Art Anderson

My local electronics store has several small video cameras that stream, and fairly inexpensively too. Couple one of those at the bench, with a decent microphone (headset perhaps), and just simply describe what it is you are doing on a model, from time to time. Sounds like it could be both fun to watch, and informative too. Art

Johan included cheater slicks in several of their car kits out of the late 60's, and Polar Lights included them in their '65 Coronet and '64 GTO kits. Art

I just thought of this model! This manlift started out as a diecast scale model (it is 1/24 scale, BTW), and was quite well detailed at that. My example is that diecast as molded in styrene from the diecast tooling. Yes, it is intriguing, and yes it is a pretty nicely done rendition of perhaps the one piece of construction equipment that anyone sees--manlifts are everywhere, in big cities, small towns, even get used in agricultural and highway construction projects. I can, in my mind's eye, see myself disassembling this piece, painting it green with bright yellow "Sun Equipment Rentals" logo's and signage and adding a lot of details (yeah, the small 4-cylinder diesel engine is in there, under a hinged cover, as are the control panels!), and posing it as it might be used as a platform for working on a multi-story downtown building. But would I lay out $25-$30 to buy it in a kit box? Probably not. (It was given to me by a friend almost 3 years ago). And having shown it to my model car club, even taking it to a couple of regional shows, it pretty much drew a collective yawn. Art

Any model kit manufacturer would almost give his left *** to sell a hundred thousand of any model kit subject at $40! The trouble is--some subject matter over time has shown, by actual experience, that it just doesn't generate the mass numbers needed in order to justify producing more of it. If that were not the case, then logically virtually any model kit of a Yugo would sell pretty well, would it not? Any modeler should understand this, even if that understanding comes from their experience in other merchandise areas on which they do, or have in the past, spent money. Of course, any economist can show that the lower the price point, the more units you will sell--that's very much a no-brainer, UNTIL you factor in whether or not a particular product idea has any real legs to it. Just in the last two years, we've seen the introduction of three cars out of the 1950's, all of which stood us builders on our collective ears out of excitement. Now, anyone who was alive and building model cars 30-50 years ago can ask themselves (honestly, I hope) "would I have gone nuts to be able to get a model kit of a '49 Oldsmobile 88, a Hudson Hornet, or a '55 Chrysler C300 back when I was a teenaged model builder in 1965 (or 1975)? I'm pretty sure those three subjects would have died on store shelves back then--they were just dorky, dumpy looking "back row of the car lot" used cars back then. Even in the 1980's, those subjects would have been little more than "resin casting territory"--having been around the industry, particularly at the retail level, I could have counted the requests for any of those three subjects on the fingers of one hand, and had at least three fingers left over. But even 30 years ago, modeler's interest in such subjects more than likely would have been at best, lukewarm. In a fairly short period of time out from now, I suspect that farm toys, as we know them even today, will largely have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, given that today, only about 3% of the US population lives on farms anymore. Diecast farm toys, by and large, is a nostalgia-driven product area--yeah there are diecasts of the newest and latest, but the ones that grab attention seem to be models of equipment from years, even decades past. Art

Folks who attend NNL's and enter contests, indeed those who never enter a thing but shop the vendors at those events, frankly represent only the visible tip of a rather large iceberg. Art

One set of statistics, were they accessible, would be the "annual reports" of the various model companies. However, not since AMT Corporation was bought out by Lesney in 1979, has there been a publicly traded corporation (and annual reports filed not only with the IRS and SEC, but also provided to each stockholder) in the US producing exclusively plastic model kits. Aurora Plastics was gone. Revell had been swallowed up by the French toy company Cegi, Monogram had been a subsidiary of Mattel since about 1967, MPC was bought up by General Mills (the Cheerios people) in 1968 and so on. I had the opportunity, on one of my frequent trips to AMT Corporation on Maple Road in Troy, Michigan, to read several AMT corporate annual reports to stockholders, which included a couple of annual reports from the middle 1960's (I saw these in 1977 BTW). It was fascinating to read of $100,000,000 in annual sales by AMT in the 60's Annual Reports, and then to note that by 1976, company sales having been static at that $100 million level 10 years or more later (and those sales by then were NOT all model kits--AMT was doing other plastic molding alongside model kit sales by then, just as I saw AMT/Ertl doing in 1994 while on a tour of their Dyersville IA plant) Now, those years of huge, but static sales figures came during a time of high inflation--meaning that the units (model kits sold) were significantly fewer than what had been sold back in the 60's. When I got a phone call from the then-Managing Director of Lesney AMT in March 1992 that Lesney had filed for bankruptcy, he assured me that I would get paid the nearly $2700 I was owed for box art and trade show models, but pointed out specifically that the model business had declined so deeply that Lesney-AMT had shipped just six thousand model kits in the entire first quarter of that year. Talk about "in the tank"! In a way I should not have been surprised though, as in December 1991, at the height of the Christmas season, upon walking into my favorite Marsh supermarket, I was confronted with cubic yards of Monogram model kits, mostly cars, and the blowout price of $1.50 each, your choice, no limit--that was a "fire sale price" considering that model car kits carried a $3.00 MSRP by then. Later on, I was told by a source at Monogram that the company inventoried all the old Aurora tooling, and those that they could not see as meeting the standards for Monogram Models products were sold for scrap, their having been made not from steel, but a rather valuable metal alloy. That same source told me that the "fire sale" of model kit inventory and the sale of nearly all the Aurora model kit tooling was a major part of saving Monogram from obliviion--and we know now, of course that it helped do the job. Over these past 10 years or so, the diecast model industry has declined precipitously--no longer do the big box retailers have 18-24 foot aisles with 6' of pegboard just for Hot Wheels, no. Now it's less than 6 feet in many stores--some have very little in the way of Hot Wheels. Many of the brands once crowding diecast aisles are now completely gone--what remains of 1/24 and 1/18 scale is more and more a specialty market. So, lumping plastic kit sales in with diecasts, as industry journalists are wont to do gives a very inaccurate picture--but then, journalism graduates write, they aren't very good at analyzing things all that much in business publications to the extent of telling US meaningful information. I used to track model kit sales, along with tracking tools, paints and supplies, and then compare them in my hobby shop, I could figure that a model kit would generate, on average, at least its selling price in add-ons, such as glue, paint, tools, aftermarket details. Not each kit, but certainly over the aggregate that was my experience. So, any statistic that just lumps even two of the three categories together really skews the numbers dramatically. But that's the press for you. Art

Hobbies in general seem to me to reflect an old saying I'd heard years ago: "When times are good, it's Wine, Women and Song, but when times are hard--It's Beer, the Old Lady and Television". 2011? We were just beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel of the "Great Recession", which I'd be pretty sure impacted the higher priced segments of the hobby industry. A well-known plastic model kit industry executive was quoted in a magazine article a few years back as saying they could only identify perhaps a couple of hundred thousand model car hobbyists across the US. I suspected then, and still do, that this number is way, WAY off--years ago, in the 1980's, when I owned a hobby shop here, the vast majority of model kits got sold to people who were not truly avid modelers in the sense we on this board think of as being avid modelers. It seemed so typical back then that come Thursday or Friday of the week holding a payday at the University or local factories (and we have here all the same factories that existed in 1985, PLUS several more that came on line since!) guys would come in, peruse the model car aisle, pick up a kit, a few bottles or spray cans of paint, perhaps some glue and maybe a tool or two--pay for their purchase and go down the shopping center to the supermarket or perhaps the liquor store for a 6-pack, and disappear. I'd seldom see most of them until next payday or so, and I never, EVER saw anything that the majority of those customers built either. Back then, I could have counted the really serious builders I knew on a single sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch notebook paper, double spaced. In other words, while we modelers who build, post up pics of our builds, go to contests and NNL's may seem limited in number, behind us, back there somewhere ensconced in the privacy of their personal "man caves" exists a pretty large legion of unknown, almost "closet" model car builders. Another interesting thing that I've noticed from my years in the hobby, and almost exacty 30 years in and around the retail hobby business: Hobbies in general are very much "counter-cyclical" to economic cycles. I still remember Trost Modelcraft & Hobbies from the south side of Chicago. While my interface with Trost was completely that of a retailer dealing with a hobby wholesaler, on a trip into their warehouse, I searched out, and walked through, their retail hobby shop which was several blocks away from the warehouse. That hobby shop first opened for business in 1932--the very bottom, the depths of the Great Depression, and obviously it not only survived, but prospered way back then! The first real boom in model car building happened when? In the spring of 1958--the very bottom of the so-called "Eisenhower Recession" (which shrank US auto production by almost 40 percent, nearly killed off American Motors, and delivered what was ultimately the fatal blow to Studebaker)--even 1959-61 were lackluster years of recovery--and yet a lot of us in now our late 60's to early 70's remember that period as being truly halycon times to be crazy about model cars. By contrast, the boom period of the latter 1990's impacted model car building and model kit sales, as consumers not only went for other things, but in a way, went over to "Wine Women and Song", until events such as the "dot-com" bust and the tragedy of 9/11 turned things pretty sour once more. The "revival" of our hobby in the 1980's had its beginnings in the severe recession of 1981-82, and the 1990's "boom" seems to have had its start about 1990-91--again hardly boom times economically. It's been nearly 10 years since model car kits started getting less and less space in the Big Box stores--their demise there spurred by declining sales of them compared to other items that could turn more $$ in the same amount of space. Toy sales tanked in 2002-2004, causing the "Marts" to rethink just how much floor space and capital to tie up in that category--and unfortunately, those retailers consider model kits to be toy items--much to our consternation and disdain. What we are seeing right now, while it is a resurgence of interest in this hobby, which so many of us remember fondly from our collective boyhoods, is a "reinventing" of the industry--no longer shackled to price points dictated forcefully by the likes of Walmart, but rather determined by what it takes to develop, tool and produce truly interesting model car kits. For the first time in years, or so it seems to me, the plastic model kit industry seems driven more by new product rather than by constantly regurgitating reissues of old product designed and tooled, some of it, well over 50 years ago. True, there is still interest in those old kits of yesteryear (I just received a kit of the last reissue of the AMT '36 Ford before the tooling was munged into Dick Tracy's movie car), but that interest really generates only so-so sales--it's the new stuff that sets our model car world, figuratively, on fire once again. Sure, there are some real gems of long-ago discontinued model car kits to be resurrected, but it's the anticipation of what new kit of a never-before-kitted model of a car might be exploded on our scene at this year's iHobby that intrigues me, and I suspect, a very large number of readers of this board and the magazine that supports it. Art

Or, why not photograph them individually, and post up the pics here? I'd bet somebody who reads these forums can ID them for you. Art

All well and good, but none of these were/are done in 1/25, or even 1/24 scale, which are the scales most preferred by us car and truck modelers. Back about 1985 or so, I was asked to appraise some Product Miniiatures Company (PMC) model farm equipment. PMC produced all manner of miniature promotional items in acetate plastic in the 1950's, including 1/25 scale model cars. PMC also produced acetate plastic promo's of Allis-Chalmers farm and construction equipment, in 1/16 scale, almost all of them as assembled models. They did, however, produce at least a few in model kit form--my friend had a couple of PMC farm models in kits. Apparently, the model kit aspect didn't sell at all well, I never saw any kits like that in the hobby shop that existed here in Lafayette, downtown (and I truly haunted that place as a 11-12 yr old kid. Art

FWIW, Every Ford car produced, all the way out through at least the 1942 models, came with a small tool set, which included...................A HAND CRANK! If you look at the grille of any Ford made in the US up through the '42 models, you can clearly see an access hole down toward the bottom of the grille, for inserting the crank (I can't imagine starting a flathead V8 by hand though!). While Model T's all had a handcrank permanently mounted to the front of the engine, from Model A forward, the hand crank was a separate tool, never to be left dangling from the front of the car. From Model A onward through the '42 Ford, the engines used a toothed crankshaft pulley bolt which engaged a pin on either side of the inner end of the hand crank. Upon the engine firing, those teeth (more correctly termed "dogs"), with their angled shape pointing opposite the direction of crankshaft rotation, would "kick" the hand crank free of the spinning crankshaft. Art

Actually, There are at least four warnings about cranking a Model T Ford that I can think of, all involving the crank itself: First, always assume that the engine may attempt to literally start backwards! For this reason, ALWAYS use your left hand on the crank (Model T crankshaft turns to the left as you face the front of the car, and using your left hand to turn the crank ensures that if the engine "kicks backward" the crank will kick your hand (in conjunction with your pulling up on the crank) out of the arc of the crank itself and out of danger of your wrist of being struck by the crank. For this reason, NEVER wrap your left thumb around the handle of the crank--if the engine does kick back, with your thumb wrapped around the handle it can either break your thumb, or pull your left arm down into the arc of the crank causing it to strike your wrist and break it badly. My dad lived all his adult life with a slightly crooked left wrist, caused by a Model T crank hitting it when he was about 12 or 13. Second, ALWAYS check to see that the spark advance lever (the lever on the left side of the steering column below the steering wheel) is all the way up, which retards the spark timing as far as it will go--however, with wear, and the inevitable loosening up of the fairly complex mechanical linkage between this lever and the spark timer which is all the way up at the right front of the engine, the spark lever can appear to be fully retarded, but any sloppiness in the linkage can make this a false sense of security!. Third, ALWAYS check to see that the throttle lever (on the right side of the steering column) is all the way up, which means that the throttle is closed to idle, or perhaps only the slightest bit open--too much throttle when starting can exacerbate any kicking back, or also cause the engine to "speed" as it starts, which can "grab" the crank, making it spin right along with the crankshaft. Fourth, and this relates back to the first warning! NEVER, EVER push down on the crank, as if you are "winding" up the engine. This puts your hand and arm completely in the "arc" of the crank handle, and should the engine start and the crank not disengage, the crank will strike your arm, causing more than a simple fracture. All that aside, Model T crankshafts didn't have much in the way of thrust bearings (in order to keep the crankshaft from developing "run out"), and as the engine got a bit worn in the bottom end, the crankshaft often would slip to the rear a bit too much, which moved the flywheel with its series of magnets (Model T used magneto ignition, and the magnets were on the front face of the flywheel, acting against coils inside the flywheel housing, enough that the magnetic field was too far from the coils to generate electricity. While of course, the correct fix was to have new bearings poured, in the "field", T owners learned to jack up one rear wheel so that it could spin freely, then put the car in gear by releasing the parking brake handle all the way forward. That had the effect of pushing the crankshaft back into its proper position, and the flywheel close enough to the flywheel housing for the magneto system to work correctly. Once started, the owner had to put the transmission back into neutral before lowering the jack, lest the car leap forward! Art

Well, considering the costs associated with resin casting, and the simple fact that those Ertl John Deere tractors don't bring anywhere near the price at which a resin repop would be attractive--I think you might guess the answer. Art

However, every Model A Ford came factory-equipped with a removable hand crank--just in case the battery was too run down to use the starter. The starting procedure for the Model A is very much like for the T, incidently (I started all three of my Model A's every so often, on the crank, usually just to show off--they always started on the first flip of the crank, even in the coldest of weather! Art

If you need to dull down a shiny PVC tire (unless it has printed whitewalls on it), wipe it down with some lacquer thinner--that dulls them for me. Art

Wax interferes with the gelatin adhesive on water slide decals--just as it will with the low-tack adhesive on the back side of Bare Metal Foil. Decals first, then wax the model. Art

Harry, true enough. But I can hear the screams of anger and anguish from a VERY large proportion of the model car hobby were a model company to do that! Some things in this hobby have become traditional, soft PVC tires being one of those, and incidently, there are some very highly detailed tires that have been done in PVC, and in 1/25 scale. Art

The Japanese companies have a bit of a different business model though: They've had a tradition of outsourcing a lot of things besides decals, instruction sheets and kit boxes (those items most every model company does get produced outside their own operations), notably tires, which they have made from neoprene rubber. The "technology" for molding tires in rubber isn't rocket science--it's done essentially the same way as making model car kits from plastic, coupled with the vulcanizing process as used in making real car tires. Two things, I suspect: Cost of production--ever since the middle 1970's, Japan has been the single largest market for plastic model kits of all subjects, and price has seldom been an obstacle to modelers there--unlike here in the US. Second, and I've noticed this on several Japanese model car kits I've built over the years--those neoprene rubber tires can dry out, and literally crack apart, just like a neoprene rubber fuel line on a production car (I had to get several sections of that replaced on a couple of cars I owned, in the past 20 years or so!). Now try buying replacement tires for that really nice Tamigawa Porsche 5-10 years down the road when its tires die of old age! BTW, those of us old enough to remember the very earliest Monogram 1/24 scale model car kits, Monogram outsourced the rubber tires to a toy manufacturer in the Chicago area who was making their toys with rubber tires. Some kits that had them: The original Sizzler Dragster kit, Original issue '30 Model A Ford kits, Original issue '34 Ford coupe/cabriolet kit, Original issue '36 Ford coupe kit, even their original issue '32 Ford hot rod kit (that was reissued about 16-17 years ago as a Selected Subjects Product-SSP, also at one time Monogram produced a motorized version of their Kurtis Kraft Indianapolis Roadster with outsourced rubber tires. Art

AMT/Ertl did reissue the John Deere 4430 farm tractor, and the John Deere 310 backhoe back in 2001, first for John Deere's dealership boutique departments, and then for general sale. They apparently sold only so-so. I was in the Racing Champions Ertl Outlet Store in Dyersville IA in July 2004, they still had stacks of those unsold kits for sale. Art

1) You say "better" scale tires made from styrene: Short of making the tooling to do that in styrene in multiple segments (think of slices of a pie here!) there is no way to get detailed tread on a hard styrene tire. Bear in mind that few military tires have the multitude of relatively small tread grooves, many running concentric with the circumference of a tire. Molding them in hard plastic will require multiple mold sections in order for the tire to come out of the tooling, and even then there would be compromises, as hard styrene will not pull out of a mold if it has to come out "sideways" against the raised detail in the steel tooling without damaging the tire, and badly wearing the tooling. 2) As a former resin caster, I can say, unequivocably, that resin casting is a full time job in and of itself--actually more than full time. Maintaining a website itself can be a full time job as well. Pay someone else to keep up the website? Well, that doesn't come cheap either. 3) Model kit of construction and farm equipment? That's been tried, several times over the past 60 years, as styrene plastic model kits. While I am with you on this one, those kits never sold at all well for their manufacturers. When a manufacturer is considering a new plastic model kit subject, the sheer cost of developing that kit, creating the tooling, and even producing it simply demands a large volume of sales from each kit--with a newly tooled kit, it can take upwards of 100,000 units SOLD just to pay back all the upfront costs (this has to happen before they make the first nickel of profit on the product). Another issue here is scale: With farm equipment, there is already a very large hobby in collecting diecasts of that. As one might expect with our model car "love" of 1/25 and 1/24 scales, farm toy collectors have their preferred scale(s) which are different: 1/64, 1/32, and 1/16. 1/25 scale farm equipment to them is a "bastard" scale! With construction equipment subjects, it's all over the map, given the sheer size of such machinery in real life. Complicating this is the apparent lack of interest in the model car hobby for model kits of construction equipment sufficient enough to generate the sheer volume of sales necessary to make any money for the company(ies) who might enter that field in "our" scale. The Ertl Company tried that, in the mid-70's, with the likes of John Deere and Massey Harris tractors, and implements to go with them--they literally "died on the vine". The only reason AMT/Ertl reissued the two John Deere tractors in 2001 was that John Deere dealers often have "boutiques" in their dealerships, selling all manner of collectible JD items. AMT/Ertl released those John Deere tractors to the general hobby shop market, and many hobby dealers ignored them, sensing a lack of market for them (I bought one of each JD tractor myself, BTW, but have yet to build either one). The model companies who supply our hobby do have a pretty good hand on what subjects will sell--cars such as Corvettes, Mustangs, '57 Chevies, even Nascar Cup Cars do sell, and in fairly large numbers--that's why you see so many of them over the years--if they know that certain subjects sell very well--make more of them! If not, then not. Art

Use Google Advanced Search for 1957 Ford, and then click on "Images" at the top of the page--more pics than you can shake a stick at--you'll find not only pics of engine bays, but will also discover a great way to research real cars for the models you want to build! Art

I spotted this excellently restored '57 Custom Tudor at the Goodguys Nationals at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in September 2012. Here are my interior pictures (taken through rolled up windows, as the owner was nowhere to be found): Hope these help a little bit! Art

Dante, I spray at 2" or less with my Passche H airbrush, no matter the paint I'm using, be it lacquer, enamel, or waterborne acrylic. 3-4 inches out, unless you had your airbrush really opened up, would account for your "sand finish", or so it seems to me. Still though, you might test to see if the thinner you used is curdling the paint--you should see that in the color jar. Art

FWIW, a number of dishwashing liquids actually have silicone in them--so they clean right down to the "shine". Silicone is the deadly enemy of paint adhesion. Art

Nope, the Ford F100 kit MSRP is NOWHERE near that figure. Art

We've surely all heard the saying "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday" with regard to automakers (and gasoline/lubricant companies as well), but I suspect that it only works for a while, and then goes stale. As a fairly avid reader of say, newspapers, I can't remember the last time I've seen any serious coverage of drag racing in any major newspaper (even the Indianapolis Star doesn't give all that much really serious coverage to motorsports, and Indianapolis hosts three major racing events every year!). Sure, drag racing gets lots of publicity in magazines, even has its own couple of mags covering the sport from blowers to slicks, but those aren't really "general interest" publications--not every bookstore or newsstand carries them. Even TV coverage of racing is pretty much limited to cable channels, and then not even the really high-ratings channels. So, does "winning on Sunday really translate to selling on Monday" anymore? With companies such as Castrol--does the large sums of money spent on race car sponsorship inspire increased sales of their motor oil? Sure, it more than likely did, back in the 1960's when Castrol was the principal maker of racing motor oils (their name comes from Castor Oil, which was the preferred engine oil with racers of just about all forms of motorsport for the first 60 years or so of auto racing). But I suspect that Castrol has taken a long look at the dollars they were spending on sponsorship, and decided to take a different tack on advertising--that's happened innumerable times down through the decades of auto racing. Same with Ford: Does spending a lot of sponsorship on a Funny Car team REALLY translate into selling Mustangs--especially considering that the only thing about that type of race car that truly resembles a Mustang is the legendary FORD script logo? Ford Motor Company has sponsored race cars many times in their 110-year history--with the intent to "win on Sunday, sell on Monday", and if that tactic doesn't sell more cars as time goes on, why continue it (from a business perspective, anyway)? Art