Justin Porter

I did in fact use the kit decals and joy of joys they co-operated. The secret lay in getting my decal water from my wife's Keurig. lol

Not sure what happened there. Here you guys go.

Some additional pictures Meng has posted to their Facebook.

Going to take more pictures in a better shoot, but happy to say the Lotus is finished!

They must have at least some since the Groovy Grader and the "Son of Troublemaker" are on that release list.

Would be quite amazing if they could pull that off. Quite frankly, even though the licensing would be through Volkswagen AG and who knows how difficult they are to work with, I would pay quite well for a reissue of the Bugatti Type 35 especially with the jaunty driver figure.

Be still my beating heart that we could possibly see the Duesenbergs and Packards reissued. I would absolutely love that.

This is an exciting round of announcements out of Atlantis. Going to be quite glad to put the drag cars and the Nomad, plus the Tom Daniels kits, onto my shop shelves. Probably will make an attempt on building the Mack hauler and the Mooneyes dragster myself.

Very slick building.

Had not seen this and it looks pretty good to me too. I'm genuinely liking the sheer detail from the box they're offering. If I'm really good next year I hope they'll consider an Austin-Healey 3000 MkII as a companion kit.

Fresh update. Suspension, Cockpit, and Engine are all together (with the exception of the intake trumpets) and we're in the home stretch. The steering wheel Lotus emblem was my canary in the coal mine for whether or not the vintage Tamiya decals would co-operate and as long as my water was fresh out of the Keurig, they do! Fingers are still crossed on how the stripe will turn out though.

The E-Type FHC is my personal big grab from this group, but for my shop shelves I'm already getting calls on the S-10 and the VW Camper. Should be a good 4th Quarter for us.

I wasn't too thrilled with the way they designed it to attach for sure. I ended up soaking the little spots in the rear bulkhead in a bit of Tamiya Extra Thin Quick Set to get the lower link piece settled down into the channels, then built up a strengthening fillet of Slow Cure CA.

This has been a kit I've long looked forward to building and I finally got my hands on one for a less than nose-bleed price. It really is a very cleverly engineered kit, probably at the very edge of what injection molding could do at the time it was tooled up. I'm building it purely box stock though I am aware that I may be turning to Indycals for a replacement set of decals. We'll see when that comes up. Paint is Tamiya TS-43 Racing Green over Stynelrez white primer, with the tub's aluminum done in AK Real Color aluminum and the engine block in Vallejo Metal Color dull aluminum.

Neat. Those would be online sellers selling at below the distributor MSRP and cutting the throats of brick and mortar hobby shops like my own. I guarantee you that as a hobby shop I cannot purchase Craftsman Chevy II's for my inventory at 40 points off of $24.99.

I'll fully concede on the revisions being made to the body as being worthwhile. I'll dispute on MSRP, though. Currently Stevens International is showing $30.95 as MSRP while Hobbytyme has not given a set list price. Those are my two primary wholesale accounts. Which wholesale distributor is listing $26.99 because I'd LOVE to be able to purchase and stock Round 2 product at that number instead of my going rate against $30.95 and up on Round 2 auto kits.

Firstly, I don't begrudge them to the builders that enjoy them nor do I disagree that they represent the broadest range of kitted domestic subjects. I don't even necessarily dislike that Round 2 has taken the time to resurrect this or similar kits for those who want them. I will, however, contest the idea - and contest stridently - that it was the combination of AMT, MPC, and Johan who pioneered the detailed automotive model kit in plastic. Factually, it was Gowland & Gowland and their acetate Highway Pioneer kits in 1/32nd scale, marketed under their new REVELL brand name that first brought detailed scale miniature kits of cars to the public. In ostensibly 1/24th scale, you would point to Monogram and their Midget Racer as one of if not the earliest detailed model car kits. The SMP kits wouldn't debut until 1958, EIGHT YEARS after Revell's Highway Pioneers and TWO YEARS after Monogram's Midget. To offer up the idea that the idea of the detailed model car kit comes out of the Annuals, or that it would not have come to pass without the Annuals, ignores the far greater historical contribution to the hobby of modeling that Revell and Monogram have made domestically than AMT, MPC, and the like. Yes, there is the "subject matter" statement to make. This is subject matter that interests many domestic builders. No doubt about that. But that doesn't make it good and that doesn't make it good for the industry at large.

Yes. Yes I did. The annuals were a byproduct of an unusual time when certain "model" companies could pad their bottom line by offering unassembled examples of dealership advertising giveaways. AMT, MPC, and Johan were being hired to produce these marketing trinkets and then could add a nice profit cherry on top by tossing decals and instructions in a box with the unassembled leftovers. They had their place during a very brief window in the history of the hobby, and they vanished in the same breath as the competitiveness of the domestic auto industry. I understand their place in the grand scheme of things. I don't regard them with the fondness that many do. I feel their legacy is more of a hindrance than a help to domestic model kit manufacturers who still struggle with the very concept of "A detailed miniature of a physical object".

I have nothing especially against curbside kits. Quite frankly, some of the nicest kits I've built are curbsides like Aoshima's MGB or Hasegawa's Miura. I don't even think that $30.95 (Round 2's MSRP) is a bad price point for a nice curbside. I don't think this will be a nice curbside. I think the body proportions will be good but the headlights will be chromed, the door handles will be molded in place, the windshield wipers will be molded in place, the glass will be three scale miles thick, the interior will be an unrealistically shallow tub with barely any side panel detail, there will be no inner pillar or headliner detail, and there will be large exposed EPM's in difficult to fill locations. I understand entirely that the market Round 2 aims at doesn't often cross-shop Hasegawa or the like, but when Round 2 keeps pushing their MSRP into that realm, it's important to keep in mind that for all the "They fixed the Boss Nova body!" goodness, they're still not matching the quality of offering of their competitors.

I have a Studebaker Avanti project that I got totally burned out on because I was trying to do things like correct a molded in starter and remove ejector pin marks in chrome parts and on and on down the list. And I adore the Studebaker Avanti as a gorgeous car but just couldn't keep beating my head against the wall that was the AMT kit with my tools and techniques at the time.

It's definitely not the tool-cutters in China who are the problem, but rather the lack of fundamental oversight on the finished product by those who were in charge at Revell at the time of those kits. If you actually look at military kits done by purely Chinese companies like Takom or Meng or Ryefield they're outstanding kits generally accepted to be leaders in their genre. In particular, Ryefield has positively smashed nearly 25 years of uninterrupted dominance in the 1/35th scale Tiger I market by Dragon. No one who has ever opened the box on one of those kits would place the blame on Chinese manufacturing. The blame lies squarely on Revell having spent decades upon decades designing down to an unrealistic price point to suit a big box retail business model that no longer exists.

Loving seeing these updates to an older resin kit. Probably one of my favorite forms of modeling is builders who look at a part and just say "That doesn't look like the real thing" and then proceed just as you do.

My 6 year old knows "Doc Hudson". He has no idea what a Ford Maverick is. Like it or not, Pixar's most profitable movie franchise has had a huge impact on youth awareness of that particular classic stock car. Kids who were 6 when Cars first came out in 2006 are now 20. Oddly enough, some of them grew up to like cars, and some of them build models, and they're most often my Moebius Hornet customers.

Wait, so you're suggesting that rivet counters don't just spontaneously generate issues with kits if they're properly designed from the get go? That's absurd! That would suggest that they merely want accurate model kits!

Can confirm. At the moment one of my distributors (Hobbytyme) is Out of Stock on the Vega and the other (Stevens International) has it still listed as TBA release date. Would have been in less of a holding pattern on the Vegas if Rye Field Models hadn't just rolled out their full interior Sherman and if I didn't have such a run on Eduard's MkI Spitfire.