Help! My references are overtaking my models!

By Lorna Jenkins

Anyone familiar with this cry? It starts simply enough to be sure, but one day you look around and realise that your hobby really has taken over the house. It's not just the kit stash, it's all the magazines and books that have made their way into your house as well. Your shelves are groaning with the weight of them, you can't bear to part with a single one of them and you keep buying more which means you either start piling them up on the floor or get another bookshelf (fine until you run out of space for shelves)

In a more innocent age, you blithely built the kit as per the box art and instructions. Then perhaps you saw a book dealing with the aircraft you're currently building. "That might help me decipher the instructions" you think, unaware that you have now started on a very slippery slope indeed.

Profile publications, works by Squadron Signal, Warpaint series, Datafiles, specific books on the type, general books covering aviation or a specific air force, you become aware of modelling magazines (both club and commercial) that may have things of interest to you in it.

You buy as many as you can afford simply because "they're a good read and they'll come in handy when I get around to building that Catalina" However you notice that some of them contradict each other and there's nothing for it but to wait till the next publication on the subject is released in the hope that it will solve the problem. Until then you'll wait to build the kit ..............

Or as someone just recently said, soon I will know everything about the nothing I'm building.