This week

[Rustee]

I've found another hobby shop,so I now have a new Fat Boy and two Silver Comets,another one yielded my second Mercury Redstone. Gee,this rocket collecting is fun! Sure,I don't even have 20 rockets yet..

[barone]

Sure...go ahead......rub it in....... :D

[Rustee]

Yes,it's been a heck of a year,an Omega K52-P,Canadian Arrow,Phoenix,2 Maxi Alpha III's,Sweet Vee,Centuri 1B and others. In retrospect,selling the Omega was really a bad idea! I think I've milked the locals dry but I'm looking for more D and E power,stay tuned.
.

[Rustee]

I couldn't believe the difference between these pairs of rockets in terms of fading! If you're collecting NIP then that would make all the difference I would think. The Comets were hanging one behind the other so one got a little more beat up. This store had stuff bleached white in the window they're so archaic. Those are the good ones!

[joecool]

rusty, where are you finding these? i'm wanting to get as many of the oop kits as i can but having no luck with the local stores. all they seem to have is recent stuff.

btw i pm'ed you ... :-)

[Rustee]

I'm blessed to live in an area where most people are clueless about what their stuff is really worth,stuff that sat on a shelf for twenty years. I made a killing in Tamiya and R/C kits too. You have to do a lot of legwork,find every hobby shop you can and you never know. It's mostly just luck though,I mean they either have it or they don't but you have to know what to look for. Yesterday I went to an old store and they're going out of business,30% off everything! So I got a Big Daddy E and some D engines and a Revell 1/96 Saturn V model for peanuts. It's also important to gauge the wife's tolerance for a bedroom full of hobby crap that you're "going to sell some day"!

[Mikus]

I'm blessed to live in an area where most people are clueless about what their stuff is really worth,stuff that sat on a shelf for twenty years.

It ain't Houston, I'll tell ya that.... :(

[joecool]

or the greater denver metro area ... ;-(

[Mark II]

I would think that places like Houston or Denver, for example, which both have large and thriving rocketry groups in their respective areas, would not be places where you could strike gold in local hobby shops. In all likelihood, the bones of any hobby shops in regions such as those would routinely be picked clean. On the other hand, a collector living in those areas would probably have many great opportunities to pick up vintage kits from other local rocketry enthusiasts.

I would guess that the most likely places to hit the jackpot would be in communities that had one or more active rocket clubs at one time, but then saw the interest decline in recent years.

I know that I've told this story before, but here it goes again. Shortly after becoming a BAR, I made my first trip to the only hobby shop in my part of the state. Next to a rack of current model Estes kits, they had a large box full of clearance kits. I spent a few minutes digging through it, hoping that I would find something that might look familiar, something that I might recognize from my youth. But just about all of the kits in the box were really odd looking designs from some company that I had never heard of. At the time, I still knew very little about any rocket companies besides Estes and Centuri (and I really didn't even know that much about the latter, either). I knew absolutely nothing about the companies that had come and gone during my long sabbatical from model rocketry. So to my uninformed eye, the kits I saw in that clearance box didn't look all that impressive; for one thing, the header cards were all printed in overly bright, almost garish colors, and the kits seemed to consist of nothing but balsa parts! There were quite a lot of them in the box, though; representing quite a few different models. Still, I didn't find anything that I really wanted. I have been kicking myself real hard ever since, a few months later, I realized that I had passed up the opportunity to score a great big haul of Stellar Dimensions, Inc. kits at bargain bin prices.

Mark \\.

[Rustee]

Another new(to me) store,and my third Mercury Redstone and a Canadian Arrow. I sold my first Arrow so I'm glad to get one back. Soon it will be time to thin the herd...

[joecool]

that's it, i'm movin' to canada.