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I love this hobby!

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As I was sitting at the dining-room table this morning listening to the wind and rain outside while swapping my M-07's wheels from race to display sets, it struck me how much I love this hobby.

In my younger days I did a fair bit of work on fullsize cars in my spare time, and I enjoyed it, but it had its drawbacks such as cold garages, cramped spaces, expensive parts, grazed knuckles, smelly chemicals, etc.I find I get very much the same sense of satisfaction form working on the smaller cars, but with none of the drawbacks.

Just thought I would share my happy feelings! :D

 

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You've summed up a lot of my love for this hobby too. I work all day on antique cars in cold garages, cramped spaces, etc. Great fun in my 20's, painful at times in my 40's, lol. In fullsize, cars you're always dealing with things not working right, wrong parts, "correct" reproduction parts that simply don't fit. It burns you out. With this hobby (Tamiya specifically) all that fades away and you're usually left with the pure, good fun of the experience. I'm positively driven to assemble/disassemble/modify and tinker with things and this hobby is always here for me. Good topic!

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Right there with both of you. I still love working on 1:1 cars, but I can see a day when crawling underneath a car and working on something heavy/greasy/stuck is simply not going to be possible. Being able to pick up the chassis and flip it over makes it so much easier. And while my friends often say "well, sure, but you can't get in it and go for a drive," I think they simply lack the imagination to do so.

It seems like a lot of us share that urge to tinker with mechanical things. I've wondered before, had I not been born in the automobile-era of human history, what would I find to satisfy that urge? What would i have tinkered with 400 years ago? Maybe I could have been a watchmaker...?

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Agree with everyone that's posted!  I love this hobby too!  There's so many different aspects of it that keep it fresh:  customzing, restoring, doing box-art builds, crawling, on-road, off-road, buggys, trucks, cars, etc.  The talent and imagination I find in this hobby is incredibly refreshing and inspirational!  

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I love this hobby as well...but it’s also my curse.... 

I seemed to have moved away from kits to scratch building and making them as scale as I can... I get an idea for a functioning scale part, and I end up spending weeks researching how to build it, which means material and tooling, and just as I’m building the bit, I’m already thinking of another functioning part and wondering if it’s possible to build it....it’s the main reason why my builds take this long, if the part isn’t perfect, it has to be perfect enough before I move on to the next.... cursed I tell you......

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4 minutes ago, Trini2DBone said:

I love this hobby as well...but it’s also my curse.... 

I seemed to have moved away from kits to scratch building and making them as scale as I can... I get an idea for a functioning scale part, and I end up spending weeks researching how to build it, which means material and tooling, and just as I’m building the bit, I’m already thinking of another functioning part and wondering if it’s possible to build it....it’s the main reason why my builds take this long, if the part isn’t perfect, it has to be perfect enough before I move on to the next.... cursed I tell you......

Your personality drives you to perfection and we are all a little in awe of those who have this trait. Enjoy it for what it is and understand that there are lots of us out there who appreciate your attention to detail that we don't have the time/patience/drive to emulate.

I know when I am working on ANY problem I am not sure how to resolve i spend hours (sometimes the ones I should be sleeping as well.....) researching and working out exactly how I will do something before attempting to actually do it.

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11 minutes ago, Baddon said:

Your personality drives you to perfection and we are all a little in awe of those who have this trait. Enjoy it for what it is and understand that there are lots of us out there who appreciate your attention to detail that we don't have the time/patience/drive to emulate.

I know when I am working on ANY problem I am not sure how to resolve i spend hours (sometimes the ones I should be sleeping as well.....) researching and working out exactly how I will do something before attempting to actually do it.

Ahhhh...a kindred spirit!  Thanks mate!

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That pure experience is a spot on way to put it. My day job is designing sports equipment and I love it, but it's inevitably love mixed with the harsh reality of dull but very important things like fatigue and safety testing, budget restraints, market requirements and customer feedback. When I tinker with cars, and especially design bits it's just pretty much all the creative good stuff I love about my job without any of the rubbish. And largely its all for my own amazement, although I do very much enjoy sharing my adventures with you lot. 

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I must admit I go through the ups and downs with this hobby🤔 when I love it I go to work with different things I'm hoping to do at that particular weekend with whatever rc model is on my workbench (or dining room table) in my mind it make what can be a very stressful job that I sometimes do very much more tolerant! But the flipside to that is once I've built/renched etc I'm kinda burnt out with it and I put it away🙄 could be for weeks at a time! Example is the cheap clone bruiser I bought a few weeks ago I've just completely took it apart and rebuilt it I'm now thinking I'll give that a rest for now and I'm now looking at my monster beetle that needs a bit of attention thinking I can't really be bothered even to the extent I cover them up so I'm not constantly looking at them🤦‍♂️ but I know that within a few weeks or months I'll be back with full enthusiasm😁 I've always done this even way back in the late 70's when I got my first rough rider and I'd race it on a Friday night then get home and just dump it in my bedroom until about the following Thursday😏

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Great hobby, fab forum, amazing members as far as I concerned.

I have zero free time at the moment, but the forum keeps me sane and the posts from members help me to feel involved. 

I check in twice a day to and from work whilst commuting.

My kids have grown up with Tamiya and my extended family all accept it as a part of what I do.

Cars & motor bikes would feature if time, money and space weren’t a concern. 

However I marvel at the skills, generosity and collections of TC members and there is usually something humorous posted everyday.

Thank you! 

Simon 

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some people do cross word puzzles, some like sports, there's your video gamers, people that are good arm chair generals that watch too dang much news,

there's folks into knitting and so forth, connoisseur's of different tastes and likes, But if i'm not building i'm not happy:lol:

i wouldn't say i love much of any one thing, but if it moves forward fast then i guess i'd love to see it faster. i simply Dig doing all these neat things.

i won't ramble much more, but that's when i'm thankful for hands, eyes and fellow human beings that well, engineers, and the tool & die men and women that make the very cool products i get to use every day, that's why i LOVE trucks, boats and trains or we would have zero on the shelf:o

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Great thread, and it's taken me this long to work out what to write.  Actually I'm still not sure, so here goes :D

I love this hobby too.  Some of my best mates are from the RC scene, met through Tamiyaclub back when things were a bit more active in the mid-naughties.  We used to arrange bashes at local parks, I would arrive with my bone-stock buggies on 27MHz, NiMHs and silvercans and be overwhelmed with envy at everybody else's bigger collections of hopped-up monsters on 2.4GHz, brushless and LiPo.  But I graduated over the years and now have a collection to match, while everybody else moved on to other things, settled down, or stopped due to illness.  The bash scene is pretty dead here right now, so much so that last weekend I drove 5 hours to a bash site up north so I could have some RC playtime.

My main loves - or what I always tell people are my main loves - are writing fiction and music.  But things are difficult right now.  With a young family I don't have so much time to write in the evenings, in the mornings I'm just too tired, and my new job doesn't afford me the opportunity to write at lunch like my old one did.  I almost feel like that's left me behind a bit, like it was a dream that's slipped away as the reality of adult life has sunk in.

But I know it's not forever, I still make the time for writing and music when I can and things will keep going, slowly.  Actually I feel a lot happier now that I've let them fall away a bit.  I don't feel pressured to keep up the regular work.  I suppose you could say I'm enjoying an extended break from writing and looking forward to getting back into it again when I'm ready.  Actually I took a week off work just last week to finish an album that should have been finished two years ago, so things aren't totally gone.

What's this got to do with RC?

Well, people told me that I'd have to sell up when I had a family.  I wouldn't have the time, the space or the money, all the buggies and trucks I'd saved hard for would be sold on, I'd keep one or two and promise myself I'd get out to a race here or there, but it wouldn't happen, and it would all be over.  Well, before my daughter was born I had one Tamiya tractor truck, now she's just turned 2 and I have 5.  So, no, it didn't have to stop - I just had to start being more careful, planning further ahead and researching my purchases more carefully.  Doesn't mean I always get it right and doesn't mean I haven't over-spent here and there, but things aren't what people told me they would be.

I don't need so much mental energy to build a truck or cutting some custom parts.  Actually giving myself a kick up the backside and cutting some brackets out of sheet aluminium on a free evening is a real boost: before, I might have worked for 3 hours on a novel that wouldn't be finished for 5 years.  That scene might get cut entirely.  In fact that 3 hours work might get read again, just once, by me, before it got consigned to a 'deleted text' file and archived forever.  I might have worked for 3 hours on a track that would get another 30, 40 or 50 hours work before ultimately going into the "rubbish, don't finish" folder.  (I never delete anything).  That happens with a lot of my music.  For every one good song that gets finished there are around 10 that get a heapload of work but never make the grade and maybe 30 that never get beyond 30 seconds length.

But instead I work on a bracket or an axle mount or an electronics plate or whatever, and at the end of the night I've got something in my hands that I made.  OK, it may not be beautiful and it might be heavy and weak compared to something I could buy, but it's something solid and tangible that I made with my own hands.  It reminds me that I'm not just a pair of cuddly arms, I'm not just a transport device for manoeuvring toddlers into places they can't get, I'm not just the person who earns the wages and cooks the dinner, I can make stuff too, stuff of my own design, stuff that does things for me.  If I can't do anything else, I can at least pull apart some cars, clean them up and put them back together.  And because I don't have the spare cash to throw at them any more, I put them together with more care, making sure everything is right, so I get the absolute best from them.  Having money made me lazy.  Having a family makes me a better person.

And there's more, too.  I make it my mission, once or twice a month, to pack up my things and go somewhere to play.  Last weekend I drove a 9 hour round trip, had an overnight in a cheap hotel, just so I could bash my buggies at an indoor astro track with a dozen other RC fans.  No racing, no timing, no laptops or tyre warmers or heats or marshalling, just a fun time playing with toy cars and cooking bacon sandwiches in my camper.  A couple of weeks before that I drove down south, went RC drifting, stayed in a cheap hotel, then went to an RC truck meet the next day.  Next month I'm going to try to pull an epic weekender, heading to the south coast for RC drifting on a Friday night, staying over somewhere, doing the RC truck meet on the Saturday, then driving back to the Westcountry before the sun sets to camp over with some likeminded friends at an outdoor tarmac track, ready for a vintage touring car race meet on Sunday.  I'll race there, then I'll go home to my family.

I have an amazing wife, who lets me go do these things once or twice a month.  Even more amazing, that epic weekender?  That's happening on the weekend of her birthday and our wedding anniversary.

(I have a feeling I'm going to pay for it later...)

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