Justin Porter

Quite excited. Just got the invoice from my distributor and these and the K-Code Comets will be on the shelf at Haven next week. Biggest question becomes if I'll have any left for the Cleveland Model Show! lol

Nice progress so far. The Monogram RX-7 has really good "bones" for a project that just need finessing to really turn it into a realistic finished model. You can probably already spot the biggest issue of them all which is the fit of the rear hatch and glass. Because it sits so proud, it also shows off its thickness and it's hard to work the illusion back from that.

Just another quick post of how things are humming along on the RX-7. I'm really pleased with how the interior color combination sets off against the San Marino Blue.

These are already arriving at distributors so I'm quite excited to have them coming in soon. Seeing the box contents and now knowing that Moebius actually delivered on a ground-up Pro Touring release genuinely makes me happy.

After a busy Saturday as a vendor at Plastic Undercover in Copley, Ohio, I came back to the shop fully ready to get back to my RX-7. The undercarriage all went together without a glitch, with me adding a little playful touch going with green on the struts as if they were an aftermarket set of Tein performance struts. The interior is being finished in a combination of Cobra Motors Reddish Leather and Mr Color C116 Black Gray. I applied the Quinta printed decals to the dashboard and WOW am I glad I picked these up. They really do wake up the Tamiya dashboard. I did a quick mock up just to check progress and I am entirely happy with how this build is progressing.

Very much still available. Picked it up for $10 plus shipping from Sprue Brothers.

It's always good to see this kit getting built. The scarcity makes folks understandably nervy about building them. Love the colors and detailing you're doing so far.

After my less than satisfying conclusion to my Belvedere, I decided to retreat into the cozy familiarity of Tamiya 1/24th scale sports car kits. I had seen the Quinta Studios 3D printed interior detail sets advertised so I decided this would be a fun project to try them on. I decided on Cobra Motors San Marino Blue under their 2K clear for a color and set to work.

Some additional announcements, not yet with box art, as of 10/3/25 AMT-1490 1/25 1927 Ford T Touring Car AMT-1518 1/25 Coca-Cola Volkswagen Van Show Rod AMT-1534 1/25 1936 Ford Coupe Gasser AMT-1548 1/25 2004 Pontiac GTO AMT-1555 1/24 Li'l Stogie Show Rod MPC-1034 1/25 Hot Wheels Python

I could see a '67 Galaxie 500XL kit especially if it included a good quality lowrider option. Probably the biggest hurdle to such a kit is that the two groups of non-replica stock builders who would be most interested in the kit - lowrider builders and modern restomod/pro touring builders - would almost need a more detailed chassis than you would find under a Craftsman Plus clone. Could it be a modest success? Probably. If I were going to wager on what would be a smart tooling investment, though, it would be a modern replacement for the old '63 Galaxie 500 kit. The big '63 Ford Galaxies have a worldwide appeal that a 2n1 kit with reasonable parts to create a touring car racing version would be a hit. Seeing the Galaxies sliding around at the Goodwood Revival surely is all the sales push the kit would need.

I'm certainly glad to see everyone so excited for the Tudor. Completely catches me off guard. Personally speaking, I'd rather see a new-tool Tudor body and interior go onto the Phantom Vickie chassis BUT clearly this is the option folks get excited for.

The most recent Revell reissue to hit our shores - arriving at Stevens International yesterday so it ought to be hitting LHS shelves by week's end - is the "Captain Hook" release of the GMC wrecker, kit #4590. MSRP is $28.95. The reissue of the Monogram Fiero (kit 4573) had an MSRP of $27.95. Revell is doing a fair job of keeping their prices competitive.

Well, that's a bummer. An early body Miura is way up there alongside an S1 Europa on my "Yes we have one, but we need THIS version" list.

Hasegawa doing a Miura P400 is HUGE news! An early body Miura without the flared SV fenders and with the headlight eyelashes would be so welcome as a change of pace!

- Modified Stocker Kits The tooling practices of MPC in the 1970's are not relevant to the tooling practices of Round 2 at present save for what the costs involved are of undoing what's been done versus the sales potential of the "undone" kits. Round 2 certainly has proven that if the sales potential is there they will step up to the plate and give builders some form of replica stock option. - Round and the Lowrider '70 Monte Carlo The stock 454 Monte Carlo was most recently reissued by Round 2 in 2015. It will likely make a reappearance. By comparison, the lowrider Monte Carlo hadn't been seen since 2002. In this instance, the lowrider genre builders were the ones who had been underserved in terms of kit availability. - Revell and the Custom Cadillac Lowrider This kit was never designed to be a replica stock Cadillac and wears body modifications typical to lowrider Cadillacs of that generation. Regarding it as being flawed for not being able to be built stock is like regarding the Revell Foose FD100 or the AMT Wagonrod as being flawed for not being able to be built stock. - Round 2 Craftsman kits I am reasonably certain that the Craftsman trend will continue for as long as there are customers to support it. Round 2 has already made their next batch reasonably well publicized with the '60 Chevy wagon and the Plymouth Barracuda. They have their target audience and they have enough subject matter to choose from that I would say it's safe to assume they'll serve that target audience for as long as it's viable. - Moebius We have no evidence to suggest Moebius is uninterested in producing replica stock kits. As to offering 2n1 kits, their stock and non-stock versions are usually sufficiently different from each other (restomod Nova kits aside) so as to justify completely separate boxings, instruction sheets, and releases. If we consider something like the Nova Gasser kit, if we were to combine that with the stock Nova II kit, we're looking at a box with two separate chassis, two engines, a full engine bay that isn't used by one fashion of building, and nearly two complete interiors. I'd be willing to safely bet that'd be an MSRP of around $55-$60. I can definitely tell you that even with all of the "spares" in the box, that pricetag would cut the kit's shelf appeal off at the knees and instead of the Moebius Nova Gasser being one of my top volume car kits, it would be a dust collector sold to one or two diehards.

A full size example isn't always available to be measured or scanned. Combining research materials and extrapolating through proportion and known measured points is the routine by which military kits are accurately produced especially when it comes to ships. Funniest thing is that the method I just used - scaling photographs from a prototype and reverse engineering measurements - is actually how Aurora got their Jaguar E-Type kits to market first by photographing show cars well before other kit manufacturers had full blueprints.

AMT1414 - 1/25 1932 Ford Tudor Street Rod AMT1497 - 1/25 Hot Wheels 1969 COPO Camaro AMT1533 - 1/25 1957 Ford Fairlane Hardtop 3n1 MPC1031 - 1/25 Hot Wheels 1957 Chevy Sedan Flipnose

A fun experiment goes like this. According to How Stuff Works, a 1958 Plymouth stands 53.5" tall. If we convert that to measurements that dial calipers like, that's 1359mm. Divided by 25 that gives us a scale height of 54.36mm. If we take Horrorshow's side profile picture and play around with resizing percentages until it prints at a height of 54.36 we get a 1/25th scale side profile of a real 1958 Plymouth. We then can take a measurement of the side window aperture at the place where it looks the worst to my eye and on the real Plymouth it measures out at 12.53mm. Now all we need is someone with dial calipers and an AMT Belvedere to check their own findings. I will also grant this is just rough calculations based on 10 minutes of Google and playing with my printer.

The best way I can corroborate this is to offer what I have witnessed. Drag kits do almost always sell well. Even some of the ones you wouldn't expect to sell well - the Atlantis reissue of the Revell Mooneyes dragster for instance - do pretty well to the point where no matter how ridiculous a drag reissue may seem (Mopower Plymouth Funny for instance) you don't really want to be caught out without it on the shelf. The big catch, though, is that you have to accept that you will ultimately get stuck with product. There are a handful of kits that have seemed impervious to this in the past - for instance, while I could get them, I could never seem to have enough of the Revell Henry J Gassers on my shelves - but for a lot of drag kits there seems to be an initial bonanza followed by sales grinding to a halt.

Well, this is an instance for honesty. It has been a LONG time since I have worked with enamels and this paint job with Alclad's Candy Cobalt Blue proves that. I laid down the Alclad Aqua Gloss clear coat FAR too soon and the Candy Blue, which was still gassing out, cracked the clear. Attempts to wet sand out the cracking just led to burn through. I was tempted to strip and start over, but it's a useful tool to show what one poor decision can lead to with a finish. I am happy with how the engine bay, chassis, and interior turned out. I might attempt this build again eventually.

Here's the misinterpretation. You are right, it's not a zero sum game from the end customer's standpoint. Two different customers can want and purchase two different products. That's entirely true. What is a zero sum game is the manufacturing and distribution side. As we are so very VERY often reminded, the effort to bring a new kit to market costs a large amount of money in design, licensing, tooling, and other manufacturing costs. As such, the model manufacturers - even the largest ones - rarely bring more than a handful of all new kits to market each year. As a retailer, these new announcements shape a great deal of my financial decisions for a year. When respected and well loved companies announce new kits of popular subjects, I know I can expect good sales. When manufacturers with poor reputations announce kits of niche products, I know I can expect bad sales. Ergo, what I want as a retailer is lots of new kits of popular subjects from manufacturers that have good reputations. A manufacturer that is new to the scene can build a good reputation by delivering excellent kits at reasonable prices of coveted subjects - a good military kit analogy would be Kotare with their 1/32nd scale Spitfire MkI - but this is a tougher road to walk that requires the body behind the counter to do some heavy lifting to assure potential customers that the new brand offers something they want. A hypothetical Johan as has been described in this thread - not the efforts of Atomic City which I respect for serving their niche even if the product itself leaves me personally cold - would be spending their hypothetical tooling budget NOT on producing modern kits of popular subjects. They would not be providing me with a new opportunity to markedly increase sales with another strong anchor brand. Revell has gone quiet on the new-tool front and has even been struggling with their supply chain to distributors on existing product (over a year since I've been able to restock the '64 Impala, for instance) and Round 2 has made it clear they are a nostalgia brand, not a modeling brand. That leaves Moebius effectively all alone to create NEW products in the domestic auto genre. So what I want, badly, as a retailer, is another domestic auto anchor brand. That's why I don't want this hypothetical "scan the old kits" Johan. That hypothetical company wouldn't be offering products that could benefit my business. If there was any brand from modeling past that I would want back at this moment in time, it would be AMT/Ertl. There was a company, for all its foibles, that married classic subject matter with modern kit design at a reasonable price to deliver some all time great models.

There are subjects that Johan did that I would love to see released as MODERN kits. As builder AND as a retailer, I would be thrilled to see a Salvinos JR tooled NASCAR 1970 Plymouth Superbird, or a Moebius tooled 1971 AMC Javelin, or an ICM tooled Mercedes 500K. No. I do not want the Johan kits back. No. I do not want the Johan brand back. No. I do not want another backwards gazing vintage (or faux vintage recreation) brand on my shelves. We have Round 2. We have Atlantis. We do not need Johan beside them. You want me to be excited about the prospect of Johan injection molded kits? Okay, tell me that Johan will start to use polycaps for wheel attachment instead of wire axles. Tell me that Johan is sublicensing slide-molding technology from Bandai. Tell me that Johan is hiring the T-Rex CAD studio that's subcontracted by major kit manufacturers like Takom and Meng. Tell me that they want to deliver products that will be relevant - both in subject and design - to builders under the age of dirt. Otherwise, it's just not a product I see a future in. You seem to think otherwise, but I'm willing to bet no piece-for-piece reissue of the '68 Plymouth Fury police car is going to match the sales of the upcoming all-new tool Aoshima 1/24th scale F&F MkIV Toyota Supra.

Nope, and the screw posts are on the underside of the hood instead of attached to a core support too.

Who's this "they" that you're talking about? Moebius has offered stock versions of every subject they've kitted. Chrysler 300's, '61 Pontiacs, the various Hudsons, all of the 1965 Mopar products, the Novas, the Ford trucks. ALL of them have factory stock kit versions. Revell's general idea of modern "street machine" is a vaguely lowered suspension option, some wheels, and maybe an air cleaner or some disc brakes (case in point, the '56 Del Rey kit) which reveals their focus on factory stock. Their most popular all-new tool kit - the 1971 Mustang - hasn't even BEEN offered in a non-factory stock version. Round 2 has spent this decade so far restoring or remaking tooling so that factory stock builds are possible with kits like their '68 GTO, the Nova II wagon, the '64 Olds, and the '64 Malibu. They even "unmade" the Street Machine version of the Mueller-era 1971 Charger to create a never before offered factory stock '71 Hemi Charger kit. I don't know what you're on about because from where I'm sitting, factory stock builders are being treated better by the industry currently, not worse.

CAD looks much better than I was expecting and I am stoked that it will be full detail. Should be a wonderful shelfmate for my Tamiya Giulia.