instermatic stills camera which I found so frustrating because they where designed to take family photos. No focus, which didn't match my creative framing. So any documentation of my past is blurry.

So going through box's of what I do have here are some model I made that are gone from the the world paper mach-a ET. latex over polystyrene gremlin, card board x wing.( kelog corncake box's) photo taken years later but tis was paper and card board to, well I'd made an x wing this was enevitable.wish I'd have a better camera. black hole figure and paper R2. cut up my mums fur coat for the ewoks ( she was not happy) this was my bed room. Yo can see the card board battle star ships. Its wasn't unusual to find corn flakes in the bag because I'd taken the. box.

as I got a little older film go darker. this was taken a few years later when the latex was begging to turn.by this point I'd found an art shop to buy mount board so the corn flakes where safe. this drop ship was 99 percent finished but I gave it away when I was moving to the state's :-(. this was taken after my first job on a film. I'd gone home on a visit thats a real Turtles skin.

I hope this is to boring as all but the drop ship are now gone forever. but I'd like to see models from your past. what di you get up to in your bed room in your teens. ( I mean model wize

I wish I had some photos of my child-hood models... I was too young to appreciate the value of such things. I went thrue a plane phase, when I made a Black Widow from WWII, a B-52 Bomber, a helicopter from the Vietnam War era... after Top Gun came out I had to build a Tomcat... I also built a Falcon, an X-Wing, a Tie Fighter... I had the original Hoth Diaroma I built... I even tried a Star Destroyer, once. Then I began to fall in love with the ships from Star Trek and I built those exclusively for a time. By the time I had graduated high-school in 1994, I began to get too involved in other things to enjoy modeling. All my spare time was spent reading all the Star Wars novels that were coming out, I was going to college and working. Then in 1997 I joined the Army. I dabbled in sculpture and painting and model building from time to time thrue the years, but wasn't until about five years ago or so that I began to take it seriously. When I found the RPF, I felt at home here, and my passion for serious modeling was born. I have forgotten more about modeling in the last three years than anyone I know personally will ever bother to learn. So I am alone in my passion, and find a brotherhood here I can belong to. Thank-you for this thread, though. It has been some time since I thought about my child-hood models. A lot of paint-scrubbing, band-aids and blood-loss... and a lot of joy! I can't wait to see what others have.

Over the last few years I've been collecting models that I had as a kid so I could rebuild them.

division 6 said:

Over the last few years I've been collecting models that I had as a kid so I could rebuild them.

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I've been doing this as well, but it's been quite a bit more than just a few years. Except for two that are either hard to come by because they've never been reissued and/or are unreasonably expensive because of their rarity, I've collected all of the kits I built as a kid...and then some.

I started building models in 1969. Fast forward to 1981, and I was engaged to be married. As I was packing up all of my junk to move it all into our first apartment, I looked at my built-up kits and got it into my head that my wife wouldn't want to have to deal with them, so I threw them in the trash. All of them. In 12 years I'd built enough kits to fill five 55-gallon trash cans. The kicker is, as we were setting up our apartment my new bride approached me and said, "Okay, I've set up the bookcases in the spare bedroom. Where are your models?" :cry :facepalm Long gone now; unless someone retrieved them, they're under 33 years worth of landfill. And I don't have any photos of them.

The only kit I've rebuilt from my childhood is my first ever model, a 1/48 scale SR-71 Blackbird. Originally a gift from my father when I was 4, that we were supposed to build together, but he flaked and I built it in one afternoon. I can still remember putting it together on the living room table and all that glue... oh man the glue... it. was. everywhere. I played with that thing for months... even after parts broke off. Eventually it was used as the "crashed" airplane whenever I played with my GI Joes.

As a kid I had lots of airplane models hung from the ceiling by thread in my bedroom. I remember heating a sewing needle with a candle to poke tiny holes in the models for the thread to go through.

Then, of course, 1977 hit and planes were out the door. It was all spaceships from that point on, and still is to this day.

@ flimzy this is some nice stuff !
@ Zombie_61 Noooooooo ! A tragedy :cry

One model I had as a kid was the old Monogram (here in germany: Revell) Battlestar Galactica Viper. Luckily I never glued it complete or painted it... just played with it... pew-pew-zwooosh... And after years and years... I have found it among some other things in an old box from my last move to my current apartment (some years ago). Actually this is my modelprojekt for now... re-building my old bsg Viper... with paint and lights and all that To give my old childhood battlestar "toy" some new life. - Work in progress...



I also have the galactica and the cylon base star... but glued together... maybe I will paint them too in the future. And the space station babylon 5, also from Revell... but this one is badly painted... dont know how to rescue this poor model. Maybe with lots and lots of sanding. I also had the Kazon Torpedo from Star Trek Voyager, never build it as a kid...so it was boxed and complete... until this year.

I wish I had pics, a lot of them were Trek and Star wars kits, some military, some scifi. Then i got into the expensive anime models when they first got popular in the early-mid 90s. I wish i still had some of them to rework.

Too many to count and too many fads...first it was Batman (Aurora and Batboat as well), then Thunderbirds, UFO, etc, Formula 1 (Tamyia) then Funny Car (Mickey Thompson was my fav), then planes, then boats then 2001 A Space Odyssey, then StarWars, etc, etc...

My first model kit, when I was 8, was Old Iron Sides, the U.S.S. Constitution. No pictures of it, but I actually still have what's left of the model, twenty-six years later. It's lost all of its sails, rigging and masts, but I still have the hull from the gunwales down in a box someplace.

My second model kit was the venerable 18" AMT Enterprise. That one got busted apart and thrown out when I was a teenager. And I've built that same kit probably five times since.

I have four more unassembled that I plan to convert to Franz Joseph ships...

--Alex

I built tons as a kid. Planes, cars, and just about everything Star Wars. The only thing that survived was a Star Destroyer. It survived because I couldn't fit any fire crackers in it.

I had quite a few model kits. Unfortunately, I used to play with them. None of them survived my youth.

Ratbone said:

@ Zombie_61 Noooooooo ! A tragedy :cry

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Yep. Sad, but true. As I wrote above, almost all of them were kits I was able to get again--Star Wars and Star Trek kits, Tom Daniel and Ed Roth car kits, regular (non-show car) car kits, the Aurora "monster" kits, some military kits, and so on. But I also had most of the MPC Pirates of the Caribbean kits, some of the MPC Haunted Mansion kits, Monogram's Ghost of the Red Baron kit (a personal grail kit for me these days for nostalgic reasons), i.e. kits that have never been reissued and are going for ridiculous amounts of money on evilBay these days.

Admittedly, most of 'em were "kid built"--no seam work, minimal paint work, etc.--but if I'd kept them it would have been fun to compare those "kid" versions to what I could do today with my somewhat improved skills.

All my child hood suffered the same fate.

They would get knocked off the nightstand, break a wing.
Next stop was on the roof of my parents house with a few firecrackers. I tried and tried again to get that perfect midair explosion. Never worked out to ILM quality...but damn fun just the same.

But alas.....no photos.

I never had many plastic kits. the model shop was too far away and money short. so when I did get a paper round its was of to the art shop for card, paint, plaster bandage and little 1kg tubs of pre vulcanised latex. I found another blast from the past. sorry about the photo quality.

I still have some of my models from the late 70's early 80's.

My earliest models I probably made when I was around 5 or so with my Grandfather. They were the Aurora dinosaur kits where the bases could all interlock together to make one giant scene. Unfortunately most were destroyed beyond repair since I used them as toys as well. I never got around to painting most apart from a 5 to 7 year old's attempt at eyes etc..since they were "molded in color". I do have enough parts to rebuild the giant T-Rex model (that was molded in red with glow in the dark teeth and eyes)

Later when Star Wars came out I also built them and used as them toys, although I have them fairly intact since I was a bit older and more careful, but they are missing parts and in some areas are glue bombs. I had the MPC faclon that included the lighting kit (which was as spares as could be) Fortunately they are all pretty much repairable and can still be turned into nice display pieces with some new paint, and some regluing/detailing/minor scratch building to fix broken parts etc...

I loved to build aircraft carriers, for no other reason than to play with all the tiny aircraft. I have the enterprise ship mostly intact, but have lost all the little aircraft and deck stuff

I also have an enterprise model from the early 80's that could use some tlc

After '83 or so, I got out of models for a period as I went through high school and college, but after college around '92 or so I started getting into building and painting my brother's warhammer stuff and eventually spent most free "hobby" time doing wargaming miniature stuff. It wasn't until close to the time my daughter was born that I got back into proper modeling.
I was browsing in Michale's craft store and came across a Revell Y-wing. It was one ship they never made a model of back when I was still into building the Star Wars stuff and I had a 50% off coupon so I picked it up and was hooked again.
Shortly after I had gotten an Amazon gift card for Christmas and had always wanted a model of a Cylon Raider, Viper and Y-wing, so I picked up the 30th anniversary sets. It's been a flurry since then as I have become quite obsessed with collecting as much stuff for Star Wars and BSG as I can.

ps flimzy

that cardboard X-wing is awesome!

thank you. The x wing is the one I miss the most because I never did get any good photos.

My first model kit was a General Lee. I was so obsessed with that show (born in 1975). My dad and I built it together. Not too long after that, we did a USS Constitution. We went through a spell where we built a number of models together; it was a fun time.