robdebie

I'm not my66s55, and I'm definitely not an accountant, but here's how I would look at it. I redid the whole calculation for the complete run of 100 products, sorry for deviating from your 25 product run approach. I made the following listing of cost and hour items, from your data. There's one big guess: the time spent on casting and demolding a single kit. I guessed one hour. Master pattern: 0$ Master changes & preparations: 8h Master painting: 140$ Mold making: 32h (four times) Silicone: 1472$ (four times 368$) Consumables: 0$ Resin: 1360$ (you need 3.4 sets of 10 gallons for 100 kits) Consumables: 0$ Hours casting and demoulding: 100h (***** I guessed 1 hour per kit *****) Ebay fees: 1650$ PayPal fees: 509$ Handling: 100h Postage: 1665$ Donation: 1650$ If you now add up all the cost items, and all the hours worked, you can calculate the hourly rate: Total earned: 16500$ Total spent: 8446$ Nett: 8054$ Total hours: 240 8054$ divided by 240 hours gives an hourly wage of 34$. If you leave out postage (which would normally not be included in the price) and the donation, your hourly wage jumps to 47$. I would say that the calculation is maybe a bit on the optimistic side, since is are no cost for the master, and the cost and/or depreciation of equipment. And maybe some other items are overlooked, like the kit's box and labels, and the shipping box. Plus you would need to count also the hours spent on Ebay, communication with customers, returns, broken parts. Rob

Tim, thanks, I'm already active on the Randy Ayer's NASCAR forum. For my headlight question I thought I might have a better chance on this forum. Rob

Brian, thanks for the measurements! I'm happy to report that the openings in the kit's headlight match your dimenions pretty well. It might be enough to figure out how to finish the modification of the kit parts. I can't do casting at the moment, but if that changes I will run a small series. Rob

Casey, thanks for the photos, they are always useful to compare to the kit. I hadn't thought about T-bird forums, but that might be the answer to my question. I will try that in the next few days. Rob

David, you're right that he was an independent, with his family running the team. I already searched high and low for information, and I found quite a lot. It lead to lots of body modifications, and I'm now ready to correct the headlights, but I'm a bit stuck there.. Rob

Yes, you got the driver right: it's Bill Elliott. I picked the Daytona 1985 race for my model. The kit body is pretty awful, full of errors. But you've got to know that the kit was designed before the real car hit the tracks. I think my tally will be 25 modifications in the body alone. Track is reduced from appr. 62 inches to 58 inches. For my original question I need help from someone with the 1:1 scale street version, or from someone with access to one. I don't know whether many are still around? Rob

I'm building the NASCAR speedway version. I've narrowed the fenders considerably to make it a lot less wider than the original Monogram model, that is often critisized for its 'balloon' fenders. The car starts to look like the road car, I agree with you! Here's a photo of the real car at Daytona in 1985. I'm pretty sure the team used a stock headlight part: you can even see the elongated screw hole on the grill side, that's also visible in the first photo that I posted. They added blanking plates at the rear. Rob

I'm building and correcting a Monogram 1983-1986 NASCAR T-Bird, and one of the corrections involves the headlights. The headlights of the Monogram 1983-1986 NASCAR T-Bird are often critized. It was only when I found this picture of the real headlight buckets that I saw how the kit parts should like like: I started work on the kit parts by removing the vertical faces, and extending the 'tunnels' rearwards with two 1 x 0.4 mm strips. Now I need to decide where to place the vertical divider, and how deep the two headlight buckets are. Is there maybe someone around with access to the real thing, who can do some measurements? Here's a photo of the model so far. I've lengthened and dropped the nose (3 mm and 1.5 mm respectively), moved the front and rear wheel openings forward, and I'm about halfway now :-) Rob

This looks like a job for an Alps printer, like Pete J. wrote. These Alps decals will probably be nicer than the original Gooche decals. If you want to go this route, I have a long list of custom Alps printers here: https://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/decals.htm#custom Be aware that a good quality decal sheet requires two steps: drawing the (vector) art work, and then the printing itself. The former is a lot more work than the latter, and not all custom printers want to do the art work. A very rough guess is that the art work will require 'only' 4-5 hours of work because you have a decal sheet to start with. I've done full decal artwork for some 20 cars working from photos, and on average those took 12 hours. Rob

Randy, I would really love to hear your judgement on the shape of the MPC and AMT models. I'm slooooowly working on an MPC 1973 model, but I also obtained an AMT 1972 model. They differ in details of course, and recently I laboriously photographed both bodies in exactly the same position from various angles. By flipping the two photos in a viewer, you see the differences much more clearly. I put these photos on my MPC-Ertl 1/25 1971 Mustang webpage, but it works better if you download them and view them in a JPG viewer, alternating quicky between them. I noted the differences that I see in each set of photos, and so far the MPC kit seems to have the edge on the AMT model. However, the grille/headlight area seems to let it down, being too tall, which destroys the 'face' of the model. Also, the NACA inlets are positioned quite different on the models, and I don't know yet who got it right. It's the first time I compared models like this, but I already like what I found. Any comments are very welcome! Rob