these magazines in 100 issues costing £££££££?

[RoundYonPreMadonna]

eg. Collect and build The Millennium Falcon. £8.99 each. 100 parts.

Or The Mary Rose or 12 thousand bits of doll house.

Adds up to £12 million or something.

Does anyone actually ever complete what they are building?

I did 'how my body works' as a child, but I'm sure that only cost £1.99 or £2.99, and was more like 50 issues fortnightly. Anyway, I missed just one issue and was absolutely gutted that my skeleton had bits missing!

Oh yeah, I did actually read the books as well, I didn't collect it just for the model.

are you tempted by that model of the earth? would probably have to collect until 2020

I know, crazy prices!!

The millennium falcon model is 1:1 scale so by my reckoning £900 for the actual size millennium falcon is a fucking steal

I built a glow in the dark dinosaur and i kept the bookd in a binder.
I loved my trip to w h smiths with my stepmum to go get it.

I think they were £2 an issue, my sister did the body one .
I always pull my kids away from thoose mags muttering 'rip off'

Was just talking about this with my Mum!

I did it as a child with certain ones (this lasted about a month though).

My DS is really into Star Wars but I'd never do it because of the cost..or what if they never finished it?

I really try to avoid children's magazines these days. I prefer to give them the money to save for something etc. My DS will be 5 in March and I used to buy him 1 magazine each week. He really wanted this Transformer toy so I made him a money saving chart and we coloured in the bars on the chart every time we didn't buy a magazine. He had enough money within 4 weeks and was really chuffed!

Anything that teaches kids about "paying in instalments" that doesn't result on owning a house or a car or a similarly large and expensive object is a slippery fucking slope in my opinion. It's a rip off because there is always a cost if you can't pay upfront, sometimes extortionate.

My DH did the orary, and I've used it several times at school when we do planets. It is lovely and sits in the corner going round, the kids love it. When it's not at school it gathers dust in the spare room.
He did the mail order thing, and collected all of it before building it. No OCD here, oh no.

DS would love the globe, but not for £600...

I love those adverts. guess the price and number of issues. then mutter and moan about the cost...

at some point in the pastthere was a puzzle one... which I got a few copies of for a pound each in the charity shop. that was more missable, though the solution is in the next issue... which I will of course not have.

Used to work in publishing. Fairly common knowledge that the business case is made around sales of the first few issues. So they print huge quantities of those and make all the money. After that they've designed the other issues but will print only a few in comparison. Imagine there are subscription deals by post being heavily promoted after issue 3!!

I did the dinosaur one too, i remember it also came with 3d glasses and a 3d image in every magazine!

I'm sure there was a story of an elderly man who had collected something like 98 issues of build the titanic or some such and the company didn't make the last two issues.

DH and I both collected a history magazine as children, can't remember the name now but it came with a tape that I can still recite parts of.

My mum picked ds up the build a skeleton/human body/thing (about child height) with all the bits, organs etc, billy bones or something, with all the magazines, for about a fiver from a carboot. She was quite chuffed with herself on that one, as was ds

I collected 'treasures of the earth' magazine, you got lots of pebbles precious stones in miniature presentation boxes, my mum still has them filed away. You know in case we hit hard times and can pawn the 'fools gold'

My dad completed a radio control car kit and it cost him a fortune! He didn't care though as he learnt loads and had fun comparing with my grandad who also did it. Crazy fools spending a thousand quid on two cars!

That millenium falcon one has got to be the most expensive one I have ever seen though!

As a young teenager, I did Tree of Knowledge. I remember a very interesting article about bridges. Think I collected about 10-15 issues then discovered boys got bored.

I paid for the Horrible Science and the Roald Dahl ones for ds. The 'gifts' were individual ones so I could stop at any time. I hate the ones where you collect for one large item though, how many people get sucked in and can't stop buying them because they will never finish their model otherwise?

My dad collected all of the magazines and built the car for the James Bond DB5 series. He loves it tbf and is a massive James Bond fan but does cringe about the amount he spent now!

Another 'Treasures of the Eart' AND 'How my body works' collector here...lost interest after about 5 issues. Can't beat the excitement of going into the news agent's to see if it was 'in'. My mum bought a few fairy tales ones for me - they came with tapes.

*Earth

I quite like that globe one. I wonder if you can buy anything similar ready made. Even if it was 200 or something, it would be loads cheaper than buying a few bits every week for the next 2 years. But you would probably look at it in a shop and think 200 was bloody extortionate and not buy it.

Do they actually keep making them if you do want to buy the whole thing? You would be pretty pissed off it you had spend 400 building half a millenium falcon, only for them to stop making it because you were the only person in the country still carrying on with it.

My sister collected most of the horrible sciences magazines. Had piles and piles of them.

She also had a rugrats collection once. I think it was a geography based thing? She loved it, whatever it was.