niteowl7710

I got $5 on the Boxter being a straight reissue of the Wheels of Fire SnapTite kit. Everything on that list is a straight reissue of an existing tool with the exception of the '57 Wagon and the Ford Ranger. UNLESS the Ford Ranger is the old '80s Monogram F-150 Ranger that's the cousin to the era Ford Bronco that Revell has run not that long ago. Also whether the ZL1 is an actual model kit this go around, or a molded in white version of the pre-painted kit. The Auto Transport Trailer is the old Revell AG tooled car hauler trailer, nice to have back considering the price point of those on eBay these days.

Revell has repackaged the Heller Bentley at least twice since the 1980s. It's usually a good 15 years or so between "reissues". Heller is a fully functional company again being bought out of receivership a few years ago. They've quietly been reissuing several of their "Big C" classic car kits with next to no notice of anyone on this side of the Atlantic.

As of this evening the release dates on Tower Hobbies are as Jonathan stated. For whatever reason Revell's 4Q releases are sliding hind-end right out of 2014 for the most part. Everyone wonders where the 1Q 2015 announcements are, while the 4Q Corvette is sliding out of control into the 2Q of '15. If Revell hasn't gotten the memo about including decals in the pre-paints after the first round of ZL-1 & Challengers, wake me when they get around to a full detail glue kit.

Just order them from the source. http://www.policecarmodels.com/ch1de1.html Jeff Halpern that runs that site bought out the rights to Chimneyville...what must be at least 5 years ago. I dunno what you paid for the off-hand duplicate, but a complete original sheet only runs $8.00.

Looks to me like someone is bootlegging Chimneyville's decals. They did that sheet originally back with all their others in the early/mid 90s, but that reproduction is missing part of the San Antonio decals and all of the Texas DPS markings (with the exception of that one "State Trooper"), there was also never a large "1/24" in the middle of the decals like that.

I do belong to a club, and we do put on a very successful show. Since the "judging" is People's Choice, the club members and various sponsors will award specific Best of This, That or the Other thing. Because what I've found from years of attending shows, and even from within the debate we had about what the theme should be for our show in 2015 is that clubs and club members tend to champion the things they build. If no one in the club builds "tuners", "exotics", or "imports" or however the class is worded, then they tend to presume that NO one does, and possibly worse yet they hold some of the views espoused here about young punks, and the generic disdain of anything Foreign. You usually only have to attend a show once to get a vibe of how open minded the host club (and thereby judging and class setting) is towards things built after 1972, assembled at a point of origin outside the U.S. To Jonathan's point about not bringing tuners to display, if you get the gist that your genre of preference isn't welcome since it doesn't meet the compatibility requirements of the close minded club/judges, why on Earth would you enter? There's nothing more "entertaining" than hearing the judges make snide remarks about a model based on SOLELY on the SUBJECT MATTER of the entry without regard to craftsmanship or skill of the builder.

The kit itself is just the old Monogram Citation that was an unfortunate victim of Revell's "Lowride ALL THE THINGS!!!" kit series that they did.

Man if $7 worth of plaques is gonna make or break the event's budget it might be time to examine the club's finances in general. If you're that fearful of low attendance don't put the year on them, or get trophies with adhesive "award" area brass etchings, so you can pull off the old ones and recycle the actual trophies into another class when you decide not to have the class anymore.

Hit a large deer for the second time in as many years. The last time it was a brand new car and State Farm paid to fix it, this time it's on a 9yr old, 146k mile truck that has liability only. So it's defacto totaled, as it's gonna need repairs that cost probably 3x what the truck itself is worth. In the mean time I have no vehicle to get to work with tomorrow, and my wife is treating me like I ran the deer over at 4am on the way home from work TODAY on purpose. Oh did I mention I was borrowing this truck off my Mother-in-Law... Oh and it's the intersection of property taxes, no savings from various stuff breaking around here, and needing to buy fuel oil for the winter...

I would like to interject that added a wing, some fake carbon fiber, and a fart can exhaust doesn't make a car a "tuner" any more than going shopping in the Edlebrock engine dress-up section of Summit Racing and tossing on a set of Keystone mags makes something a "Hot Rod/Muscle Car". Also if you airdropped someone from another planet into the 1940s to look at the sea of.jellybean shaped cars (everything old is new again) they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Same goes for the Fabulous Fins of the 50s. Regardless of what you think of current automotive styling, you're looking at things through a haze of nostalgia and memories at best if you really want to pretend that once the newest automotive styling trend hit in whatever decade of the past, that in a few short years EVERY car didn't immediately adopt it and everything started to look the same.

I think there's a bit of the classic Catch 22 involved as well. People who build "Tuners" don't show them because there's no place to put them. Show organizers think there's no reason for the category because no one enters those type of models. There have been some instances recently where people who build these type of cars are entering them into the '69 to Present Street Machine class. Several times they've won which caused the fuddy duddies to howl that the car didn't belong in the class because it was Foreign. The vehicle is a customized late model vehicle set up in an SCCA weekend racer/daily driver style. What class DOES that go into then? It's not Factory/Replica Stock, it's not a full blown Circle Track...

This kit came out on September 30th. Aoshima being revolutionary and releasing a model in the same calender year of the 1:1 subject represents.

It's being reboxed here as a Rabbit GTi. But of course it'll be the usual USA hack rebox meaning US Spec decals on a German Spec model kit. See '68 Beetle thread for expected whining of people who actually expect them to tool pieces to make it fully US Spec. Of interest is that Tower Hobbies is showing the flat box Golf GTi AG kit as orderable for December along with the Cabriolet which marks an apparent reversal in Hobbico's "No Direct Import of Reboxed Kits" rule. Which seemed a bit disingenuous considering they reverse imported the Revell AG reboxed Snap-Tite Police Impala, '69 Charger & Viper ACR kits to us at the $35 Revell AG price tag.

For once I can honestly say I don't see much wrong with this thing that can't be tweaked in test shot revisions. Yeah the wheels need fixed, the C-Pillar isn't quite there. Along with that the "kick-out" behind the front door to the rear of the car is super prominent on the test shot and is rather subdued on the real thing. The front of the spear over the front wheel wells is not quite tall enough and seems to end OVER the wheel well (as in it has a bottom), rather than the bottom of the spear being "lost" on the wheel well(wheel well cutting into the spear). Lastly the bottom character line on the real car kicks up on a jaunty angle towards the bumper while the test shot shows it going straight from the front to the back of the car like someone laid a level on the side of the car and drew a line. But none of that is unfixable. It's not too long or too short, it's not pre-chopped for my inconvenience. I'm presuming since this thing has a 3Q2015 tag attached Dave and other have noted the above and will fix it in subsequent tooling shots. If you just go Google Image search the car depending on what angle it's taken at it's a sporty 2 door, or a borderline land yacht. The acre and a half of monotone gray doesn't help things, nor shooting it through a glass display case.

If you ever have a question about what Tamiya kits are curbside and which aren't just ASK someone around here, there's enough people contained here that the answer will arrive post haste as it were. I went looking at my Tamiya stash after reading that "rare" statement, and by my count of 60 Tamiya kits, 40 have full-on engines, 3 have engine inserts, and 16 are straight curbsides. Not rare at all actually.

Hard for me to get too excited about seeing that Black Widow Hot Rod thing come back out. Every LHS in the area has at LEAST one of the supposedly highly limited SSP reissues from last year. I get putting it in the general catalog will expose it to more eyes, and onto the shelves at Wally World, Michael's, etc, but when you reissue the same kit - especially one that didn't sell the last time you did it 12-15 months ago, that's treading into the '99 Ford Lighting territory where you just roll your eyes and wonder why it's back again. The Blue Whateverwe'recallingittoavoidlicensingfees is at least something that's been gone for a long time, been tooled back to it's origins, and while not something that interests me is a cool piece to see come back to the market.

Big Lots went upmarket several years ago. You can buy furniture and beds and stuff from them, we got our sectional sofa and matching recliner there about 5 years ago, all LazyBoy stuff in a pattern they weren't going to carry anymore at their stores for about $800 out the door with delivery which was about a third of what it cost buying it direct from LazyBoy or in a "real" furniture store.

Few more things that have rolled in off eBay the last two weeks. I love this time of year, when wives force their husbands to clean out the attic/basement/shed/closet, etc and people start wanting money for Christmas. The price was just TOO RIGHT (although the Alpina went for more than I would have liked) on these not to snag them. DSC01916 (1280x1022) by niteowl7710, on Flickr

The Tamiya Countachs are based on old motorized toys, so they are extremely basic low part count curbsides. I guess at this point with all of the "Big 3" Japanese companies having them, Tamiya sees no reason to retool it. Aoshima's Countach series - there are 6 kits; (2)LP400s, one with P/E, one base kit, a LP500R Japanese Import Model, 5000QV, and Version 1 and 2 of the Walter Wolf car. Of those kits the "Optional Part" LP400 and this Walter Wolf Version 2 are out of production, but still easily found (my LHS has the LP400 as a matter of fact). The series started in 2010 and Aoshima measured, photographed and 3-D scanned the cars directly at the Lamborghini Museum. The 5000QV kit for example is a completely different body, engine and wheel tooling than the LP400 kit that started the series. If you're a Countach nut, no one has ever made the '79-'81 400S, but if you want a 500(0)S or 25th Anniversary Countach to round out the full line then you have two options from Fujimi. They offer both of them in BOTH Real Sports Car and Enthusiast boxings in the current catalog. The RSC kits are scaled back curbside versions of the monster 250+ part Enthusiast versions and there's usually about a $10-12 lower price for the de-contenting of them.

Our new Volvos at work have "Volvo Economy Cruise" which uses the same radar system as Freightliner. Thankfully it's more forgiving on false echo positives just beeping. OnGuard has the tendency to also slam the brakes on too, which was always fun when you're just tooling along at 65 at 2am, without any traffic in sight in any direction, and the next minute you're doing 48 hanging on for dear life.

If you click on the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page Harry posted you can e-mail Customer Service. I had a 360 Modena I picked up open at a show and the decals were shot to heck and back. I e-mailed the Customer Service explaining the problem and requesting the cost of replacement decals. 3 days later I got an e-mail back stating decals were enroute, and by the end of the week I had them. They REALLY didn't have to replace that sheet at no cost, it wasn't their fault the previous owner stored the kit poorly.

Oddly enough I've had the opposite problem selling kits recently. People are SO accustomed to every kit being sealed on the shelf that when I resell the stuff I import I get uncomfortable looks because none of it is shrink wrapped. Much like Revell AG using those little tape circles to seal their boxes, Japanese kits are 99.98% unsealed when you import them over. Had a guy insist I must have done SOMETHING to Model Kit XYZ because it wasn't sealed and it was "too cheap". Insisted that every foreign kit he's ever seen has been shrink wrapped. Well yeah, MRC and other Distributors seal them HERE after they arrive from Japan. How did you think they got their logo beneath the shrink wrap in the 1st place? Black Magik?!?! As for too cheap...well I'm importing DIRECTLY from Japan, don't worry I'm making my profit sir.

A major factor is that unless you are an independent Owner Operator the vast majority of fleets (LandStar is the big exception off the top of my head) require a truck to be 7 years old or newer. Part of it is insurance, part of it is economics in the sense of repairs and fuel costs. The only service a trucking company can sell is On Time service, and having your O/O with the 60s/70s cabover constantly broken down and scouring around for NOS parts to fix it just isn't good business. I know that in order to get an older truck on even at LandStar it's going through an inspection more thorough than anything the DOT would do. They want their name on the side of SAFE equipment, not some remounted old cab on a new glider chassis. One of the small local Mail Contractors has a KW123, and a Pete 358, but he's making a couple of 80 mile daily round trips with them, nothing major, nothing OTR.

Fujimi also made a tuner version for Tommy kaira as well. If you're just interested in the idea of a 2 door Impreza WRX STi itself, the regular factory stock one is still in the active Fujimi catalog and can be backordered at HobbyLink Japan. http://www.hlj.com/product/FUJ03532/Aut

I think the closure of Route 88 at Route 51 did a number on attendance. Originally the road wasn't supposed to close until 9am, then overnight they switched it to 0730. I didn't get that memo, and I presume most people who don't travel that road daily didn't know at ALL. So for giggles I started following the detour, which led...no where. It was unmarked past a certain point...unless it picked back up past where I thought it should have led. I flipped a U-Turn and came back through the backside of Castle Shannon, one of the benefits of living around here - knowing the roads. But people coming in from out of town, particularly from the NE & SE who aren't familiar with the area very well might be circling Youngstown still at this hour -- Route 51 N eventually terminates into Ohio... It was a ghost town when the doors opened, but I think it managed to recover and have a nice day despite the detour, and the simultaneous home Steelers game.