Bonus Bunch

Roughly the first half of 2010, my employer sent me on a job in a relatively remote part of the country. Certainly not far enough from home to be in any way spectacular, but still, despite the excellent arrangements made by my employer, far enough to thoroughly disrupt my life at a time when I really, really couldn't afford disruptions on this scale. Consequently, this was not the best half year of my life, to put it mildly. This was not lost on my employer, who decided to give me a little something extra when I got back, in the form of vouchers from the local hobbyshop. Despite the already impressive size of my stash, it seemed only proper to convert those into something more tangible.

Tangible is one thing, but visible to at least my employer also seemed like good idea, so I set up this section of the website. Normally, I don't put kits on the site until they move from the stash into the production pipeline, but given the fact that I manage to complete something like four kits in a good year, and often less, it would have taken about four years for the whole bunch to show up here, even if I worked on them to the exclusion of all other projects. As a result, some, and initially most, of these kits will have largely empty pages associated with them. If no date is listed, there's nothing on the page but the box art for now.

Like most modelers I know, I tend to buy everything I can convince myself I want the moment it hits the market, so this bonus presented my with a delightful little puzzle: what on earth was I going to buy with it? Some kits that would have made it onto my shopping list showed excellent timing by appearing just as I was having a staring match with the vouchers, but these accounted for only a modest fraction of the total, so after long and careful deliberation (yeah, right, a bag of money and an excuse to go on a shopping spree..) I figured I'd set up a collection of 48 scale WWII fighters. There were a few of those already in the stash, and along with the new arrivals these could be promoted from oddballs to a branch of the collection.

I intend to build most, if not all, of the kits from this batch straight out of the box, for the obvious reason that I don't want to hide these gifts below a pile of aftermarket parts and modifications. Exception to this rule will have to be decals, as Hasegawa, much though I like their plastic, and despite their top notch reputation, still can't print a decent sheet of decals. Oh well, there's always aftermarket sets out there to correct this.
I'm not about to drop everything else and work exclusively on these kits, but I will keep at least one of them on the production line at all times, to ensure some degree of progress. Even so, I should not be surprised if I'm still building my bonus a decade hence.

	2012-11-10	New Airfix Red Arrows Hawk. Completed
	2014-02-23	Italeri-Supermodel MB339 Frecce Tricolore. Completed
		Italeri-Revell G91. Planned
		Italeri-Academy Sabre. Planned
		Revell F-4F Phantom in Jagdgeschwader 71 Richthofen anniversary markings . Planned
		Airfix 1:48 Spitfire Vc. Planned
	2011-03-29	Monogram 1:48 Hurricane. Completed
		Hasegawa 1:48 P-39. Planned
		Hasegawa 1:48 P-40. Planned
		Hasegawa 1:48 Macchi C202 Folgore. In progress
		Hasegawa 1:48 Spitfire IX. Planned
		Italeri 1:48 Spitfire IX. Planned
		Italeri 1:48 SDB5 Dauntless. Planned
		Trumpeter 1:48 MiG-3. Planned
		Tamiya 1:48 Gekko type 11. Planned
		Revell 1:32 Tiger Moth. In progress