What I Collect By Dave Tallon, Tallon Custom Collectibles Since the February theme for TTT is "How do you decide what to collect?", I am taking a break this month from customizing tips to participate in the discussion.  I think it is a delimia we all face.  The toy companies seem to be raising the bar with more detail and more features with every new release, making it very hard to resist running out and buying them as soon as they hit the shelves.  We all have a limited amount of money to spend on toys and limited amount of space to store or display them.  So how does one choose which ones to buy?  For me, the answer is to pick a specific category of models that interest me, and try to stick to buying models that fit in those categories. The items I buy for my collection are primarily ones that I plan on putting on display.  Every once in a while I will buy something as an investment to leave in the box, but usually the packaging goes by the wayside as soon as I get it home.  Since I only have a limited amount of room for displaying my toys, I primarily focus my collection on 1/64 scale.  Even then, I have more models than I can display, so I will occasionally rotate which collections I have on the shelves and which ones I keep in storage.   I prefer to collect models that are harder to find or have to be custom built.  This helps sustain my interest in the collection by keeping it from growing too fast or too large.  I also try to limit my collections to items that I have some personal association with.  Along these lines, the items I am actively collecting right now generally fall into one of two categories; machines from my family history, or machines related to my job at Caterpillar. My Dad helping my Grandpa planting  corn with his John Deere 70 The collection that I started when I first started taking an active interest in the hobby a few years ago, and the one that is still most dear to me, is my collection of machines that have been a part of my family. One of my greatest thrills as a child was visiting my grandpa Tallon's farm.  I remember vivedly riding with him in the tractors and combines during the spring and fall, and "helping" him tinker with his antique tractors or playing hide and seek with my brother and sister among the tractors in the machine sheds during the summer months.   By the time I was old enough to help out, however, Grandpa was "retired" and I had already missed out on the glory days of the family farm.  Most of my farming memories came second hand via stories and pictures, which fortunately for me, there were plenty of.  I found that collecting models of the tractors and equipment used on the farm is a great way for me to remember those stories, and to spark memories of new stories in those that lived through them. The tractor of my grandpa's that was my favorite was a Massey Harris 44 Special pulling tractor.  A 1/16 scale version of that tractor was the first piece in my collection.  This tractor not only sparked my interested in collecting tractors, but opened my eyes to the tractor customizing hobby, and the toytractorshow.com website.  I followed it up with another puller from my family history, a 1/16 John Deere 4010.  After building these two tractors, however, I realized that I did not have the display space, nor the budget, to continue with a 1/16 scale collection.  So, I shifted my focus to 1/64.  In addition to the aformentioned Massey and 4010, my collection includes 1/64 versions of each, plus a JD 6030, JD 70 LP, Oliver 1900, Oliver 70 Row Crop and several others.   As it stands now, this collection is about half complete.  Most of the tractors from my family history were either pullers, or vintage iron that is not as readily available as all the variations of modern tractors.  Because of this, adding these tractors to my collection usually requires at least a little customizing and/or quite a bit of searching. Although I enjoy collecting models of tractors from my family history, those are not the only models in my collection.  I have to admit that being employed by Caterpillar has instilled more than a little "yellow blood" in me.  Because of this, I enjoy collecting Caterpillar models.  As with most other large tractor or equipment manufacturers like Deere or CaseIH, there are too many Caterpillar models for most people, including myself, to try to collect them all.  For that reason, I have several sub-categories of Cat models that I focus on. The first category includes models that I have worked on during my career at Caterpillar.  During my brief time at Cat, I have worked on a wide variety of machines.  I operated a 320C months before they were available to the public, and was there for the assembly of the very first 5110B, just to name a few.  Norscot has produced models of several of these machines I have worked on, and several others I have been able to add to my collection by customizing a similar model.  It is a great feeling to look at these models and know I played a part in the development of those machines.  I still would like to add several pieces to this collection of machines I have worked on in the past, and my list continues to grow as I work on new machines that are yet to be released. My newest collection combines my interest in farm tractors with my interest in Caterpillar.  It is a collection of Cat related ag tractors.  It started with the Caterpillar and AGCO Challengers, but has grown to include antique Cat tractors used in agriculture, as well as tractors and machinery made by other manufacturers that have been powered by Cat engines.  I have really enjoyed researching the different tractors from the 1920's through present day, and selecting significant ones to target for my collection.  Like my "Tallon Farms" collection, many of these toys are hard to find or have never been produced, and thus require customizing or building from scratch. Also like my Tallon Farms collection, the models in my Cat Ag collection are primarily 1/64 scale, but I also have a few larger scale pieces. I just began this collection last summer, so I have a long way to go before it is complete, and I look forward to finding and building the models that I hope to someday add. Even with these fairly specific collecting interests, I would be lying if I told you that I limited my purchases to only items that fall in these collections.  I think sometimes we all find a model that may not exactly fit with the rest of our collection, but is, for whatever reason, just too hard to pass up.  While it is good to focus your collections to help you decide what to buy, we are all in this hobby to have fun, and the most important thing is to not lose sight of that fact as you are doing your toy shopping.  For more information and pictures of my collections, visit the "Collection" page on my website at http://www.talloncc.com/page01.html.

TTT February 2004 Page 4

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