Couple of questions

[ewetwo]

I just got the 1964 Ford Galaxy model and inside the instructions said Blueprinters. What does that mean? Also I have 2 1949 Ford coupe models. When I looked at them. One had rubber tires and the other had 2 piece plastic tires that you glued together. Is the one with the plastic wheels really old? And would it be wrong form me to post pictures of mainly chrome sprue with parts on them to find out what they went to? I did a search if there was a number on the sprue. And the search always came up with the same model kits. But the parts are indeed different.

[Greg Myers]

Click away, parts ID are a part of this board. Just spent the day with friends digging through some boxes of old stuff playing the "What kit did this come from" game. 

[BigTallDad]

 Have you looked here?

http://public.fotki.com/drasticplasticsmcc/mkiba-build-under-c/

[tom]

When Ertl owned AMT, the kits came with an invitation to subscribe to Blueprinter.  If I remember it was a quarterly magazine, had model building tips and sometimes had special offers where you could buy (by Mail) limited production  model kits.  The kits came in a black and white printed shipping box, but were kits you couldn't usually get otherwise.  The promo-style 1964 Galaxie 500 was one of these.

[Mark]

The two-piece tires were a mid-Seventies deal.  Probably cheaper to make than the one-piece vinyl tires.  The sidewall detail on some of those is actually not bad, but the tread detail is poor as it always is on two-piece tires.  Too, those weren't 100% plastic, nor were they vinyl.  They had too much flex in them to be able to mold them together, and styrene cement didn't stick to them.  Much later, a couple of kits were issued with two-piece slicks from that period, but molded in black styrene.  Those could be cemented and molded together, which was better but still not as good as vinyl. 

[Art Anderson]

1 hour ago, Mark said:

The two-piece tires were a mid-Seventies deal.  Probably cheaper to make than the one-piece vinyl tires.  The sidewall detail on some of those is actually not bad, but the tread detail is poor as it always is on two-piece tires.  Too, those weren't 100% plastic, nor were they vinyl.  They had too much flex in them to be able to mold them together, and styrene cement didn't stick to them.  Much later, a couple of kits were issued with two-piece slicks from that period, but molded in black styrene.  Those could be cemented and molded together, which was better but still not as good as vinyl. 

Actually, much more serious an issue!   Many of us can recall the almost paranoia (not entirely unjustified BTW) over "carcinogens" (chemicals, materials or compounds found to cause cancer), and late 1975, polyvinyl chloride was determined by federally funded investigators to be carcinogenic--particularly when vaporized during the injection-molding of vinyl (PVC),  being released into the air in the injection-molding process.  That finding threw much of the US plastics industry into a frantic race to find ways of limited the release of PVC monomer vapors into the air that factory workers had to breathe.  This affected, of course, model companies using soft PVC to mold into tires, but it was seen as a real threat to the automotive components industry, particularly those companies supplying wiring harnesses (which had molded PVC pin plugs for splicing harnesses together.  For nearly 18 months or so, injection molding facilities producing PVC components were racing around, trying various methods of greatly reducing, if not eliminating this industrial hazard.  Hence, the various ways that US model kit producers worked around it:  2-piece polyethylene tires, one piece polyethylene tires, you name it.  Fortunately, manufacturers using PVC in injection molding came up with very efficient ways of removing the harmful vapors from the air in and around their molding operations, and ultimately, PVC feedstock suppliers discovered that there were other, safer plasticizers which could be used to replace a fair amount of the PVC monomer itself.  It took a few years for the legal staffs at the likes of AMT, MPC, Revell and Monogram to apparently decide that the worst was over, and one-piece PVC tires began coming back into model car kits.

I was directly involved in all that scare, being the Human Resources Director for a large Essex Group Wire Assembly Division plant here, which produced thousands of wiring harnesses for Ford, Mecury and Lincoln, as well as replacement harnesses for other makes of cars needing to be rewired.   In addition, I was then doing box-art, trade show display, and presentation models for AMTCorporation, so I got to see that whole thing both inside the factory and out in the marketplace.

Art

[Mark]

MPC never changed tires in their kits...maybe the materials changed, but the tires themselves didn't, they always had one-piece vinyl tires in 99% of their kits.  Maybe they knew something about these materials that AMT didn't?

[ewetwo]

8 hours ago, Mark said:

The two-piece tires were a mid-Seventies deal.  Probably cheaper to make than the one-piece vinyl tires.  The sidewall detail on some of those is actually not bad, but the tread detail is poor as it always is on two-piece tires.  Too, those weren't 100% plastic, nor were they vinyl.  They had too much flex in them to be able to mold them together, and styrene cement didn't stick to them.  Much later, a couple of kits were issued with two-piece slicks from that period, but molded in black styrene.  Those could be cemented and molded together, which was better but still not as good as vinyl. 

It's strange because that kit doesn't have a scan code on it. So I figured it was older.

[Art Anderson]

On 6/11/2018 at 4:53 PM, ewetwo said:

I just got the 1964 Ford Galaxy model and inside the instructions said Blueprinters. What does that mean? Also I have 2 1949 Ford coupe models. When I looked at them. One had rubber tires and the other had 2 piece plastic tires that you glued together. Is the one with the plastic wheels really old? And would it be wrong form me to post pictures of mainly chrome sprue with parts on them to find out what they went to? I did a search if there was a number on the sprue. And the search always came up with the same model kits. But the parts are indeed different.

For the "Blueprinters" series of kits, there was never a need for a UPC bar code on the packaging, as the Blueprinters kits were never distributed to hobby shops, direct to subscribers of the Ertl Blueprinter.

[Art Anderson]

6 hours ago, Mark said:

MPC never changed tires in their kits...maybe the materials changed, but the tires themselves didn't, they always had one-piece vinyl tires in 99% of their kits.  Maybe they knew something about these materials that AMT didn't?

Mark, I'm pretty sure MPC (in those days, a subsidiary of Kenner Toys) did change over from vinyl for model kit tires--there were other soft plastic compounds readily available, more than likely black-pigmented polypropylene, which can be made reasonably soft and pliable.

Art

[ewetwo]

1 hour ago, Art Anderson said:

For the "Blueprinters" series of kits, there was never a need for a UPC bar code on the packaging, as the Blueprinters kits were never distributed to hobby shops, direct to subscribers of the Ertl Blueprinter.

I should have been added more to my answer. The 49 fords. The one with the plastic 2 piece tires dosen’t have a scan bar. 

[Ace-Garageguy]

11 hours ago, Art Anderson said:

Actually, much more serious an issue!   Many of us can recall the almost paranoia (not entirely unjustified BTW) over "carcinogens" (chemicals, materials or compounds found to cause cancer), and late 1975, polyvinyl chloride was determined by federally funded investigators to be carcinogenic--particularly when vaporized during the injection-molding of vinyl (PVC),  being released into the air in the injection-molding process.  That finding threw much of the US plastics industry into a frantic race to find ways of limited the release of PVC monomer vapors into the air that factory workers had to breathe.  This affected, of course, model companies using soft PVC to mold into tires, but it was seen as a real threat to the automotive components industry, particularly those companies supplying wiring harnesses (which had molded PVC pin plugs for splicing harnesses together.  For nearly 18 months or so, injection molding facilities producing PVC components were racing around, trying various methods of greatly reducing, if not eliminating this industrial hazard.  Hence, the various ways that US model kit producers worked around it:  2-piece polyethylene tires, one piece polyethylene tires, you name it.  Fortunately, manufacturers using PVC in injection molding came up with very efficient ways of removing the harmful vapors from the air in and around their molding operations, and ultimately, PVC feedstock suppliers discovered that there were other, safer plasticizers which could be used to replace a fair amount of the PVC monomer itself.  It took a few years for the legal staffs at the likes of AMT, MPC, Revell and Monogram to apparently decide that the worst was over, and one-piece PVC tires began coming back into model car kits.

I was directly involved in all that scare, being the Human Resources Director for a large Essex Group Wire Assembly Division plant here, which produced thousands of wiring harnesses for Ford, Mecury and Lincoln, as well as replacement harnesses for other makes of cars needing to be rewired.   In addition, I was then doing box-art, trade show display, and presentation models for AMTCorporation, so I got to see that whole thing both inside the factory and out in the marketplace.

Art

Probably nobody here knows or cares, but there are some inaccuracies in your terminology.

When one presents himself as an expert, it is incumbent on said "expert" that the facts he pronounces are indeed correct, and that correct inferences and implications will be drawn from the presented "facts". This is to avoid others going away and repeating incorrect information that they "heard" or "read" from an "expert". The world today is full to overflowing with wrong information endlessly repeated because many people just aren't careful about accuracy, or think they understand things they do not, and fail to check their information prior to repeating it.

1) PVC is NOT a "monomer". It is a polymer, made from the vinyl chloride monomer, which is itself made from products derived from salt and oil.

2) Moreover, PVC is NOT a "plasticizer". It is a thermoplastic that, in rigid products like plumbing pipes, is referred to as "unplasticized".

3) Plasticizers are an entirely different group of chemical additives that make PVC and other compounds more-or-less pliable. Phthalates are one group of plasticizers that are now known to have some dire environmental effects, including causing fluctuation in hormone levels and birth defects. Because they can function as an estrogen "mimic", they are thought be part of the cause of the global decline in the male hormone testosterone. Phthalates are being replaced with other plasticizers for this reason.

4) When heated, PVC may release immediately toxic levels of HCL (hydrogen chloride, which is hydrochloric acid gas) and carbon monoxide, and depending on the exact composition of the PVC compound, may also release dioxins...another group of highly toxic chemicals.

In 1979, an incident resulting from overheating in a plant fabricating PVC components is related in this link:   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1009017/

And here is a 1983 overview of medical research and conclusions (going back to the 1940s) relating to the health risks and possible carcinogenic effects of the vinyl chloride monomer and PVC dust :   https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/52/ehp.835261.pdf

On the basis of these results, the IARC (29) in 1979 concluded "Vinyl chloride is a human carcinogen. Its target organs are the liver, brain, lung and haemo-lymphopoietic system."

Perhaps you meant that vinyl chloride was the "PVC monomer", but that was not clear, and extreme accuracy is required when discussing or relating chemistry.

PVC remains as the third most widely used synthetic plastic in the world.

 

Edited June 13, 2018 by Ace-Garageguy