Art Anderson

Now to decide what color I want it to be. Art

I think you'd be surprised at just how much MPC tooling does exist. I've read the MPC tooling inventory as given me by RC2's AMT/Ertl people in late 2004, just as I was being laid off with the closing of Playing Mantis (they kept me on a small retainer for a couple of years afterward, in case they wanted me to help them lay out any model car kit reissue programs (I did one, but it was never followed through on). In contrast to the AMT tooling, which was loaded out persuant to a bankruptcy settlement in the late summer of 1982, MPC's tooling and the inventory lists of that, were apparently kept quite organized in their transfer to AMT/Ertl in the late 1980's. Art

More than likely, Hiro saw the sales of those kits drop off over time as the marketplace was pretty much filled up, at least for the time being. Every new model car kit has its selling cycle--it will sell very well when first released, and then (and this is a variable "then") sales drop off as the immediate demand has been satisfied--that happens with every model kit product eventually, of course some more quickly than others. Pretty much, royalties are figured, based on projected sales over a specified period--not like there is a running "counter" that just keeps going, and going and going. When that specified period is up, and all accounts settled, either a new royalty agreement has to be executed, or if the projected sales say, for the next 2-3 years aren't enough to make it all work, then the item gets dropped from production, and generally the tooling preserved for future use somewhere down the road (assuming that it was cut from say, hardened steel as opposed to aluminum short-run injection molding tooling). Art

Licensing is, of course, a whole 'nuther issue as regards the costs associated with doing model car kits commercially. It's all too easy to suggest, on a forum such as this one, that licensing fees somehow are a "cash cow" for say, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, even Ferrari. But, let's start with the premise which I have stated on these forums a few times in the last several years: Anyone, be they a large corporation, or merely a single individual (think a writer, musician, artist here) owning any "intellectual property" (which is what patents, copyrights, and trademarks/trade dress are, BTW) must be prepared to protect those properties against ANYONE who might use them without authorization for their own personal or business gain--that's very much cast in concrete under US Law, reinforced by several United States Supreme Court decisions--so really that issue isn't at all arguable--deal with it. In order to protect such intellectual property, almost always, the services of a law firm (or in-house legal staff) is required, and that includes researching both internal records as well as verifying that whatever product has been presented for approval does in fact meet the necessary legal standards making it eligible for "protection". All of this costs somebody money (last I looked, lawyers and such other experts as may be required don't work for minimum wages). That is pretty much the major portion of licensing costs--of course, with say, a performing artist or other famous person, it may well be far more lucrative to them personally than say a major automaker. I'd be pretty sure that were one able to look at a detailed annual report from say, GM, income from licensing of products replicating GM vehicles (or even licensed reproduction parts such as for restorers) might seem like a fortune, but in the major scheme of things, licensing income is a pretty small part of their total equation. And, while I really cannot say what the royalty per licensed product is, it's not a HUGE sum per piece, but it of course does add to the final price of the product, whatever that product might be. It is, though, a recognized and necessary cost of doing business, whether we as model car kit consumers like it or not. Bottom line: If the car we like as a model kit is of of a protectable and protected real car, no sense griping about it--if we want to see it in kit form, the royalty is part of the price of admission. That said--most automakers tend to not bother with the rather (in the general scope of model car kit producers) small aftermarket mfr's who may produce 100 or fewer of any one model car subject in a year's time. Art

Of course, color printers come in all sizes, shapes and capabilities. At work, I see color printers that far outshine anything you or I are likely to buy--and there are a couple of color plotters that cost many thousands of dollars. It's just like digital cameras--a basic one can be had for mere peanuts compared to what any digicam cost 20 years ago--but yet a top quality one can set you back 15-20 times what a basic point and shoot would.

There is a major difference between a cell phone (or even a smart phone) and any 3D printer, and that is--the virtual lack of any mechanical systems in the cell phone, Harry. With a 3D printer, you of course have the digital component, which controls the thing--but the rest of it relies on fairly complicated and certainly highly precise mechanical machinery, and therein lies the rub. Art

Of course, the up-front cost of everything needed for a decent 3D printer HAS to be considered! I just spent some time looking at these machines, and at this time, they are not cheap to buy at all! At upwards of $2,700 for say, a MakerBot plus another $1,500 for their "replicator" (the device for scanning what it is one wants to copy, the very first part (regardless of what that might be) will be well in excess of $4,000. Even 10 parts reduces the cost of each part (not counting materials) to $400 each, 100 parts gets it down to $40 per part and so on. What this means is simply that it would take an awful lot of parts made in a reasonably short period of time for any modeler, doing this at home, to begin to have a set of machinery for creating model parts at costs per part to make it at all advantageous. Now, I have little doubt that there will be (if not already!) modelers who will adopt this technology--but frankly, it will be simply little more than an addition, rather than replacing any existing molding technology, from resin-casting to mass production of plastic model kits for a lot of years yet to come. Just the history of the computers we all use to communicate on this forum should point that out--desktops have been around for about 35 years now, they have increased exponentially in their power and capabilities, but it took until the very late 1990's for them to come down in price below the $2000 mark for a more-or-less basic machine. I have also seen, and held in my very own hands 3D printed tooling mockups for model car kits--and while granting that those were done specifically for the purpose of evaluating things like accuracy of dimension, shapes and contours, and the body shells showed every evidence of having had their surfaces smoothed out to eliminate the "ridging" that necessarily happens with the "layering" of the material from multiple passes of the printer as it built up the shapes. On body shells with their fairly shallow curves and shapes, those "layers" were not highly visible in areas where they could not be smoothed down, it's been the small parts such as rear axles/differentials, engine blocks and manifolds where that "layered" effect was VERY visible indeed. If one has ever seen the layered thin plywood kits of say, dinosaurs, etc., or even read an architect's or engineer's contour topographical map, that's very much what those parts resembled, albeit with very small contour "lines" around all the rounded (or raised) surfaces. I would be pretty sure that this all is a matter of the "resolution" of the printer--the finer the resolution, the thinner the layers of plastic printing, which would result in ever finer "ridges" on rounded or tapered edges of the finished part. But, I have to believe that the finer the resolution of the 3D printer, the more expensive the machine will be--not to mention the increased printing time due to the higher number of passes the printer will have to make due to a thinner layer of material per pass. Lots, and lots of things to consider in all this, I think; but I believe that it's going to be a number of years before we see anything like a consumer-priced 3D printer that will produce a model car body shell that even comes close to the standard of surface finish we've all come to expect in the model car body shells we see when we first fondle a new one with our bare fingers. Art

Ben, ASSUMING that CAD files do in fact exist (which they most assuredly don't, at the automakers, for cars designed and produced before CAD was even dreamed about. In fact, original factory drawings for say, 1952-54 Hudsons don't, or if they do, no one knows where they might be. After all, Hudson merged with Nash into American Motors almost 60 years ago--and Hudsons became little more than re-trimmed Nash Ambassadors with Hudson 6-cyl engines--no need likely ever seen for archiving all those drawings in case somebody might want to do a model kit of one way out there in the 21st Century. Art

Of course, that has to take into consideration all the up-front costs: A high-resolution 3D printer will never likely come at all cheap--and a computer with speed, RAM and hard-drive capability enough to handle all the necessarily HUGE files won't either, most likely. Then, of course there would be the cost of the software package--nobody's gonna exactly give those away. And, I haven't even adressed the learning curve. Art

Split the year between Sr in HS, Freshman in college.

IF one is able to, and willing to spend the money to buy the level of 3D printer that will do the job to a level we've come to expect with our injection-molded plastic kits. At this point, and probably for a good while into the future, I suspect 3D printing will be at least a small part of the model-building mix, but I'd not hold my breath waiting for it to run the injection-molded plastic model kit into the dirt for a LONG time yet to come. Art

I'd be pretty certain that EDM is less expensive to use than the old-fashioned rotary milling pantograph setups, as it's very much robotic from my understanding. Art

One of the best tools I've ever used in measuring a real car (or parts thereof) for a model or miniature is a carpenter's rule (along with a dressmaker's measuring tape) having every other inch blacked out. Used in photographing the actual car (the ruler being laid close to, or actually on the surface of the vehicle) it gives direct information as to the dimension in question. It makes figuring dimensions in 1/25 scale very easy to do. Art

Tom, Believe it or not, AMT and MPC both used to do that very thing, certainly when developing a model kit of a car which was available for such extended study. In fact, in a magazine article from about 1966 (Car Model, I believe), about MPC and their development process of a new kit, there was a very clear picture of a REAL 1927 Lincoln Roadster inside the rear of their factory, with designers going all over it with measuring sticks, tape measures, and taking voluminous notes about this and that on the car. In the bottom line, however, it doesn't really much matter the nationality, culture, or background of the people charged with the responsibility of creating the designs, tooling mockups, and ultimately the steel tooling for a model kit, as long as they have the requisite skills and the dedication to follow instructions. Given that, it behooves the people responsible for overseeing the development of a new model car kit to be very sure to provide accurate information, and skilled evaluation and followup. In addition, a high level of communication skills are a requisite here, being even more important than ever when dealing at great distances, as well as across language and cultural "barriers". Art

The AMT '25 T Double Kit's hot rod V8 is a 430 cid Lincoln. Art

When you say "disintegrating", do you mean that the "chrome" is fading away, leaving the raw plastic color of the part showing? If this is happening, it's more than likely due to contaminates in the surrounding air (think air pollution here). To understand how that can happen, it helps to understand just what model car kit "chrome" really is: For starters, it's not chromium, as would be the case on the bumpers of a real car. Virtually all the "chrome plating" on model kit parts is actually aluminum, which is deposited on those parts in a large vacuum chamber, the aluminum being vaporized in a total vacuum by the use of high-voltage electric charges shot through strips of the metal itself. The parts were sprayed (or flow-coated) with a clear, non-penetrating (non-crazing) lacquer to give the parts tree a very shiny surface, to which the vaporized aluminum molecules adhere. After this process, the kit parts tree was then given an overspray or coating of the same non-penetrating clear lacquer. This "top coat" protects the aluminum layer from wear in handling (it's only a mere few molecules thick!) and against vapors in the air. Aluminum is one of the more "active" metals on the Periodic Chart of Elements, and as such, pure aluminum (which is what is used in plating model car kit parts) "combines" very easily with elements (chemicals) that are either acidic or strong "base's" (think any acid, or a base such as sodium hydroxide here, or for that matter, even salt). If someone in your home smokes, or your kitchen stove doesn't have a vent hood over it, the vapors (or tobacco smoke) can have chemicals in it which while perhaps invisible, can damage reactive metals such as aluminum (the sulfur compounds that can be released from cooking eggs will do that, by the way--they can tarnish silver, copper or brass very quickly). A glass (or plastic) display case can protect the finish on your models, but in order to do so, it needs to be fairly airtight. A glass case with sliding doors will pretty much keep dust off (household dust can carry such contaminants as I mentioned and when landing on a model car surface, allow those contaminants to attack the surface finish of a model!), but still minute particles of dust can get past those sliding doors. Other than protecting a model from constant exposure to such airborne contaminants or contaminated dust or lint, there is no really good way to protect a model. However, some modelers have been known to give the chrome parts a further clear overspray with say, Tamiya clear lacquer, Future floor polish, prior to assembly. That's not absolute proof against the plating going away, but it does go a long way to preventing it. Of course, the high end diecast models, such as Franklin or Danbury Mint, have their plated parts electroplated with real chromium, but that is a very involved and costly process--and not one seen generally with model kit parts. Art

Except that Stalin's car was a Russian sort-of copy of a Packard 180--NOTHING interchangeable at all, not even sheet metal. Packard enthusiasts and historians have argued about that issue for several decades, but with at least one or two examples now in the US, pretty much it's been confirmed that the ZIS limousines that were built in the Stalin era were actually rather crude copies of the senior Packard. Art

Yes, Round2, after leasing the AMT/Ertl plastic model kit tooling for a few years, bought the entire plastic model kit tool inventory from Learning Curve, which is what RC2 was renamed several years ago. Art

Vern Tardell, in his excellent book "Building a Traditional Ford V8 Hot Rod" points out that in actual practice, boxing the frame rails alone didn't work very well in the long run, due to the tendency of any Model T through 1932 Ford frame to twist (a problem common to just about any car frame prior to the introduction of a chassis X member in the middle, which Auburn Automobile Company pioneered with the 1929 Cord L-29 series. As for an engine for the T, a Chevy 6, while it could be hopped up, probably would have required some frame reinforcement of the T chassis--considering that any inline 6 of the 50's was considerably heavier (by 150lbs or so) than a comparable V8, certainly a lot heavier than a Ford flathead V8. This was due to any inline engine of more than 4 cylinders requiring not only a longer and heavier crankshaft, but the block had to be heavier as well, in order to counteract any tendency to flex or twist (yeah, cast iron can still flex and twist, however slightly, and in an engine block, that's detrimental to such as main bearings). Not only that, but consider the sheer length of the Chevy 6 vs a T four-banger, or even a flathead V8: To install a 6 in a T will require either moving the body back (not difficult to do on a T, recessing the rear of the inline 6 back into the front of the body (a T bucket ain't all that long front to rear--where to put your feet?) or lengthening the frame rails themselves (which will increase the twisting action of the frame itself). Art

In 1990, I bought 7 different versions of this pickup, in kit form, both MPC and AMT versions, with the idea of casting them in resin--that's where I found the differences. Many of the kit parts were interchangeable--notably the chassis which could go from one to the other, back and forth, interchangeable. However, the plated grille and front bumper could not interchange between AMT and MPC by 1969. There were wheel and tire differences, as well as trim level differences between the two companies. The Blazer/GMC Jimmy kits came from AMT for 1972, as part of a planned "Construction Site" series of model kits (the same series that spawned the Caterpillar D8 Bulldozer, and would have seen a Link Belt Speeder backhoe shovel as well--the Link Belt Shovel was announced at the HIAA Trade Show in Chicago in January, 1972, with a picture in the AMT '72 Catalog, but it was never tooled up due to the dismal sales of the CAT, from what I was told over the years by AMT's people). As for Walmart offering any of these kits should they be reissued by Round2, I seriously doubt that, as Walmart, unless they buy a few for selected stores, really doesn't market model kits across all their stores anymore, and haven't for several years now. Art

Ditto! Non-flammable propellants went away YEARS ago due to their environmental concerns, so guess what replaced those FREON propellants? Try propane and butane! Ask yourself: Would you heat up a propane tank or a butane lighter for any reason? 'Nuff said. Art

If you can find "Bookbinding Leather" (sometimes called "Skiving Leather", that works very well for covering model car seats, as leather can be made to stretch enough to avoid wrinkling. Art

Especially so, IF the tooling was designed from the get-go with other body versions in mind. Art

I cannot imagine any model company deliberately putting out a model kit of anything knowing that it will be a money-loser. After all, certainly in the US, the three plastic model kit companies located here are definitely not even close to "Fortune 500" size by a long, long way. Pretty much, certainly in today's marketplace, a model car kit has to stand on its own financially. Given the relatively small size of model companies, that's really the only way it makes any sense to tool up a new model car kit. Art

Uh, it takes a LOT more than 35,000 sales of a new model car kit just to put its tooling expenditures back into the company bank account, trust me on that one. Art