Allen Wrench

Very cool! I really like the black wheels!

Actually, they can and will as long as automotive modelers are willing to accept wildly subpar efforts, and until such time as they start voting with their wallets and demanding better.

A more fair point of comparison might be the Moebius/Model King vintage NASCAR kits, like the '61 Pontiac, '55-'56 Chryslers and '52-'53 Hudsons. Those kits usually sell for $30-$35, and, while they have their shortcomings, they leave the Salvinos Olds in the dust.

I don't know if anyone else picked up on this on the Mike's Facebook page. This is a post from Rick Salvino himself, copied and posted here verbatim ... "Sorry I like to make one more comment. Don’t worry about the people that are picking are kit apart they expect a $80.00 Tamiya kit that can be sold worldwi5de in a $39.95 that is for a small slice of the hobby.We have exceeded all expectations and more !!! " Wow. Just wow. I've got some news for ya, Mr. Salvino ... Tamiya's Mercedes AMG GT3 kit sells for about $50, or roughly $10 more than uour misbegotten Olds. And, while it's a curbside, it makes your kit looks like it was designed by a toddler with crayons. (Which, let's be honest, it pretty much does, anyway.) If you can get past the mangled English, you can practically feel the hubris dripping from that post, too. I'm inclined to not ever buy any of these guys' products just because they come off as arrogant jerks.

I don't anything about filmmaking, but I know a bad movie when I see one. I'm not a chef, but I know a bad meal when I taste one. I don't know anything about brewing, but I know bad beer when I taste it. I don't play any musical instruments and know nothing about the workings of a recording studio, but I know bad music when I hear it. I don't know anything about manufacturing, but I know a shoddily made consumer product when I get one. Your point is invalid.

Exactly. While Salvinos is supposedly creating the cotect rear suspension parts, it was stated on the Mike's Decals Facebook page that the front suspension probably won't be fixed, although Mike did say he was planning to offer the correct parts in resin. (At additional cost, no doubt.) And even if they fix both the front and rear suspensions, that does nothing to rectify that horribly misproportioned engine block/transmission, the oversized transmission/driveshaft tunnel, etc. But hey! We should be thankful to Salvinos for giving us the opportunity to purchase such an inferior product and we'd better go out and buy as many as we can, otherwise, they might not make any more of them!

... and who still bemoan the fact that Wal-Mart no longer sells AMT kits in checkered boxes for $5 each. This particular school of thought, combined with the willingness of car modelers to accept subpar, inaacurate kits, are why we can't have nice things like the military modelers.

And what is really galling is the attitude of the kit's manufacturer, chief distributor and their sycophants that people should willing accept, and even be thankful for the opportunity to shell out their hard-earned dollars for, a product that they themselves acknowledge is subpar and riddled with inaccuracies. If you went into a restaurant and were served a bad meal that made you violently ill, I seriously doubt you'd be mollified by excuses like "The meal was a one-man effort" or "It's the first time the chef ever cooked that meal." And I expect you'd be downright furious if the manager told you should be thankful the establishment provided you with the opportunity to be served such a terrible meal. And finally, I don't think you'd continue to patronize the restaurant because you wanted to see it succeed. I'll simply never understand why so many car modelers willingly, even cheerfully, accept junk in boxes like this Olds kit and even berate and belittle those who have the temerity to point out that what they're purchasing is, in fact, junk. It all goes ro reinforce beliefs that the IQs of a lot of modelers are a lot like a Hobby Lobby coupon; 40 percent off from normal.

I completely agree. Mike is obviously twisting himself into a pretzel making excuses for this kit's shortcomings because he has a financial stake in the project. If you go to the thread on the Mike's Decals Facebook page, Mike gors on to say in a separate post that Salvinos welcomes "constructive criticism" of the Olds kits. Uh, no, sorry, it obviously doesn't when it's scrubbing posts that are even mildly critical of the kit from its Facebook page. Speaking of the Mike's Facebook page, I'd highly recommend going there and reading the comments on Mike's post defending the Olds kits if you want a good laugh. One gets the idea from those comments that if Salvinos was selling actual feces in boxes, some people would label anyone who dared to complain a "whiner" or a "rivet-counter" and tell them in no uncertain terms they should be thankful someone was still producing feces in boxes.

Different suspension setups won't do anything to fix that mess of an engine, unfortunately.

Do you really think any negative ones would remain up for long?

IMO, a newly tooled NASCAR kit released in 2018 should be done to AT LEAST the same standards of quality and accuracy as the Monogram and AMT/ERTL NASCAR kits released by those respective companies more than 30 years ago. This one falls well short of that mark. What we have here, essentially, is a mashup of the Polar Lights NASCAR Charger chassis and a styrene clone of a poorly done diecast body, shot through with a generous helping of '70s MPC NASCAR kit DNA. Yeah, I suppose one could build this thing into a halfway decent-looking shelf model if one wanted to put the effort into doing so, but, if an accurate replica of a NASCAR Olds of this era is your goal, I think your best route is a resin body and a chassis from one of the aforementioned AMT/ERTL kits.

It looks like they basically copied the old MPC two-piece adjustable-wheelbase NASCAR chassis, and I'd be willing to bet that's why it has leaf springs and torsion bar front suspension. The engine block/transmission looks terrible _ the block, heads and valve covers are too short and the transmission is too long. What a hot mess this kit turned out to be, and, the sad thing is, it didn't have to be that way. It's not like it would have been difficult for the Salvinos to do some homework and get it right. As it stands, the kit pretty much screams "poorly researched and rushed into production." Nice decals, though.

Very cool-looking street stormer!

The AMT '62 Catalina is and always has been a stellar kit. Round 2 made it even better by combining the stock and custom versions in one box and including templates for side windows. It's also a great basis for the nostalgic/fictitious PG II kit. I preferred the previous version, mainly because.of the Beswick decals, but I will still probably get one of these.

The Salvinos have stated as much on their Facebook page. They tried to claim the kit was done this way because the chassis is based on one Petty used, which was a leftover from one of his Dodge Magnums. This is bull honky for a couple of reasons: 1. Petty's Olds wasn't built by Petty Enterprises; the King purchased the car from Cecil Gordon. 2. There's no way NASCAR would have allowed the car on the track with leaf springs.

Superb job on a great kit.

I'm not overly familiar with the Franklin Mint model that was used as the prototype for the Savinos kit, but, my guess is that it had the leaf spring rear suspension, so they just went with it.

The point is that the kit is perfectly acceptable to the majority of people who will buy it, just as it was to the majority of people who bought it in its multiple other iterations over the years. Therefore, Revell has no real financial incentive to upgrade it or to tool up a new version. That's not "opinion." That's fact. If the kit is not acceptable to you, your choices are A. Don't buy it, or B. Buy it and put the work in it necessary to make it acceptable to you. Sometimes, that is just how it is ... in hobbies and in life.

The only time Revell is likely to make major upgrades to an existing tool is A. If there's something glaringly wrong with it, and B.If they believe the improvements will have enough of a positive impact on sales to justify the cost of the fixes. The upcoming '69 Boss 302 Mustang with the retooled body is one kit that would seem to meet that criteria. The GMC pickup? Not so much, because, honestly, the improvements would likely go unnoticed by most of the people who would buy the kit.

If you want to build a truly accurate Stroppe Baja Bronco, the best route by far is still the standard kit and the excellent Fireball Modelworks conversion kit.

Righteous!

Correct you are. It's a case of people not understanding the difference between being a "customer" and an "end user."

The Rodfather was the first revised reissue of the Tweedy Pie. It was one of several Roth kits that underwent "de-Rothing" after Revell disassociated itself with Big Daddy. I'm pretty sure the pickup bed was not an option in the original kit, but was tooled for the Rodfather, as Revell had to add some new parts to differentiate the kit from the Roth version. Other new parts would have included the wheels and tires (obviously) and the stock T grill shell. The Tweedy Pie-specific parts deleted for the Rodfather and subsequent versions were retooled by Revell and included in the most recent issue of the kit.

I'm pretty sure the reason this is happening is that the management of Hobbico and Revell got tired of people criticizing Revell's products and decided it would be best to just go out of business. If only we had heeded the warnings ...