Chuck Kourouklis

So Descartes walks into a bar. Tender sez, "Know what you're gonna have?" Descartes sez, "I think not." And disappears.

Well no, there's not much difference in definition between "builder" and "assembler", but there's been an apparently inadvertent shift in semantics here; the classic cliche specifically is "MODELERS vs kit assemblers", and the superiority of the former approach has long been strongly implied at a minimum and spelled right out in more extreme cases. To repeat myself, I can't really see how it matters so much if your self-esteem doesn't hinge on your hobbies, but what the hey... And while we're on definitions, there IS a pretty clear distinction between speculation on an imminent release - TOPICAL speculation supported by hard data in preview photos and a comprehensive history of gremlins MAKING IT TO PRODUCTION (for what, the 4th time in this discussion? 5th?) - and an out-and-out review. Just look at the kinds of distortion necessary to make these non-points.

Gotta say, I'm liking the panel gaps. Looks like all that's needed for dead-flush in the roof is some light tweaking of the upper door panels.

That'd be a nod to keyser for parsing things down with a certain catchy, irrefutable economy - even those of us who prefer to fight fire with napalm can appreciate that. And no, there ain't nothin' wrong with painting and assembling at all, in itself. It's the insistence that people point out problems ONLY because they're "kit assemblers" that's the kind of nonsense so obvious it should have been retired long ago. If somebody likes a problematic kit, nobody tells him how act or think about it. Nobody hints he's somehow lacking as a modeler, nobody tells him he shouldn't be appreciative, nobody tells him not to buy it (ironically, he's more likely to be the one hollering at a critic not to buy it instead). But in this thread, it goes even deeper than that; most anybody who's noticed an issue with the Del Rio wagon is still looking forward to the kit, still intending to buy one or several. And STILL we get the lectures about production process, or how grateful we should be for new kits, or even that ancient poppycock about how Revell will just blow its own toes off and deny itself the revenue from a new kit simply because we don't fawn over it enough.

Between this and "defensible to do it wrong, offensive to point it out", I'd like to nominate a new poet laureate for the thread. That IS what the drama all boils down to in the end - the inability of some of you to deal with the fact that people point out flaws in kits. It's YOU ALL who start the name-calling and the snideness and the fur-flying because people who criticize kits do not behave the way you think they ought to. And Art, with all due respect, "food for thought" - ? How about grist for vaporization, years gone now? I'll "just wait for the kit" when I start seeing meaningful corrections between previews and what's on the shelf after more than a decade otherwise, thanks (#4 - again - at the blog linked below). And as long as that patently false "Builder vs Kit Assembler" dichotomy keeps coming up, I'll keep pointing out that I gave that sad little canard its richly deserved vivisection long ago, at #2 in the link below... and then that I undertook a project to prove the irrelevance of that angle by meeting its baseless challenge ANYWAY: never mind the Steve Bouttes and the John Goschkes and Bill Gearys and Bob Downies and countless others before me who've long shown even more conclusively that pointing out problems doesn't immediately impugn your qualifications as a builder. DEMONSTRATING a point is also something you guys don't do very well - because you need to have a valid point in order to demonstrate it.

Right as rain, Bruvva.

I'd like to take a moment now to note a distinction, possibly due just a L-I-I-I-TTLE more respect 'round here: Maybe it doesn't really boil down to intelligence OR the sharpness of your eyes; maybe sensitivity to proportion is just more a matter of habit or self-training. And there IS a difference between affably pointing out you don't see a given problem... (^^) and continuing to be so uselessly snide about the observation - or insisting that people need micrometers and other "engineering tools" to pick nits - out of your own inability to see that problem.

Yeah, and Roger had a pretty good take on John's basic point back on p 8, post 150, too. Can't say for sure, but it does look like they've made the rear wheel arch line a bit less of a linear gouge and a bit more of a concave feature. Rear quarter crease still looks like it could stand to reach back a bit further, though.

I was wondering.

Yeah. The bare plastic shows possible corrections a little more clearly, but I believe there's a painted prototype with chrome not too far back in this thread.

For what it's worth - the pic that Casey posted a while back seems to suggest some work on the sedan's problem areas:

I still love the danm thing, myself. I just don't understand - where does examining a kit's flaws mandate that ANYBODY shouldn't like it? I'm hard-pressed to come up with anybody insisting that a modeler is somehow at fault for liking a kit with problems - but that sure seems to be way people READ it. And I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing the connection between that interpretation and reality.

W O W. Very clear now that you've pointed 'em out, Andy. Still heartened, though. Corrections on this will require a lot less than the Olds did, certainly much less than The Kit That Must Not Be Named, maybe about on par with the 'Cuda. Btw, did anyone notice the shove down a slope that doesn't really slip?

I'll be interested too, Andy.

*EDIT* woooops, my bad. You didn't change this. So. Come again? In fact, why don't you quote me on anything as presumptuous and judgmental as this? Or in the alternate, why don't you show us where Bill tried reading your mind and slapped up some half-conceived hack profile on you?

Yeah, you got him. After pages of Herculean eye-rolling and snark directed at muzzling anybody who's not all sunshine and my-little-ponies about this kit, you all actually caught somebody trying to dictate your content for once. Did you entirely miss that his second sentence was basically the same as your last two, Scott? Now as for KNOWING Revell won't correct whatever problems there are with this kit, no, we can't say for sure - we just have a decade or more of seeing kits show up on the shelves with the exact gremlins seen in previews to indicate the likelihood of correction is pretty low, which is why this angle is so old I've had it covered literally for years in #4 at the blog linked below. And I'm just gonna toss it out there that you can acknowledge Revell is trying and still be critical of the products. The two are not mutually exclusive. I'm goin' all hard-core 'cause there's that same ol' BS in this thread demanding a counter, but the timing is ironic because I could not be more delighted with Revell right now. Their '14 Mustang has wheels, a strut tower brace, and an intake cover i've been waiting years for. If we can't get a glue kit of a current pickup, their SVT Raptor is the very next best thing, the greatest promo-style late model SnapTite they've done, for my money. That Model A comin' up looks so awesome I have a hard time imagining what could go wrong when I open the box. And then yes, THIS DEL RIO WAGON ITSELF looks very exciting to my eyes, to make Bill's point one more time for anyone who actually gets such points. But pot-stirring begets more pot-stirring, long before this thread and long after.

I'm game. But then I've been saying basically that same thing from a different angle all along.

Funny. The last thing I did pull some calipers on was a bit troublesome - but mostly for things that had nothing to do with what I was using the calipers for. The changes I made, and watching the results take shape, were a BLAST. And the way that model sits there looking quietly more correct than most any other one built more conventionally? That's the very soul of FUN. It's a gift that keeps on giving, in fact.

Well. By "looking good", I meant mostly that there wasn't any screamingly obvious 2-inch chop, headlight-housings-out-to-the-moon, hacked-off rear quarters, bulbous upper fenders or flattened Hapsburg-lip wheel arches. In other words, errors of a sort that do not require "engineering tools" to see, stuff so off that your mere recollection of the 1:1 calls it out, krap-before-calipers-like-it-or-not - though it doesn't seem to suit your purposes to acknowledge problems like those, now, does it, Tom? The kind of logic you rely on really appears to hinge on the premise that A N Y deviation must be off incrementally, so we can just jam it into a "rivet-counting" context no matter how obvious the problem really is. BUT. I was aware of a hazard in my premise, and I may inadvertently answer Bill's (now deleted) question here: it was Mattel that finally cut the scat and went to LIDAR scanning of prototypes, as Airfix is doing now - most notably, the scans that figured into their Batmobile diecast, which Polar Lights ultimately leased to make a kit that was somehow magically free of the gross proportioning issues we see in so many other new tools of vintage subjects. And what's the constant refrain? Maybe Airfix can afford it, certainly Mattel can, but that kind of tech is simply out of the budget for domestic model manufacturers to acquire for themselves just yet. But the Polar Lights/Mattel association is a link that pretty emphatically suggests you examine the fruit with an engineering tool or two before making any arch generalizations about the comparison. Anyway. Kool ride!

You're actually proving so much more, Jesse, that I feel compelled to stop and THANK YOU for it. So there's nothing at all argumentative about putting up a "tsk tsk" gif, then?

So about that "toy" angle now: anybody wanna regard scale models as toys, there's nobody to stop you. There's even a certain logic to it - if a yacht or a restored P-51 or a Lamborghini count as "toys", models certainly don't escape the purview in that context. Nothing wrong with that opinion in and of itself. What IS wrong is to use that opinion as a basis to judge how seriously everybody else should take their models, and make that grounds for everything from the same old tired, unjustfied condescension to bleating about how members should be banned and threads should be closed 'cause the discussion isn't going the way you think it should be. As ever, we got people who essentially prompt the squabbling and then make such ostentatious displays of how TIIIIIRED THEY ARE of it, and how SOOOO ABOVE IT ALL they are, contributing little but the very drama they criticize to the conversation. So. Just who is it with the maturity problems again? Some of us can't help it yet, getting a little worked up at being cornered with the same old lame-brained long-dismantled approaches over and over and OVER again. These days, I'm kinda just shrugging at it all - the more you all keep it up, the more I can point to a two-year-old blog and have more objective people laughing along, saying "yeah, they really DO all that!" (#4 seems germane, btw) Btw, one las' thang on toys: couple Christmases ago, I couldn't help but note a pretty accurate-looking Fiat 500 as I waited in a toy store line. Made by Mattel. To stuff Barbie dolls in. Yeah, I wouldn't mind at all if model manufacturers could hit proportions as well as that particular TOY manufacturer did.

I'll leave it to the true SL cognoscenti to document what colors should apply where on the dash, but in the context of an airbrushed Tamiya aqueous acrylic, it actually makes perfect sense; you can hit the entire chrome piece with the highlight color and then swab off the bezels and switches back to bare chrome with Tamiya thinner or alcohol. I'm actually quite pleased they did it this way for that exact reason.

And that's where I have to disagree with you, Andy. Am I less unhappy with the 300's problems than you are? Yes. But I'm not such a hard-core fan of the '57 Ford, and by my reckoning, i saw fewer deviations on this kit than I did on any other vintage subject Revell kitted in 2012 - even the '50 Olds, the foibles of which I got very familiar with as I went through a review and then a conversion of it. And I continue in my assessment of this as probably Revell's closest of that year's releases. But I have no problem with your dissatisfaction with the kit. You mentioned some hard facts to justify it. It is the people who could not deal with your observations who really caused the problems in this thread, and that's the pattern that repeats itself over and over again. We now have this as an example to pile on top of the three I referenced earlier and quite a few more I haven't. How much sarcasm did you engage in? Or name-calling? That garbage didn't start with you.

Wow. I do love the way you put that. Though i gotta point out that the former party imposes its arbitrary value judgments on the latter far more frequently than vice-versa. Just have a look at some of the push-the-buttons-then-point-the-finger methods directly above...

Ah, Bill... As a guy who himself is delighted with Revell's '57 Ford 'cause it's relatively the least funhouse-mirror vintage offering we've seen from them lately, someone who knows exactly where you're coming from, I gotta ask: As desperately as these guys grab for any misdirection they can to justify their hysterics at kit criticism, are you really at all surprised your Challenger point was so precisely missed? Don't know how much of this you've observed, Gaute, but just in case you were wondering, you shouldn't buy the revisionist history some of this lot'll throw at you. The talk of manufacturers being "idiots" or "not caring" only started percolating after YEARS of harrassment from people who lack the maturity to handle topical discussions of shortcomings in kits, who somehow take those discussions personally and flail about with fairy-tale demands for "perfect kits" and other such tripe to try and make any sense of this infantile indignation they constantly contrive over stuff they had no role in developing. Two threads come immediately to mind: The Kit That Must Not Be Named The Moebius Ford Pickups Notice who really starts making the conversations personal - not the critics, but those poor tender souls who just get so TIIIIRED OF IT ALL. Look where the name-calling really starts. And those are right off the top of my head. OH, and how about this one, where people started soiling their Pampers over a problem with a kit that wasn't even named specifically: Scale Model Inaccuracies And I'm just scratching the surface. There's a mountain of archives in this very forum showing this same basic pattern and laying bare who the agitators really are.