Justin Porter

Looking good so far. Don't forget the external oil cooler with unnecessarily long looped piping!

Probably one of the most nicely engineered examples of PE wire wheels I've seen. ICM does fantastic stuff in general, though, so I'm not surprised.

Too many other factors effect hobby shops to say that it's strictly whether or not modeling is still a popular hobby. My shop is holding steady because it's a specialist shop that stocks the tools, paints, and kits that places like Hobby Lobby or Michael's would never bother with, but also because it has a tiny storefront in a small city with good highway access from neighboring areas. All the same, the same things bite us that bite most hobby shops: the margins are horrible, the product availability vacillates wildly, effective advertising is shockingly expensive when trying to reach the primary consumers, and any time the economy hiccups leisure time spending is the first thing to go away.

User friendliness is a huge part of Tamiya's business strategy and I do wish more manufacturers would take the lesson to heart. I have often said that the best way to ensure someone goes on to build their second model is to ensure that they enjoy the process and the RESULTS of their first.

Oh I have a couple, and they're not exactly RARE kits comparatively speaking but they haven't been easy for me to attain, either. Tamiya Morgan Plus Four Gunze Sangyo Hi-Tech Lotus Elan coupe Italeri Ferrari 250GT SWB Gunze Sangyo Hi-Tech Austin Healey Sprite Fujimi Ferrari 250GTO

Ohh just more Doom and Gloom from someone who isn't actually paying attention. Globally we're seeing MORE car kits from MORE new companies, not less. We've seen fresh 1/24th scale passenger and racing car tooling in the past decade from Meng, ICM, Ebbro, Nunu, Belkits, and even new domestic manufacturers in Salvino JR and Moebius. Funny thing too is that I can say that it's not generally older builders in my shop who take home kits like Aoshima's Pagani Huarya or Fujimi's Mclaren F1.

Speaking as a hobby shop owner, and one in their 30's no less. You're wrong. Dead, dead, dead wrong. Young people DO want to build models. They want to build them as adults who've developed unique tastes and disposable income and free time. No. Kids don't want to build models. They have free time that's structured within an inch of their lives between school and extracurricular and when they do engage in creative play it's with virtual toys that allow total freedom of creation like Minecraft or Lego rather than model kits. But young adults? Young adults LOVE model building. Look at the popularity of Gundam. Look at the rise of armor and aircraft building tied in closely with the popularity of games like War Thunder or World of Tanks (the latter of which has pushed companies like Amusing Hobby and Takom to release more and more "Paper Panzer" i.e. tanks from the drawing board that never saw combat) or even the effect Gran Turismo has had on the popularity of subject matter in automotive building. No. Young people don't want AMT's unassembled dealership promo toys from 60 years ago. Why would they? They come into my shop and for nearly the same price as those Round 2 reissues they can walk out with Tamiya's Ferrari F40 or Nissan R32GTR? The hobby as a whole has changed. Better tools. Better paints. Better kits. No doom here. Just progress.

I've forwarded the flyer to my primary Testors wholesale source and he's in touch with his Testors rep. Hopefully we can get some confirmation. This is the sort of thing that festers in the absence of a concrete statement from the manufacturer coupled with poor availability of product.

That looks truly fantastic. Love seeing all the little added details that bring the tough kit to life.

Licensing has gone the way it has because it's no longer as valuable to the car manufacturers to "advertise" through model kits as it once was, particularly as modeling is much more focused on older cars - and typically competition ones - than on the latest street cars. As such, the relationship has changed. It's now much more valuable to the model kit manufacturers to have the rights to that intellectual property, to use the car manufacturer's IP for their product than it is for the car manufacturer to allow the model kit manufacturer unfettered access to their IP. We've seen this before in the video gaming world as well, where a single developer pays for exclusive rights to a car manufacturer's IP so that the exclusivity of having those cars in their game becomes a distinct selling feature. Again, it's because the car manufacturers know that there being a game, or a model, or a diecast of a car from their past likely won't change present day sales of their flagship $35,000< crossover one unit BUT the companies producing those games, models, or diecast can practically live or die as to whether or not they can release that next piece. That kind of power is worth money.

Given that Revell has shown an all-new Land Rover kit this year, I would say reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Not silver really does a great job of showing off how curvy the 959 really is. The wiring on the engine especially with the looms looks particularly good too.

Great to see a nice build of a brass era car!

All done! Wrapped up my Tamiya 1/24th scale Lotus Seven and I'm genuinely pleased with the results. The color is Deep Green out of the Vallejo Model Color line, with a variety of Model Air, AK Real Color, and Alclad paints in the details. The windshield frame was done with a 2mm Molotow marker, and the clearcoat is Alclad Aqua Gloss. I tried to avoid getting the car too shiny to keep that "homebuilt" feeling of a kit-built Seven.

Lovely example of a road-going Cobra. Your build is definitely a nice one.

It's funny, but I've found that motivation seems to come most easily from setting boundaries with my builds. I build a pretty wide variety of things but I've narrowed that to subjects inside of that variety to things I'm truly passionate about. I've weaned myself a bit off of the "well that looks interesting" purchases and instead focused on better tools and paints. I've binned projects that I've finally come to realize are well and truly stalled, and come to understand that when a project is really that stalled out it's because I just plain don't want to do it anymore and there's no shame in that. I'm a happier builder and a better builder now, and the added challenge of building the best example of a thing - whether a sports car, a Universal Century Gundam, or an obscure WWII fighter or early jet - complete with references has all come together to make me a more prolific builder too.

Just like classic Ferraris themselves, classic Ferrari kits are meant to be driven/built and it's so good to see a kit so often regarded as untouchable getting built!

Got a bit more assembly done. It's really a fun kit to just sit down and assemble and while there's a little bit of prod and push to getting some things fit it's generally a fun build.

Happy to see this getting built. Even as a curbside the finished model does have a lot of presence on the shelf.

Next project in line is one I've resurrected from my "dead pile". It's Tamiya's 1/24th scale Lotus Seven kit, which I had painted a Testors metallic green some years ago, hated, and put back into the box. Now that I'm trying to whittle down my stash, I did a quick wet sanding, primed it, and shot it with this Vallejo Model Color Deep Green which I'm much happier with. I figure I'll knock this out and set it down right next to the MGB in my case.

No. Not all of them. I'll happily concede - using my own preference for classic sports cars as an example - that Revell's Austin Healey 100-6, Jaguar XK-E, and Porsche 356 are all lovely builds with truly impressive scale fidelity for their era, that the IMC Indy cars and Sports Racers remain truly worthwhile builds, and that even AMT's run of Indy cars in the mid 70's are quite good despite some cost-cutting measures. Even the Aurora/Monogram sports cars with the exceptions of the Ferrari 250GTO and Chaparral 2 make for good representations of their subject matter. But I've invested a lot of time reading reviews, purchasing kits, and refining the abilities to build even "tricky" kits. I know what I'm getting into on the car side of things because I know that it's going to be slim options and frequent excursions into archaic kit types to build what I want to build in cars. In other spheres of the hobby, a subject is often kitted by several companies with the exceptions of truly obscure material, leaving builders options for everything from highly detailed "no expense spared" builds out of the box to toss-it-together-in-an-evening inexpensive kits for the casual builder. Just this past year, there have been 4 new kits of the P51-D Mustang in 1/48th scale (Meng, Modelsvit, Airfix, Eduard) covering this broad spectrum so that there's a Mustang for every builder. The most recent example of this phenomenon I can think of in the car world is the Ferrari Enzo.

I'm going to take a stab at it and guess that he meant that the 50 year old car KITS are the badly built - or more accurately badly engineered - things in his statement. And they are. Over shallow interior tubs, mile thick glass, chrome headlights, holes in the engine block for music wire axles, exhausts and suspensions molded to the chassis plate, and on and on down the list. I'll personally bake a cake for the forklift operator who "accidentally" drops the AMT '33 Willys Sedan Delivery tooling and renders it unusable.

It's already happened in the aircraft world. Between Tamiya, Trumpeter, Hasegawa, Wingnut Wings, and HK Models there's been a big push towards 1/32nd scale as a mainstream builder's scale rather than as a high-end only scale primarily because of casual builders who want bigger parts.

Super clean build and it is neat to see an "everyday" stock Skyline.

Unfortunately, all four of those kits had massive design and accuracy issues. Worse, the "kids" who did build them also were buying Fujimi, Aoshima, and Tamiya kits of similar subject matter and very quickly decided anything with the domestic box labels was best left avoided. Kind of a shame since the Revell WRX and Integra kits were quite serviceable.