"What's the most curious thing in your collection?" Topic

This Tiger 1 wheel I spotted

ebay.to/2mv6agD

made me wonder what's the oddest thing you've brought home in the name of collecting?

This Tiger 1 wheel I spotted

ebay.to/2mv6agD

made me wonder what's the oddest thing you've brought home in the name of collecting?

This Tiger 1 wheel I spotted

ebay.to/2mv6agD

made me wonder what's the oddest thing you've brought home in the name of collecting?

A hollow plastic cow that once contained ice-cream. I've wanted one for ages.

I have an uncle that collects rocks. I've always thought (to myself of course) "Dude, I can go out back and in 20 minutes can have more rocks than you've been collecting for the past 20 years."

Dryer lint for 15mm fantasy figures: _ o_ _ _ n.

The balls from roll on deodorant bottles. When painted up and stuck on clear plastic peg bases they were great for making planets in Starfleet/Starfire/etc battles.

Made up 5 planets, didn't get around to doing the rest, still got a couple of dozen of them in a spares box.

Micro chips from old computers (really old computers). The plan was to spread out the contacts, glue on gribbly bits and paint them up as a bug army. Scavenging them is as far as I got.

To understand this you have to know I am a cartoonist who primarily works in black & white. A visiting friend noticed I had collections of nun figures and killer whale/Orca plush toys. He asked about it and I told him they were related. "How so?" he asked slightly nervously (I might also mention he was raised in the Catholic Church) to which I answered; they both have a strong black & white graphic quality. He laughed and said I should be more mysterious about it next time someone asks.

I have a porcupine quill– all the other stuff is entirely understandable…

Oddly I think mine might be the wine bottle top foils I keep for when I used to turn them into flags – now I don't do that I don't know why I still keep it!

My collection of brass wire that surrounds many a nice bottle of Rioja. Some is ready braided and easily triple braided for Napoleonic lace work eg aigulettes. I have lots of it……fun collecting, rarely used

My wife.

Nice one…I like that.

If my wife is curious, it is only because she keeps asking why I paint all these figures, base them, photograph them for the Napoleonic Forum and then stick them in the attic.

A pair of 30-sided dice, for which I have never ever found a practical use.

B

Two things actually
Periscope from a Patton tank and a massive Soviet Naval flag now hanging in the game room

1895 37mm HRC round with USN stamps.

Two brass model P-38s about 5"x 5". My dad made them during WWII on his ship in the Pacific out of spent 20mm shell cartridges. 20mm cartridge and .50 cal cartridge from the same time frame.

Little toy soldiers. They're all over the place.

used coffee cup sleeves for using as corrugated sheet metal.

Like Robert said, toy soldiers.

I remember once as a kid I started to save toilet paper rolls; I was going to use them with my D&D figures somehow. But like most things, time goes by and things are forgotten about. The best laid plans…

The plastic screw-on caps from 1/2 gallon milk containers. This was back when my mates and I were playing Command Decision. In that game you put down order markers at the beginning of the turn. These were originally standard war game counters, and you'd put another, blank, counter on top to hide what you were going to do. Then somebody came up with the idea of making dice with the orders marked on them, which would save a lot of hunting for the right counter. But a blank counter on top left the sides exposed, so your opponent could see what you weren't doing. The milk container caps worked great to prevent this.

Of course, as soon as I had enough of them we changed to a different set of rules, so they became redundant. But I found them in a box the other day!

Hmmm.

I have a keyboard cover from an old desktop computer, that is painted up to be a factory complex. Does that count?

The balls from roll on deodorant bottles. When painted up and stuck on clear plastic peg bases they were great for making planets in Starfleet/Starfire/etc battles.

I can totally relate! We used to have a 70+ lb rock (it was a bit more than 20 inches in diameter) that we used to put in the middle of the living room floor as a star. To this day I can remember the hilarity when the member of our gaming community who always insisted on having the biggest, most powerful star ship, turned his Federation Dreadnaught … we could all see where the string would take him, but he was looking down at the compass base and then at us as we all burst out in laughter before he finally followed his string to see that he was about to fly straight into the star!

Alas the infamous rock did not belong to me, but rather was a resident of the apartment I lived in when I was a student. When I left the apartment, the rock stayed behind. (It came to live there care of the US Air Force, which had paid to have shipped from Arizona to Berkeley, CA for the prior inhabitant of the said apartment, who was a USAF Tech Sgt who received a moving allowance when he left the service and couldn't think of what else to have shipped other than the door off of his room, 400+ golf balls from the Phoenix Municipal Golf Course driving range, and a rock).

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

As far as minis go, a 15mm 'heavy tanegashima' matchlock of the type used in the 1590s Japanese invasions of Korea.

Still need to finish the matchlock bits, but the gun tube and carriage are done.

@deadhead – I also have the fine wire from spanish wine

Not that odd but have a couple of 50 cal shells I dug up at Bentwaters, a 20mm dummy round from a Vulcan and 30mm dummy round from a A-10, have taken them to work for show and tell a few times.

Dummy rounds!

In London I was digging the garden and found a brass 303 cartridge with GB 1940 VII stamped on the base. I always imagined it had fallen from a Spitfire (which had no business over central London I now know of course). I treasured it for years, but always wondered why it had four holes drilled in the side.

Modern Internet is great for this kind of thing. Within minutes I learnt it was a dummy round of no interest at all.

Sob. Still have it though.

Does a large tub of real Waterloo mud count? (Used for basing mixed with PVA). Glad I was not searched at Security. It looked like something far more illegal.

BTW, a brilliant posting that could have been crossposted far more widely

I've got an 18" Navy searchlight somewhere in the garage. I think it's hiding behind a stack of 5,000+ vacuum tubes… ;-)

Insects, when I was 11 to 13, I had to collect them for 4H club. Why some people call that a hobby I have not a clue. They just bug the heck out of me.

As a kid my dad had a wooden dummy round of maybe a 3 – 6" round I think was a navy ship gun, no idea what ever happened to it

Oh, well if we are talking dummy rounds and such …

I have a LAW (77mm rocket launcher tube -- expended/empty/inert/no risk to anyone unless I drop it on their foot), and a 30mm projectile that I have never actually been able to identify from the markings, with a colored tip (and a ballistic cap), which I certainly hope is also inert.

I also have a Vietnam era US Army body armor vest (mylar, but no ceramic inserts), and a WW2 USAAF flak jacket (made from with overlapping metal plates).

I used to have two practice M1917 "Pineapple" hand grenades, but don't know where they have gotten to over the years.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

A whole bunch of clear plastic cases that once held PCMCIA cards for laptops.

I use them for storing 1/6000 scale destroyers and TBDs. They're about 2.5" x 3.5", so theoretically should hold 14x DDs on 1" x ½" bases. I tried to buy enough of these to house all the DDs of all the navies of WWI, so I still have a bunch left unused.

- Ix

My Great Uncle was a NAVY diver he took the brass plate off one of the scuttled german shipos in Scaps flow :)

A possum's mandible

I have some real Quartz Chrystals that I turned into a terrain piece …

Old CD cases that I cut into custom movement trays.

oooh, just remembered the ashtray stand shaped like a (100 lb?) bomb, also buried in the garage. If I put it in the yard with the fins sticking up in the air, I'd get in a lot of trouble… ;-)

I collect rocks from places I've been. I paint the location it came from on each rock. My favorites: a piece of Hadrian's Wall, a piece of Catherine's Furnace, a brick from Old Fort Jackson.

I know, I'm odd. My wife reminds me of this fact all the time.

In my city flat books occupy much more space than toy soldiers, even that I have lots of them too. I have some 19th century US books on printing and photography my granddad brought to Russia in 20s.
Still, I guess most of the odd things end up in my summer house our family has from 1950s…as for any Red my pick will be hammer and sickle. Hammer is of Swedish origin my other grandad brought in 1945 from Hungary, and sickle is even older (and I regularly sharpen it to cut some heads…err…grass )

A bottle of real Russian Vodka that, purchased in Moscow, in 1992, that I have reused and refilled for the last 27 years.

It probably had the same lable for 50 years due to communism. I visited Russia soon after the fall.
I also have a record to play Great Patriotic music in the backround, if playing my WW2 Russians, generally after a few shots of vodka.

I have a Russian language version of "The Hunt for Red October" Printed in 1991.

None of my collection are curious. One or two might be interested, and a few are downright nosey parkers, but I don't think any of them are curious about anything.

This guy? girl? How does one tell?

GHQ 2S6 Tunguska added for scale

My skull.

Well, OK, my jaw.

Well, OK, a cast of my upper and lower teeth on the right side that was made so an orthodontist could make me a replacement tooth. (I can neither confirm nor deny the relevance of a bar fight in a biker bar to the tooth replacement necessity.) When I went to get the tooth put in, I asked if I could have the casting. Nobody had any use and they were going to throw it away. So I took it home and built it into a hill. There be giants, y'know…

Nice Russkie AAA and Dino !!!!!

A whole buncha Gil Elvgren's Pin-up Girls illustrations from the late 40s to the mid 60s. Remember the old Pin-up calendars from Brown and Bigelow?

WooHoo!!

A sailing ship made out of cow horn.

Just struck me about some stuff my dad brought home from his tour in the Pacific during WW2 –

> a spark plug picked up in the course of a "self-guided tour" of a Japanese airbase on Eniwetok.

> a couple of small (and PRIMITIVE) hand tools acquired during a "self-guided tour" of Yokosuka Naval Arsenal shortly after the Japanese surrender.

My dad was quite the adventuresome scavenger according to a shipmate of his I had the fortunate opportunity to chat with back in the 90s.

B