Announcer

Go behind the wheel, under the hood, and beyond with Car Stuff from howstuffworks.com.

Scott Benjamin

Welcome to Car Stuff. I’m Scott Benjamin, the auto editor here at howstuffworks.com.

Ben Bowlin

And you know me, Scott. My name is Ben Bowlin and I hang out with you. And I also work for the same website.

Scott Benjamin

Why do you always feel like you need to introduce yourself to me?

Ben Bowlin

What’s that?

Scott Benjamin

You always introduce yourself to me before every show.

Ben Bowlin

I have a bizarre form of retrograde amnesia.

Scott Benjamin

I guess I do the same to you, though.

Ben Bowlin

Who are you?

Scott Benjamin

Every time. Anyway, so I’m excited about today’s topic.

Ben Bowlin

I can tell. You’ve got a bit of a glow about you.

Scott Benjamin

Maybe I do, yeah. That’s a condition. I’m going to get that taken care of. But the thing we’re going to talk about today is scale model cars. And I’m pretty excited about it because I happen to collect them. I haven’t seen my collection in about four years, though. They’ve been packed away in the basement in storage bins, every one wrapped up in a t-shirt as a matter of fact. So I’m going to get a lot of t-shirts when I finally unpack as well. But I loved collecting them. I used to spend part of my paycheck on these models every couple of weeks or every month or so. I’ve been to a lot of places that have some really cool stuff displayed, unusual things.

And digging into this, I’ve found out a lot more about them. There’s another whole world out there that I had no idea existed.

Ben Bowlin

Absolutely. I had the same experience. And before we go further, we should figure out what type of scale model cars you go for. Most collectors go for a specific, right?

Scott Benjamin

Yeah, they do.

Ben Bowlin

A specific ratio.

Scott Benjamin

We’ll talk about that, too. People collect by all different types of parameters. I have it written down somewhere, how people do it, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But I collect 1:18 scale. And that’s relatively big. They’re about a foot long each, and they have a moderate amount of detail to them. They’re metal. You can usually open the doors and the hood and there’s an engine there. There’s a dashboard that has a little bit of detail to it. There’s usually seats that have some type of grain in them and stuff like that. I guess moderate is the best way to say it.