My Uncle Mike was the person who gave me my interest in modelling - he always made kits and I remember many a fond day rummaging though his drawers in the garden shed and feast my eyes on his huge (collection of) parts!
Anyway, I though to give him a call last night as I hadn't spoken to him for a while and his wife - my Aunty Barbara - has just gone into a care home. Inevitably, the subject got onto aircraft and kits. He always claimed to have a model of every aircraft ever kitted and was proud to own TWO Whitley bombers when even that Frog tooling was a rarity. Many of the kits he had were discontinued by the time I had got into modelling seriously and I always lusted after such impossible to get gems such as the Aichi Val, Petlyakov Pe2, Bristol Beaufort and such like. He recently gave his collection of real vintage kits he never made to his son-in-law to list on ebay (damn, there goes my inheritance) as he's 84 now and will never build them. He used to write directly to Revell, Frog and other companies when he "discovered" a new aircraft and have them send him one by recorded post direct from their factories!
Every kit he mentioned having that he thought was probably the only one left in the world and many of those he never had that had never been produced were now widely available and I didn't have the heart to tell him that there was probably not an aircraft that hadn't, by now, been produced in kit form. Not only that but I had many of them too! It just shows how the model industry - and the world - has moved on!
