About Weekend Hobbyist
Weekend Hobbyist is a buying guide for building toys, board and card games, telescopes, collectible figures, scale model kits and kids' ride-ons sold on Amazon US. It reads makers' specifications and Amazon listings, sorts products by written rules and prints those rules on every list. It does not test products, rate them or show prices. When a value can't be confirmed, the table shows a dash.
The Piñon Loop crew are characters
The site is written as the notes of one shared garage. It sits at the end of a cul-de-sac called Piñon Loop in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with the Organ Mountains out the back window. Bay One holds a car nobody washes. Bay Two is the workbench and the telescope rack. Bay Three is the engine corner and a wall of shelves. On Saturdays the door goes up at nine.
The three people who sign the pages are the site's recurring characters, written by the editors. They are personas, not real people. They have no credentials to offer, and they never claim to have bought, built, played, painted, ridden or looked through any product on this site.
- Marisol Ortega, 52, "the bench". A county land surveyor who owns the house and the garage, with a grown son in Albuquerque who calls on Sundays, mostly. She labels everything, including the label maker. Marisol signs the telescopes and scale model kits pages, plus the brand catalog.
- Theo Park, 38, "the table". A middle-school math teacher who lives across the loop with his wife Dana, an ER nurse, and their kids June (11) and Sam (7). He reads rules out loud in voices. Theo signs board and card games, building toys, the home page and every gift page.
- Luis "Lucho" Benavides, 31, "Bay Three". A service tech at a powersports shop who rents the casita behind Marisol's house. He keeps a helmet wall in Bay Three and three shelves of figures arranged by scale. Lucho signs kids' pit bikes, mini bikes and go karts, and collectible figures.
The characters have opinions about kinds of products and hobby habits. Each opinion comes with a reason you can check: a spec, an age label, a maker's limit or a safety rule. They don't have opinions about how a particular product performed, because nobody here has used it. (Sam, who is 7 and also a character, has opinions about everything. Those don't go on the page.)
How products are picked
Every product on the site is a real, named product listed on Amazon US, in one of six sections: building toys, board games, telescopes, figures, model kits and ride-ons.
- Makers' specs first. Piece counts, scales, apertures, engine sizes, weight limits and similar values come from the maker's own pages, boxes and manuals.
- Amazon listings second. Where a maker is silent, a value may come from the Amazon listing, and the table marks it as a listing value.
- Some fields are read, never imported. Age, player count, piece count, scale, magnification and rider weight limits are taken only from the listing's own title and description or from the maker, never from Amazon's automatic data fields, which get them wrong too often.
- Ages exactly as stated. The age range is the one on the listing or the box. A product never appears on a page for an age below its stated starting age.
- Claims stay claims. A safety standard or a feature like a certified solar filter appears only when the maker says so about that model.
- Written rules for every list. Each best-of list and gift page is built by a rule applied to the data, and the rule is printed with the list. If a rule leaves too few products, the list isn't published on its own.
- No ratings, no scores. The site doesn't give stars or points, and it doesn't rank products by taste.
Licensed lines appear by the line name the listing uses, and nothing more. Prices are never shown, because they change too often to print. The Check price button opens the Amazon page, which has the current price.
Availability on Amazon US is checked every week. A product that's gone is taken out of the tables. A brand with little or nothing left on Amazon US keeps its page, which says so plainly and shows similar products from other makers.
Facts that aren't about a product, such as toy safety, small parts or how a telescope works, come from sources listed at the bottom of the page that uses them. Rules for riding mini bikes, pit bikes and go karts vary by state and town, so the site points you to your local rules instead of giving legal advice.
How the site earns money
Weekend Hobbyist is a participant in the Amazon Associates program. When you follow a Check price button and buy a qualifying item, Amazon may pay the site a commission, and your price stays the same. The details are on the disclosure page.
How to report an error
If a spec, an age label, a link or a sentence looks wrong, tell the editors through the contact page. Name the page and the value, and add a link to the maker's page if you have one. A correction with a source gets fixed first. (Marisol will want to know the source anyway. She keeps a label for it.)