Bob Dobinson gently lifts the colourful lid from the cardboard box. We are both in awed silence. Each of the three compartments inside contains a muddle of cheap plastic widgets. But Dobinson’s finger delicately prods the ancient Cellophane that’s kept everything neatly in place since the late 1950s. “Lovely!” he exclaims. “Look at that, nice and crackly. You won’t see another one like it.”
He’s right. This Monogram Auto Racing Trio set — dating from the 1950s and comprising all the 1:24 scale parts to make a 1932 Ford Hot Rod, a Midget racer and an Indianapolis single-seater — is among three known survivors worldwide. After a few hours’ patient graft with glue, paint and transfers, you would have three perfect plastic miniatures of classic American racing cars. But you’d also have Dobinson, a 44-year-old, foaming at the mouth. If you made these kits up you would, he says with a shudder, be committing “the ultimate crime”.
Dobinson runs Carkits International (01702 615 397, www.carkits-int.com), supplying model car kits to thousands of enthusiasts around the world. Every two months he sends out a catalogue to the hobbyists, running the business from his home in Southend, Essex. He can’t be exact without a lengthy stock-check, but there are more 7,500 of the plastic kits stacked floor to ceiling in his lounge and the log cabin in his garden.
But bizarre as the set-up may seem, it is lucrative. Kits in the catalogue average £30-£40 each, but the Monogram set we are looking at costs a whopping £295 — although for a collector any value would vanish as soon as it was built. Outside Dobinson’s house is a Mercedes CLK — the latest in a string of Mercs paid for with the proceeds of his kits.
Plastic kits were once part of every boy’s childhood. Although aircraft and ships were most popular, there were thousands of different car kits, too, with Airfix the most famous British brand. Once made up, however, the light intricate models did not last long in most boys’ bedrooms, so supplies are now scarce.
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Dobinson entered this arcane world in 1983. At the time he was a shopfitter with a love of old Vauxhalls such as Crestas and Victors. But the real things were notoriously rust prone and he found collecting Vauxhall models more satisfying. At a toy collectors’ fair, he came across three 1:32 scale Airfix Vauxhalls in a virgin state inside their original 1960s packaging, in a box containing 20 other cars. They cost one shilling and six pence (7½p) originally, but somehow they had survived unsold on a dusty toyshop shelf and the vendor wanted £20 for the lot. Reluctantly, Dobinson coughed up. However, he was amazed to be able to sell on the other 17 kits and got his money back four times over.
“Other dealers in old metal Dinky Toys thought these plastic things were rubbish,” he recalls. “But I started dealing in them and found collectors just coming out of the woodwork.”
He soon began buying and selling old plastic kits for a living. “It’s all about the box art,” he says. “The plastic parts are fixed to sprues — the plastic frames they’re moulded on — and it doesn’t matter if some have fallen off as long as it’s all there. But the box must be in good nick.”
Driven by the US market, kit boxes carried beautifully crafted illustrations of their subject. Monogram and AMT produced some of the best visual celebrations of hot rod culture. Even Britain’s Airfix, Frog and Merit employed the cream of illustrative talent to evoke Jaguar E-types and Mini Coopers on their packs. An illustrator called Iseki is renowned among connoisseurs as one of the greats for his stirring artwork on the boxes of kits made by Tamiya, Otaki and Bandai in Japan.
Eventually, US trades description legislation stopped the fun. By the mid-1970s, manufacturers were forced to reproduce photographs of the finished kits on their packaging, rather than fantasy images that not even the most skilled modeller could hope to emulate. By this time, too, plastic kits had started to lose favour to the instant gratification of electronic toys. But as old brands vanished, collectors intensified their interest, especially in Japan. “The Japanese are amazingly obsessive about collecting,” says Dobinson. “They even like the smell of a kit.”
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He removes the box lid from a 1960s AMT Silhouette kit (price: £64) and shoves it under my nose. “Go on, have a sniff of that,” he urges. Despite myself I have to agree — it may only be musty cardboard and plastic vapour but for most men of a certain age, it’s a smell of real nostalgia.