Justin Porter

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.

Model building isn't going away. The things that excite young people so much that they want to build models of them are what's changing. Fighter jets and spaceships and tanks and pirate ships and fictional and historical figures? Still evergreen. Still going strong. Even growing in some sectors. Add to that wargaming miniatures and Gunpla and you have a hobby that's thriving on the whole. Car modeling? Oh boy... Car modeling... Car modeling globally isn't actually doing too badly. New companies like Belkits and Beemax have found comfortable niches producing quality racing car kits. Aoshima has settled into supercars while Fujimi keeps the more "pedestrian" cars coming and Hasegawa does the historic thing. Building an identifiable piece of racing history, particularly one that these young builders have created a rapport with often by "driving" it in PC sims or games like Forza, Gran Turismo, or Grid, makes these kits as dependable a seller as your usual array of Tigers and Spitfires. Muscle car, custom, and hot rod kits like those that AMT has focused on since the early 60's? Their audience is a little bit more finite. Ala Kart is a massively significant car in automotive history, but the number of people who have actively interacted with Ala Kart drops each year, and so the number of people who want a representation of it in their daily lives drops. Gradually, with the exception of a few "evergreen" examples, most every bit of that generation of automobilia will become niche. Once they're in that niche, it will be the role of short run, higher end model manufacturers to serve that significantly smaller market (in the model aircraft world, look only as far as the sheer number of different short run companies there are in 1/72nd scale) If you don't believe me, think about the last time that someone mentioned Pierce-Arrow or Winton to you.

A favorite sports car of mine and from experience I know that those kit decals are NOT easy to work with. Well done!

Spellbinding to see work like this.

I wish. The first issue of these when American Satco was the distributor supposedly had LHD dashes in resin in the kit.

Aoshima just re-issued it this year. When I saw it in the "upcoming releases" at the shop it automatically became a "One for the shop, One for the stash." order. lol If you have the chance, don't pass it up! It builds up so sweetly.

Looks beautiful to me. It's not the easiest kit to build cleanly but the results clearly can be fantastic.

Very pretty example of the new NSX.

Very clean build of a very striking Porsche.

My friend Spyro gave me a bit of help and now here's some much improved pics of the MGB.

The Tognotti car that AMT kitted along with the "Wild Dream", right?

Well, I mean obviously that one. lol

Better question than who's going to customize this first... When are we going to get a T-bucket kit with as nice a front axle, spindles and all, as this?