Somewhere to start

This is my little blog.

It's going to be about my Gear collection.

I've been collecting gear for a little over three years now and I can truly admit that it has become an obsession, an obsession that has driven my girlfriend mad with the amount of time that I spend on the internet, on different forums and ebay drooling over bits of kit.

I've been really into gear ever since I was a little boy, but I never really put two and two together to actually start collecting until only a couple of years ago when I bought a couple of the 12" figures by Dragon and Blue Box. I loved the gear that the figures had and loved the attention to detail. It got me back into noticing little bits when watching war movies and loving the design and thought that goes into each and every piece of gear and kit that is used.
I've always had an obsession with US forces kit and over the years it has gotten all consuming. Suffering from a mild case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder does not help in the case of a collector.

I'll never admit to being the most knowledgeble person when it comes to the gear, especially comms, but this is what i'm into. Some peoples collections make me sick, the amount of time, money and effort that they must have put in is incredible.

So my collection is not the most extensive, expensive or exciting that you might see about, but so far it’s taken me quite a while to amass all the bits that I have.
I will admit that there have been quite a few mistakes made when making purchases, some things that I bought as an impulse buy, instead of doing some decent research and some pieces that I have since sold and now regret.

The first ever bit of kit that I bought when I was still really young was a crappy OD webbing belt and canteen that I used to use for Army Cadets along with a really old respirator haversack that my Dad’s RAF buddy got me. I’ve probably still got these back at my parents house somewhere. I remember being 13 years old and in the Cadets, the thing that made me really jealous of some of the older cadets was that so many of them had their own webbing sets. I was never a big fan of British kit and always was more interested in US kit. Even at a young age I really wanted to get a full set of Alice webbing. So when I eventually started buying kit a couple of years ago this was one of my first purchases.

I'm really into collecting gear to do a USMC Force Recon impression. I love the way that the FSBE II gear looks, it's mostly out of my means at the moment, so I'm having to do with replica versions of the FSBE II kit, most of this is by Pantac or Flyye Industries. I would dearly love to be able to get all the original real steel kit, but I'm going to have to deal with what I can source and find for the time being.
My goal is to create a really detailed and accurate impression using replica equipment and to then replace as much as possible with the real pieces of kit.

It's not just HSLD gear that i'm into, I also really like plain grunt gear. One of my holy grails for a while was to obtain a Point Blank IBA in Woodland pattern. This I did a while back and now I'm in the process of adding little bits to it to make it look as good as I can.

With this blog i'm planning on posting up the kit that i've already got along with an explanation of how or why I got it and with any future purchases.