It’s been from April since we’ve heard from our lord and saviour The combat workshop, but the Union goes on. July’s question? Why do we stash and what do we get out of it? Or as I’d rather like to call it,

Okay, maybe I’m overdramatising it a bit, but honestly this is how I feel at times. We all have a goal that we want to reach with our hobby. Wether it is just having fun building kits or being able to display a complete evolutionary line of Spitfires, we all have our reasons to hoard (because that’s what it is) a couple of kits in the back. To me this was always having a complete collection of WWII aircraft. This changed after seeing a MiG-25 Foxbat, which made me break that rule, then Tamiya’s quarter scale tank kits came into play after I wasted my time playing World of Tanks, and now franticly War Thunder. I even gave in on buying 1/35 jeeps and trucks for a while (which has luckily ended recently).

I’m sure we all have our exceptions to the rule like “but my father drove that same Corvette as this 1/24 kit” or “I’ve always loved the Star Trek Enterprise so I really ‘need’ that one”, but most of us try to keep to one subject. I can’t speak for all of us, but I tried to keep this rule of 1/48 to prevent my stash growing to massive proportions with all kinds of stuff.

Now unlike most of the scale modellers, I am still young and have a good amount of decades ahead to complete my stash, but given the current number of input in the stash and output on the bench, I have recently come to the realisation that I will need some 47 years to get rid of the current number of kits that I have if I keep up the same output I have held up the last two years. So by then it would be 2062, I would be 68, I will have switched career choices twice and the world would have supposedly perished eight times. Also RIP gasoline cars… This is why sometimes I feel like it is a curse to stash.

But then why keep a stash? Easy. I buy that kit because I don’t want to run the risk of not finding it again, or at least not at the same price. Try to get your hands on a Revell kit that was issued in 1999 and you’ll know what I mean. We all have the intention to build those kits one day, but we can’t tell which ones we’ll feel like building a month or two, so we buy it just in case so we have the option to. We really want to build that fw-190, but the camouflage is just so scary at the moment. It could also be that you find an awesome picture of a Mustang you just want to build, so you just want to have the possibility to get on it right away. We buy the kit because it might be sold out by then, or even worse, out of production, which might take years to find, and if you’re lucky, at a reasonable price.

Check out the Sprue Cutters Union webpage to read other takes on this subject!