echoxrayniner

Dang, I was a whole foot off. Well one more for the scratch list!

If we're gunning for the 200ish inches, there's two more thematically appropriate options. The 1981 Ford LTD "men in black" government car is approximately 198in with the gov. bumpers, which was heavily featured as the bad guy car in season 1. Another size approx. heavily featured villain vehicle which actually fits the part count rather well is the 1982 Chevy G20 Hawkins Power and Light van. Either way, its gonna be fun to see how friggin' far off any of my guesses will be down the line heh

That one's shown top left, 07724. They've more or less covered all the main characters' cars in the show so far besides three; - Joyce's '76 Ford Pinto - Steve's '83 BMW 733 - Jonathan's '71 Ford Galaxy The others(used for several episodes) are the early eighties Indiana trooper Caprices, the Mercury Marquis wagon, a '85 Cadillac Eldorado convertible but they're highly, highly unlikely. Based on the length of the model in 1/25th scale, I honestly don't think either the BMW or the Galaxy are entirely impossible.

Alright now I'm willing to take the beatings I deserve but what the hell am I supposed to do with being beaten for the service my country's postal service provides? PostNL's tracking system is limited information wise, they do essentially three scans and thats all that is visible. Entry scan, distribution center exit for international shipping(which is often skipped when busy) and when they depart the physical country. They are mailbox packages and get treated differently in the sorting process until they leave the country, once stateside they get treated as parcels. Also let me be very honest here, you were refunded fully. I'm going out of my way to do everything right at my own expense, and still its not enough. That said, its not until they reach the USA when they get accurate scans with every stop mapped out. For goodness sake at least, at the very least give me a break for that particular part because holy hell that's just incredibly and ruthlessly unfair. Also shipping labels automatically expire after six days without an entry scan in most European post systems, so lets leave that notion be.

Oh worry not, I promised you the set even with the refund in mind and thats exactly whats headed your way ASAP, Sizzler hood stripe decal and all. You're hitting the nail on the head, or rather nailing it perfectly. I've committed to simply downscaling and downscaling hard, wrapping up my current affairs and catching up. I've basically ran into a wall and decided that I guess the wall might as well stay there, remain at a nice pretty distance. Instead focusing on keeping a steady supply headed to my American distributor, maintain the hard limit on orders(and its contents) that I can handle, and keep the previous 5-ish week average and somewhat steady print run dates like they used to be. Essentially it was just a cascade of balls-ups, life taking any grip I had right out from my hands and getting a good hard reality check from customers and family alike. My old man dying from being a-okay added like two months to an already surreal amount of backed up work. Like trust me when I say, nowhere was my intention ever to let things slip past a five week turnaround, much the hell less a six month one. That's a pretty solid reason why a topic like this is so justified, I've reeeeaalllyyy let things run off course and then some and it certainly more than deserves a word of warning/caution to the masses. But at least I'm not going anywhere, just gotta make sure stuff remains in a nice little island of stability again where I can effectively solo it better. Communication and perhaps allowing AI here and there to pre-chew or educate me in writing more efficient and less time consuming emails/comments, ideas and such like that I do appreciate all the nice things that are said though, gotta throw that out there too!

Well suppose I may chime in here. Kiiiinda was inevitable and very much deserved, though part of me is glad that it's a mere "caution" instead of "avoid" or something in that vein! The optimist in me's glad that it's less a hard hell-no but I gotta and will be treating it as what it is; a hell of a wake-up call if anything. The long and short of it is that stuff is utterly ****ed as of late. Timetables went from hours to days, weeks to months and from a tidal wave of work rolling me flat into the floor boards I won't deny that just about every angle of my organization has either been screwy or flatout destroyed. My communications skills are admittedly horrid, especially as of late where the daily email quota has surpassed the 20 to 25 a day. With my day job being nine to five, dinner and taking a thirty minute power nap the decal work's been squeezed into a four hour window. Packing, shipping, customer contact, maintenance, creating the print files, all of it's been squished into either weekend work or those couple hours in the evening. Thanks to Joe Morgan of the above mentioned Facebook page, the business grew massively in a short amount of time. Like, holy **** levels of massive. That guy is a treasure, a bear and dang near a father figure to me nowadays but for customers and model enthusiasts; he's all that folks have mentioned here and then some. He's offered and for as far as I can tell successfully taken a handle of talking to folks, handling well over three quarters of any client contact, setting meets and the whole kaboodle while I get to play with my pretties on the other side of the Atlantic. Though he can't solve everything for me, nor should he; like I mentioned I somehow, someway got to be a victim of my own success. February, March, April and May saw more orders hit me than I had... ever. Like, hundreds more. Hell by March it had already tripled my annual numbers. Good problems yeah but in hindsight I had no idea the cartload of work that'd join it, to this date it's always been a simple process of get the order, process the order on file, send file for printing and when the prints are made and returned to me I Q.A. 'em, pack 'em all individually and get to creating the packages one by one. I've stumbled plenty before, when my girlfriend Vicky passed away in November 2022 it quite literally took half of the business out right there and then. Like @Can-Con accurately mentioned, I uh... Yeah, that hole is just impossible to fill. Doesn't help the gal had a ten year background in customer service and a degree in communications, leaving the hole ever bigger. She did the stock, lovingly, which I'm still blown away by given it was a thirty two year old woman accurately identifying the most obscure-ass decals for the website. She did the contact, she set up the system, the whole ordeal. Effectively, aside from me maintaining the webshop and the backend, I was a fry cook on the line and she did the front of house entirely. Being the introverted people pleaser dumb**** I am, I never quite found a happy medium between simply chatting and giving half my customers a full refund and still ship the stuff on my dime. Then just after the largest influx of orders I've ever had, my dad got a cancer diagnosis in May to boot. And I'll very shamelessly admit that when he started to take a nose dive, I couldn't give a dang for the decals, my life's work, my actual job, you name it. He was dying and I had three weeks to make the most of being with him, so I did. Of course, there's something to be said about had I communicated a single thing, that would've been known buuuut catch-22. So that put another month long hole in an already pressing time where I desperately needed 37 hours in a day that only had 24. Essentially, before I spend another three paragraphs on it: everything became a "tomorrow then" thing. Got thirty emails? Do ten today, twenty tomorrow. Don't have to repeat that cycle to see how that can go wrong, and it did and still does but at the end of the day I'm plowing through as much as I can handle. I don't wanna fault myself for finding every aspect of the business equally important, and to a degree everything suffers due to it but it means that the ball stills rolls albeit slowly. I've put precautions in place, like a hard cut-off on orders so I don't ever get as overwhelmed as I have gotten to this very day. When all the hundreds of 'em are finally out and underway, I hope to finally get back to actually being able to reply to people properly again instead of just a fraction, that sort of stuff. Does that mean I'm immune to the what-ifs and all the should've's? Hell no, I'm absolutely not looking for sympathy or empathy, y'all paid for a product and communication and most importantly said product are the things that matter most. And while I'm yapping like a nutter here, I figured I'd also address two more things. It is a little disingenuous to assume the simplicity of any market, no matter the background one might have. Not trying to smackback here but it really, really isn't as simple as 'I got the files, so I print' in my experience. ALPS printers are few and far inbetween and cost prohibitive(not to mention, creatively, as they're... not especially awesome), so I rely on an outside source. Fortunately, this source has an ALPS and a full-color OKI and offer the most important thing of all: individual page-by-page designs. Normally, one would just get several thousand of one item printed, or a few across. This place lets me run nuts with everything, get all I want without having to pay more for wanting individual designs every single time. This is a very nice niche to have, as I'm too small for a commercial printer of my own without having to invest my whole life but too large to rely on companies to want to run individual pages for me. Every single sheet is made to order, custom or not. Yeah this has the downside that nothing is in stock, and sometimes they are and I've tried to stock up on the most popular ones time and time again but they just... sell out faster than I can print them aside from the orders made. The upside is that not one single sheet remains the same, it allows me to keep adding, growing and fumbling with the designs to have all that one could desire and more. I've got a few examples that I'll list; Five years ago versus today, slowly over time Or this one; It's a little benefit to an otherwise not great situation, especially with the wait times as of late. Kinda-little-bit fortunately, this is often not a very time limited hobby but its true, that still doesn't excuse not even half of how I've run this business for the last nine months to put it mildly. Hope that more or less clears up just a smidgeon of it all.

Figured this one out. WooCommerce had an emergency update the other day and it introduced a bug that caused the decimal point to be deleted. Something to do with currency seperators to be dots in the States and such but commas overhere so it just... ignored it. The default checkout pre-address is set to the store region which is the Netherlands so it snagged the 6,45$ option and immediately turned it into 645 friggin' dollar. Also I used to do envelopes but since 2020 all commerce has to be sent via barcode mail(fancy word for package), escalating the lowest "legal" possible cost to 14$. Effectively it made shipping in an envelope a 50/50 risk that some overzealous mail sorter takes it out for not bring a letter. I ship in mailbox packages to avoid damage, and given the cost is so steep I may as well give folks a proper protected package. Costs me a little more than it earns as the box itself is a buck plus a piece but ah well, better safe than sorry eh

Ray here! Holy hell, something desperately must've gone wrong if the checkout quotes a 600$+ shipping cost. Most expensive shipping I offer is around 33 bucks and that's a cakebox sized parcel D; Lowest ought to be 14.50 if you're from North America, so even if something's wrong that'll be all thats needed to ship. Like Rex and Pete mentioned, if all you want is a plain set with no changes at a lower shipping cost(roughly 10 bucks IIRC), feel free to hit up Joe Morgan on the Facebook page Rex showed above. That said though, I've been playing catch up from a total tidal wave of orders from like the last four months. So dang many that I havent even gotten the time to update the website, properly reply to emails, the whole shebang. At long last at the phase where I can finally start packing and shipping very, very soon but yeah... pretty gnarly wait nowadays, sorry fellas :< Also thanks y'all for the sweet replies, I friggin' love you guys ❤️

Decals. Waterslide decals, aka waterslide transfers, aka multiple of 'em. Its just automated translation.

Heeey, thats me! Hah, wicked - I really appreciate the shout out, man. Getting this absurdly huge tire decal selection going is a weird trait of mine that doesn't appear to get any slower for the forseeable future given I'm still missing just about any drag tire(sticking with road tires for the most part). Same goes for the cars, got a disturbing amount of stuff on the to-do list. Gotta say though, I am hella behind on orders since the two-man team got reduced to one through a personal tragedy so the turnaround times are a little all over the place as of late ?

429 ;D

C1 Models and A&N Models have some exceptionally good European stuff too, A&N's definitely more pick up, truck and van related however. Got C1's Caddy, Koenigs Ferrari, Bowler Defender 110 and the SLS AMG body kit and they're nothing short of kit quality stellar.

Thanks for the screenshot explaining it, picture's worth a thousand words after all! Also shot ya' an email regarding the colors, just to make sure the bird's colors match the Firebird as best they can! As for the general remarks. The artwork's still for the 1/25th & 1/24th scales as it generally gets the point across, though I still will upload color variations and the far more detailed 1/8th artwork to each drop down choice eventually. Bit of a hassle to get everything functioning as it is with the twin choice thingy. For two weekends in a row I got dragged off by family to give me some escapism from the loss I had to endure three weeks ago so I tend to pick up the plethora of mail in the days after. Seriously, apologies for not getting back to any of y'all sooner. I had it mostly finished back around the time when my girlfriend had her stroke and slowly when the opportunity arose added pieces of upgraded art(generally, making it equal to the Revell kit decals and going further) and managed to at least get it done last month. Been getting anywhere between ten to thirty requests a week for it so I'd say its about time. That being said though, this one only made it due to it being largely done before my life took such a drastic turn, the remainder of the 'Coming Soon' page is basically now at a point where I can't make any promises, though. I was a third of the way with creating the 10th Anniversary hood bird with the elongated wings, having measured the whole thing out so it sits flush with the hood and the wrap around the A pillars but, yeah... It got stalled, much like the rest. So the regular ol' shaker variety bird will be the only 1/8th scale design I'm doing for the next few months until things get settled. I oughta mention though, few things that I was requested or came up with to make life easier on this behemoth of a friggin' model are a dash pattern and a single cluster of gauges that can be placed before putting the plate over it as right now you're meant to... kinda either guess or do it in reverse, plate first and awkwardly fenagling decal gauges through. Accurate plates were a big thing too, and I purchased a plotter with a de/embosser tool that'll allow me to get raised letter plates for at least the 1/8th scale some time in the future. Once I get back at it in a while, I'm not 100% certain which 1/8th set will take priority as I'm being asked to do just about any version equally but the '81 version is high on my own list simply due to how ungodly rare and kind of alien the artwork for the hood is. I'll keep an ear to the ground for the requests, base it on that. Likely will be the 10th Anniversary, hah. Edit: Also should add. I've worked with the hood piece for a few hours on and off the body and perhaps I'm just a very lucky soul but mine's flush with the body. Granted, mine was wedged under everything else in the box and it has a thinning amount of plastic from the front to the rear, that might be why its so prone to warping.

It'll still be publicity, mwaha! Getting myself some sets printed as well, got the Sierra the sets were measured on sitting around gathering dust - time to turn that guy into a proper Sierra XR4i. And I appreciate all the kind words, truly. It's... it's been a rollercoaster, man. This is just a side project that we did after I'd be home from work that spiraled out of control massively, though with the two of us and having Joe Morgan retailing for us out of Wisconsin, it's manageable. We've been at the mercy of the printing company at times but never near as bad as the last two months. We finally got our prints in from October just last week, and the November print's looking to get delivered in the third week of December due to the horrendous backlog of orders they themselves are working through. Before Vicky fell ill, she'd manually inform every single soul that there's been a delay and keep the website banners up to date at every moment and man am I struggling to keep everything communicated properly the last couple o' weeks after her passing. I'm just super happy and grateful that people are patient and above all, so unbelievably friendly. Like, sure this loss is a pretty okay excuse to be slow on the replying and such but I'd be lying if I didn't feel guilty for keeping folks hanging and having to tell them they're waiting six to eight weeks to get some decals. So, seriously - thanks, for the patience, the friendliness and overall just that kinda... I don't know how to describe it, that kind of "we're all humans" feeling that y'all give me. From the emails, the messages, the replies here, I can safely say we've got friends and family in just about every state and province in North America. Y'all rule ❤️ Safe to say though, despite it all, designing esoteric decal sets is easily my favorite part of the whole thing and I'm told that hobbies make for good therapy so, guess sooner or later I'll be putting my focus back into catalog growth and then some.

Oh heck I had no idea that order was for a MCM Admin, that raises the stakes haha. Makin' me nervous overhere! We've been dealing with the printing company having one issue after another for the last fifty days, grinding just about everything to a halt but yeah we try to be as vocal and transparent as possible. Least I can do is be clear when stuff hits the fan and, while totally inexcusable to have to sit 'n wait for a month and a half for a print order, not hearing/saying a word about it is worse I reckon. Though my girlfriend Vicky handled all the customer service/emailing for a year and a half until she suddenly passed away two weeks ago, so I'm half-cocked trying to fill both seats out of nowhere after enduring the worst print delay we've had in years. Fun times here, fun times! Wish me luck >.< Also about the North American dealer, I'm super happy to hear that he's doing exactly what we both hoped would happen! ❤️ Joe Morgan of the FB store's a hell of a dude, he's just about allowed me to go from a few hundred of designed sets to hundreds in just shy of a year.