[jim]

Originally Posted by djjeffhall

Epapazian,
Hey there.

I've had similiar conversations with Martin, and I certainly respect his opinion and yours.

However, the question that Martin never could answer, and neither can I, is this. If there are so few collectors, where did all the Lancasters go? (Or Donald Duck Spitfires, or pick your rather hard to find bird.)

In the case of Lancasters, they are rare as hens teeth. Corgi has issued 12 liveries, each of which ran 2000 or more. (A few issues ran unlimited (10,000?), two are 5600 and 6000 respectively with the rest around 2000. That equals slightly less than 40000 Lancasters manufactured. According to Martin's numbers that breaks down roughly to 5 each for every "hardcore" collector and 30000 "casual" collectors. Those numbers, while completely speculative would pan out according to the numbers of birds released. (I got those numbers from Tricatus's website. By the way, where has he been lately?)

I can tell you, I don't have any Lancasters and I doubt many folks on this forum that have as many as 5.

What I'm getting at is that I believe there are a lot more collectors than anyone believes. Otherwise, there are TONS of Lancasters and early Corgi
Spitfires sitting on shelfs around the UK and states waiting for someone to discover them. Since no one seems to think this is the case, all these planes went somewhere.

I could be completely wrong of course, but otherwise, with the number of diecast being manufactured, there should be "piles" of birds gathering dust waiting for us "fanatics" to discover them.

I can't fault your reasoning, there must be more out there collecting these things than we think.