We’ve been through this before as part of another thread:
“The Worst Model Kit You Ever Built?”
But it’s probably worth re-hashing as a separate thread of it’s own. My philosophy is never throw away anything that glues with ordinary polystyrene cement as it just might come in useful someday. That’s not just parts but sections of sprue too. But it gets worse; over the years I’ve acquired Tic-Tac and similar sweet containers, plastic cutlery, .22 Ammo boxes, Chip Forks (scrounged half-a-dozen of a new - at least to me - style from a local Chippy only last week) and (many years ago) the tubes out of rolls of thermal paper. The list is pretty endless. The why is quite simple; I like building weird stuff. Back when Space/Sci-Fi wargaming used generic rules rather than systems designed to sell a product you could knock out items over a weekend for a game the next week. But it goes further than that, modelling is a creative act and part of creativity is often a wish to make something which is uniquely one’s own - hence all the aftermarket stuff for people who don’t want their stuff OOB the way the manufacturer intended. Using junk for Sci-Fi builds is a low-cost way of fulfilling one’s glue-sniffing urges without all the bother of research and fixing problems in one’s usual field(s), a fun diversion when the mojo is low. And all those useless kit bits - go look at your favourite movie/TV series from before CGI took over and see how many components you can identify. I don’t build much now but when this cropped up on that other thread I just had to join a group build elsewhere and relive the good old days:
Regards,
M