End of an Era - Verlinden Productions Closing

[Mike999]

Link to the discussion on the Missing-Lynx armor board.  With some sad pictures of Verlinden dioramas, molds and other stuff going into the Dumpster.  Verlinden didn't do many 1/24 items but they did turn out a few good ones, like the 1/24 CHP figure shown below.  If you want one of those, better start looking right now. eBay prices for Verlinden stuff will no doubt be hitting the stratosphere soon.

http://www.network54.com/Forum/47211/thread/1473968626/last-1474034391/View+Thread

 

[Maindrian Pace]

That's sad, Verlinden was always a good seller for us when I worked at a Hobbytown in the late '80s.

[Luc Janssens]

That's sad, Verlinden was always a good seller for us when I worked at a Hobbytown in the late '80s.

Then you sold stuff I produced, since I worked there for a few years, 'till I got in trouble with his son, Wim (he's some character).

Francois (or Swa as we used to call him) was a great guy and a fantastic painter and diorama setting expert, for building and lots of scratch building, he had a great team of friends (like my dad Eddy) of which some gave up their day job to start work for him.....but there's his son again, and a lot of those friendships went sour, even with his American partner Bob Letterman (of the former VLS Corp, later sold to squadron)

 

[Maindrian Pace]

Quite likely. Here's a story for you: We had a customer that ordered Verlinden and other WWII diorama products from us periodically. We were happy to get the stuff for him, it was always a special order item and no other hobby shop wanted to go through the trouble of going through an off-the-map distributor. So we ordered this bombed-out urban scene for him, a corner of a building in some unnamed city in Europe, street piled with rubble, and it's basically a box of plaster castings of bombed, blasted, and broken scale brick and other debris. So he carefully goes through each piece, and he finds one small slab of building that got broken in shipment. He goes 3/4 psycho, blaming us, Verlinden, the distributor, the shipper, you name it. Now, 1) it could have been glued back together in seconds, and 2) as this was a scene of chaos and destruction, it wouldn't have made any difference, and nobody would have known any differently.

So another customer, a WWII armor modeler, comes up to see what the commotion is all about. He asks the guy if he will take the product. The guy says "No!" So he says, "add it to my pile, it will be a perfect backdrop for my Comet, (British tank) but it will have to be broken up a bit more." The first guy just shook his head and left.

[935k3]

Then you sold stuff I produced, since I worked there for a few years, 'till I got in trouble with his son, Wim (he's some character).

Francois (or Swa as we used to call him) was a great guy and a fantastic painter and diorama setting expert, for building and lots of scratch building, he had a great team of friends (like my dad Eddy) of which some gave up their day job to start work for him.....but there's his son again, and a lot of those friendships went sour, even with his American partner Bob Letterman (of the former VLS Corp, later sold to squadron)

 

Is that the Wim who runs bestbalsakits?

[Luc Janssens]

Is that the Wim who runs bestbalsakits?

No, Wim Verlinden lives in the US, the whole family migrated to the USA in the late 90s IIRC.

 

[carrucha]

Too bad.  I really liked their stuff when I was into military modeling.