Art Anderson

Yup, When I rebuilt a Model A engine back in the 60's, the only expensive parts were the pistons, and that set of 4 was $50 or so. A new set of valve springs made for Model A's was like $27, but in the exchange book, we found the exact same spring used as the camshaft thrust spring for the Dodge 241cid Hemi, and bought that way, only a dollar per spring! About the only rebuilding parts not available over the counter back then were the main and rod bearings, as those were cast in place, with babbitt--kinda like molding molten solder on to tinned cast iron. Insert bearing kits are now available for the A engine, but I think I'd just as soon have poured ones. Art

Model B was what Ford called their 4-cylinder 1932 cars, which were identical in every respect to the V8, or Model 18, except for the engine, and the badging (V8's had V8 emblems on the headlight bar and hubcaps, B's had no emblem on the headlight bar, Ford "Oval" on the hubcaps. A Model B engine is distinguishable from a Model A by the elimination of the oil overflow pipe on the left side valve galley cover, and a two-bolt attachment for the water pump, along with vacuum spark advance on the distributor (Model A still used manual spark advance, the right side lever underneath the steering wheel). Ford continued to offer the Model B engine in 1933-34, but with what they called the Model C crankshaft, which was counterweighted, the 4-cylinder being dropped from production mid-year in 1934, due to miniscule sales of it. From that time, until late in the model year 1940, Ford only offered V8's in the US, then introduced a small 4-banger that summer, pulled from their very successful 9N farm tractor. This 4cyl was offered until the end of civilian car and truck production in late January 1942. Art

V8 was never installed in Model A's at the factory.......but rather the '32 Ford Model 18. In fact, Ford commercial models (station wagon, panel delivery, pickup and 1.5 ton trucks) didn't get the V8 until late summer 1932--they were being delivered with the Model B 4-cylinder, itself an improved and more powerful upgrade of the Model A engine. Art

Scrutinized this one at Classic Plastic two weeks ago, and I gotta tell ya, John's painting technique has got to be something else! That red paint is flawless--smooth as glass, shiny as wet water, and yet not a detail was lost to paint buildup! Anyone got a clue as to how you did that, John? Or did you develop it on your own? Fantabulous work! Art

Harry, nothing at all personally here, you and I have had a couple of very neat conversations in the last year or so, but yes, when third parties come forward, start insisting that a manufacturer do this or that with THEIR time and their money, then that at least borders on unwarranted criticism. I fully understand the desire of potential customers to see at least pictures of the kits or other products produced by the likes of Modelhaus....however, when their stuff has been featured in "new product" columns in model magazines for now nearly thirty years with pictures, including, I believe, MCM, and certainly on other message boards, most importantly Spotlight Hobbies Message Board (formerly Hobby Heaven), and are also featured in modeler's Fotki and other web based photo sharing websites, AND incredible "word of mouth" testimonials for the last three decades (incidently, with the retirement a few years back of Fred Cady--who himself basically jump-started the current model car aftermarket in 1975--Don Holthaus is the undisputed "Dean" of the model car aftermarket industry), then the old Packard slogan comes to mind "Ask the man who owns one". FWIW, any number of resin casters over the years have used Modelhaus as their "Gold Standard", striving to bring their products up to the high standards that Don and Carol have created, maintained, and continue to improve incrementally. The posts on just about every model car message board on the web are proof positive that what I am saying here is true. Now, I also understand that some people are like Missourians, they want to be shown. If someone absolutely will not buy a product unless he/she sees a picture of it, that's OK by me, but to somehow denigrate a manufacturer because he or she doesn't have the time to dedicate to creating a website full of pics, that becomes a matter of choice personally, but not a license to carp, complain, or editorialize IMHO. As a final note here: I wonder how many aftermarket mfrs have come and gone over the years, even after putting out illustrated catalogs or sell sheets, even had splashy websites with pics, color pics? There have been many, for sure, in all the media used in the aftermarket production of kits and parts. If someone doesn't want to believe any number of unsolicited kudo's about someone's product, that again is a matter of personal choice, and to be blunt, it is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, again IMHO. I also wonder how many resin casters have produced products that didn't live up to the promise shown by photographs of their products in their advertising. Hmmmm? Art

A bit of a hypercritical statement, IMO. Don and Carol are a small group, Mom and Pop, with I believe, some part time help for packing orders, that sort of thing. If you think they have a lot of extra time, think again--in resin, EVERY part is hand poured, and hand demolded, any flash cleaned off by hand. EVERY part to be plated has to be mounted on trees to send off to the plater, by hand. Every windshiled or back window that is needed is a hand operation using a vacuum former, by hand. Of all the aftermarket, resin casting is not only physically demanding, but also just about the most labor intensive there is. In addition, there are new molds to be made, constantly, RTV rubber molds have a very short life, both in production, and in the "library" (RTV deteriorates even sitting on the shelf between runs). There are masters needing repair constantly, and new masters to be prepped for making molds (even though a master might be the work of a truly great modeler, there still can be work that needs to happen before molds are made. All that said, I can vouch, personally, that a Modelhaus resin kit is as close to a quality styrene piece as it gets--painted, trimmed and built, it is quite hard to tell the difference. Their reputation for high quality work has made them the standard of the model car aftermarket, the benchmark that every other resin caster uses (at least those who give a ###### about their product!). While it would be nice to see Modelhaus have an illustrated website, knowning the Holthaus' as I do, when they have a lead time of 4-6 weeks in a lot of cases, they cannot see taking time away from all the production processes they go through to do that. In addition, they have always been very careful about overpromoting their vast line of products, simply because their's is a full time job (more than full time!) for the both of them, and their's is not a business where you just go out and hire any Tom, Dick or Harry to step in, start pouring resin--each piece has the potential to be a "gotta hold your mouth right" proposition. Don and Carol know that their reputation is on the line with every piece they sell, from a pair of clear red taillight lenses (which is where they started almost 30 years ago, as restoration parts for old promo's and 3in1 kits, to chrome parts (they make thousands of those monthy, and have for a couple of decades now), to full kits. So to "insist" that they need to take a website, or their print catalog "to that next level" seriously comes across as unwarranted criticism in my book. At the shows they attend, the crowd around their tables isn't a crowd of gawkers, it's a crowd of buyers, with cash in hand, and many of those are newbies to the hobby of building resin kits. In short, they would not be the largest in the field, nor would they have as huge a line as they have developed, nor would they have the international reputation they have, were their stuff not as great as it is. There are times when "word of mouth" is about the only reference needed, and that the Modelhaus has earned, and earned in spades. Art

2012 will be the 50th anniversary of my HS Graduation, and my classmates and I plan on having a blast at our reunion! (then, it's on to the 60th Anniversary! And, I KNOW where I was in '62.) Art

Charlie, you do make some valid points, of course, but it seems to me that in all the talk going on all over this country, all the handwringing, the biggest piece of the puzzle, the biggest group of people responsible to a great extent for all the importation of products-once-made-in-the-US are who? I submit that it's me, you, and the other guy down the street, in short just about all of us. The late cartoonist, Walt Kelly, suggested this through the eyes and ears of his little muskrat Pogo. One day, back in the late 1960's, Pogo, who polled his john boat all around Okeefenokee Swamp, making his observations on the world, scrawled on the side of it "We have met the enemy, and they is us!" Our country's tradition has been, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution on these shores almost 200 years ago, to demand the greatest value for the least money. It doesn't take an advanced academic degree to see the evidence, it's everywhere, and has been so all these years of our history as a nation, as a society. Even early newspaper advertisements from the mid-19th century touted, constantly, "cheaper prices", "we will not be undersold", and all the way to "We sell for less, Always". Couple that concept, VERY strongly and deeply rooted in our conscienceness, with our equally fervent demand for low inflation (and our's traditionally has been the lowest of any developed, industrial county on the planet, with the possible exception of Switzerland) makes our currency not only stable in relation to other nations, but also makes imported goods automatically less expensive to bring in than to make here, and that's absent any tarriffs or transportation charges. Our traditionally strong currency also makes American made products considerably more expensive to sell in other countries, even without adding in their tariffs and taxes, or transportation costs as well. Further exacerbating this is the practice of numerous countries, China being the prime example, who do not allow their currency to be valued up or down by the marketplace, rather choosing for national or regional issues to artificially peg their currency against ours and those of other importing countries (the Yuan is still pegged at around 8 to the dollar, for example). China, for instance, also has an extremely high unemployed/underemployed work force, whose numbers if known, surely are a closely kept secret by the government for political reasons. In large part, a lot of what I mention above stems as much from our's being a disposable society--just look at the manmade mountains called landfills! Until the recent emphasis on recycling, the vast bulk of trash being landfilled was solid materials, not food waste. A teacher once told my class in Jr High School that if the then-current trend for tossing it all away continued unabated, the city dumps would become the biggest stock of steel, copper, brass and aluminum, not to mention glass and paper (he likely hadn't even begun thinking about the mounds of plastic items that now get thrown away. Making this situation even worse is the almost total lack of reparable consumer goods, things like tabletop appliances (can you find a shop to repair your Mr Coffee? Most likely not, and if you could, the cost of having it fixed might be close to what a new one costs). Even the computer being used to write this is, in its basics, unreparable--if the hard drive dies, I will get a new hard drive--don't have any repair shops here that will rebuild it, replace it's motor or bearings; burn out the mother board? Get a new one, the old one won't find a repair shop either, to locate the ruined component, cut it out, solder in a new one. Even in auto repairs, much of what used to be fixable is now a replaceable modular unit, perhaps returnable for refund of the core charge, but more and more unlikely. To take this directly back to our hobby, if we were still producing model car kits in this country, the cost per kit would likely be high enough to add more dollars onto the current price structure that everyone on boards like this one carp about constantly. But, in the effort to keep selling model car kits to a retail industry which had pretty rigid price point expectations, something had to give, somewhere along the way. So, offshore went production, which incidently for us modelers has had a side benefit--it's possible to produce fairly small runs of reissued kits and still keep the final cost at least in reason vis-a-vis a newer, higher production kit. But, if nothing else, were we to morph into a society that truly understands that what each of us do, what each of us buys in our daily lives, has at least some effect on our neighbors, and became willing to pay a price for what we buy that sustains its production in this country, by our neighbors, I think this debate would be something that would go away, purely for lack of a market. Art

Your last sentence says a ton, Andy! Any study of 20th Century history will show that the wave of Nationalism/Protectionism that swept this country through the 1920's, culminating in the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930 and dutifullly signed into law by President Herbert Hoover, took a recession and turned it, almost overnight, into the Great Depression, as other countries simply followed suit--world trade dropped like a stone in water very quickly. At the time, the US was only a minor importer, but a major exporter of goods and raw materials, and those markets dried up overnight. It wasn't until the Kennedy Round Of Tariff Negotiations in the 1960's that world trade rebounded, although we were a much larger exporter than importer following WW-II. While our modern trade balance is way off, into serious deficit country, some major US industries are major exporters, companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, and the entire US steel industry. In addition, exports are the real driver of US agriculture, which is still the envy, and marvel of the rest ot the planet. To see what world trade looks like, all one has to do is to stand and watch any transcontinental railroad, look at the container trains. Living where I do, in mid-north Indiana, along one of the principal rail arteries between San Diego, Los Angeles and Norfolk Virginia, we see thousands of seaborne containers daily go through here, the vast majority of which are offloaded on one coast to railroad cars, transported across the entire US, to be loaded on ships going either to Europe or Asia, depending on which direction the train is going. Sure, that traffic practically disappeared about this time last fall, but it is reviving, as are the trains we see here of 85' automobile cars going both ways, and trains of coil sheet steel cars going to Detroit, etc. to supply automakers. Our US economy has often been characterized as being very much like a supertanker at sea--monolithic, slow to accelerate, slow to stop, and VERY slow to make VERY wide turns (many supertankers take up to ten miles to execute their tightest 180-degree turns, for example). Buried in all the hype we see in the news these days, is a stream of commentary that we in the US are seeing a fundamental change (and that's change NOT emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue nor from Capitol Hill) in our economy. Did you know that, for example, the number of transactions at retail paid by debit cards now exceeds, by a fair margin, CREDIT card sales? That is a major shift, MAJOR! People paying cash up front at the store, rather than excercise debt. The firm of Obama, Pelosi & Reid complain that in spite of all the stimuli, banks aren't lending enough money--but news stories abound of bankers stating simply that prospective borrowers aren't exactly beating down their doors these days, a far cry from just a few years ago. There was a time, perhaps 50yrs ago it began to end, when people used credit far more wisely, for purchasing those few durable goods, and a house to live in, with borrowed money, for all else paid cash. That was the effect, as much as anything, of memories of the Depression of the 30's, which had as one of its root causes, almost unbridled consumer credit extended during the heady days of the Roaring Twenties. While credit cards existed in the 50's, they weren't bank cards, but rather the likes of Diner's Club (pretty exclusive back then, BTW) and American Express (slightly less exclusive), and relatively few merchants accepted them. Consumer credit, outside the likes of GMAC or Ford Motor Credit, was primarily the venue of the small loan companies, Household Finance, General Finance (remember "Friendly Bob Adams"?), or locally owned small loan companies, who tended to know their clientele, understand their situations, and lended accordingly. When our parents went to buy a house, they talked to a local banker, who likely knew them, or could find their credit rating locally, said loan application presented to the bank's loan committee, with often the loan officer having to present the application, and having to defend it in front of sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed upper management. In those days, a Dunn & Bradstreet credit rating was just one factor, not the only one (the other credit reporting companies weren't even thought of yet) in granting or denying the loan. We may well be seeing somewhat a return to that once archaic system, who knows? While I am 65 yrs old now, and not in the market anymore to buy a house, or even a new car, I still do not see a "dismantling" of our economy, or of our industrial base as you suggest; but rather a change, a transition. Change, if nothing else, is constant, and ever more rapid than at any time in history. The critical necessity, it seems to me, is to be able to adapt quickly to a changing world--after all, harness makers and buggy makers had to do just that a little over a century ago. People who once found work shucking corn by hand, feeding ears of corn by hand into mechanica shellers had to accept the arrival of the mechanical combine, for example. As old industries slowly die, new ones seem to keep cropping up, as has been the case through most of the history of this country, and others as well. Art

Basic machining is kinda like riding a bicycle, once you learn, you never forget--trust me, it will pretty much all come back to you! As for lathes, buy the best you can afford--my personal choice would be Sherline, as I have had mine for now 28 years, the precision and ease of setups on a Sherline have to be experienced to be believed. In February of this year, I sprang for Sherline's vertical mill, and just about every accessory they make for it, and that thing is just the berries. With a mill, even more so than a lathe though, precision and accuracy are extremely important, as you do not want any wobble or runout of the milling headstock when you are working with small carbide mills or center drills, those things break very easily if not mounted in an exactly true head. Art

Well, speaking for myself, summer brings car shows and other outdoor weekend activities, which I enjoy too much to stay inside, cut, fit, glue and solder stuff together. Now that fall is here, and the outdoor car events have pretty much died off for another year here, it's back to the bench more. I've already soldered up the basics of the Knox frame, and finished the long leaf springs. And guess what? It's supposed to rain on my two days off this weekend! Art

Every generation has gone through tough times, certainly economic, and at times due to war. So try and relax, you are not alone, nor are you the first, nor is your generation the first, to go through this. A recession can be declared over when our economy stops shrinking, and starts growing once again--the tough thing though is that even if things start looking up, employment generally does lag behind the resumption of growth. I've been not only an employee, but also an employer, and believe me you, it's hard to hold a line when people come knocking on the door, looking for work, but yet you have to steel yourself to wait just that little bit longer, to be assured that things are truly looking up, and that another employee will be needed--I believe firmly that every employer out there goes through that. We were warned back in January that recovery would be slow, and that unemployment would continue to rise through this year, due exactly to the things I just said above. That said, be willing to take up anything that comes along--being employed for what may seem like peanuts beats the hell out of sitting around worrying. You may "starve" figuratively speaking, but at least that starvation will be slower, and you will develop valuable survivability skills that will stand you in good stead when, in the future, this sort of thing happens again, as it does, and has done, about every 10-15 years or so (historical record shows that, BTW). In the meantime, it does little good to recriminate against those who one sees as somehow at fault in this current situation--those who truly may have had a hand in creating this economic mess will have their day of judgement, but be willing to understand truly no one person is responsible for what happened economically, not even a small group of "someones", but in a very real way, all of us have at least some culpability, either by our actions, our inactions, perhaps our own profligate ways. Pretty much, this recession came about due to all our going forward. Fat, dumb and happy were we, as credit was so easily obtained, and then used to forward lifestyles that were unsustainable by most. Just as the Wall Street Speculators played their games, and got burned badly in the end, we ourselves, the so-called "Little People" played along too, or so it seems to me. Everyone claims to dislike Congress, judging from the polls, but do we as a people REALLY do anything about it? Not really, given the pattern of long years' standing, of sending the very same people we claim to detest back to Washington for yet another term. Don't like that? If so, why not work hard and diligently to support new candidates who just might change things for the better? Huh? Don't like your city council, your county legislators? Same thing, work hard to support some new blood there too. I suspect that this experience, this time, will have an effect similar to that experienced by people who went through the Great Depression--they aren't going to be as eager to take on debt, many won't for the rest of their lives, being "Once burnt, twice shy", and while that will be healthy for them, it will make recovery longer and slower, but perhaps over time, that won't be such a bad thing, who knows? We may very well decide to learn once more to enjoy simpler, less expensive pleasures, and that could well mean this hobby, which is still rather inexpensive entertainment, as it has almost always been, and that's a good thing too. So, hold on, that light at the end of the tunnel probably isn't an 18-wheeler coming at you, me, nor the other guy. Art

Yes, Walmart did carry Polar Lights kits, in selected stores. Funny thing with Walmart--they don't always have the same stock on the shelves from one town to the next. In fact, they got the first shipments of the Great American Rides kits. Art

Dave. We evaluated the Monogram '64 GTO with John Mueller, and he pointed out numerous serious inaccuracies in the body shell--too wide, too boxy, hood and rear deck way too flat, for starters. Mueller provided us with some 300 pics he had taken on our deal of a pair of GTO's, both hardtop and convertible (Monogram's kit is a two door sedan (Post). Now, in doing reference pics of a car for modeling, no consideration is given to "beauty shots" but rather pics that show shapes, dimensions and details. Those get taken from all sorts of crazy angles, in order to capture all the subtleties of the car when a mockup is done for a model kit or a diecast. When evaluating any model car kit, particularly the body shell, it's essential to compare that body shell to pics of the actual car, by holding the body shell in as close to the same position as it appears in the pic of the 1:1, THEN closing one eye or the other, to eliminate visual perspective and depth perception, in order to view both in the same manner, just two dimensions (a camera lens does not give the effect of that 3rd dimension, depth. Monogram's tooling of the early to mid 1980's all tend to show a certain boxiness, too flat panels, but they are one thing for sure, INFINITLY buildable, which certainly made them extremely saleable, without question. But, I would urge anyone purporting to judge any model car kit or diecast, to consult as many pics of the real thing as possible, and forget trying to judge accuracy merely by comparing one kit to another---there is no 1:1 benchmark when that is done. Art

I've posted too many times already about the errors in the Polar Lights Coronet--basically that Sales let Walmart dictate the release date, far too far ahead of the scheduled time frame and all that--the kit is a disappointment both to me, and the guy who was heading up Polar Lights at the time. HOWEVER, the '64 GTO is far more accurately done, despite some claims to the contrary on this and other boards! When one has over 200 photos and measurements of the real car to go by, done by none other than the legendary John Mueller (long time AMT Corporation head of product research and design--he DOES know his stuff) I stand by what I said, that kit is very well done overall--the only '64 GTO done as well was the original AMT kit from 1964, now in the unobtainium category. As for the old, original AMT '65 Coronet, two things: The kit cannot be brought back without nearly the same investment as an all new tool--the original tool was an early MPC design, produced and marketed by AMT, whereupon, MPC took the tooling, made a funny car kit out of it. I have the complete MPC tooling list as it stood from RC2 in 2004--almost nothing of the original kit tooling appears on that very lengthy tooling inventory. In addition, by comparing John Mueller's reference photo's of two original cars, the MPC designed, AMT produced '65 Dodge Coronet 500 is itself far from accurately done as well. Art

Just as I did with regard to 01/01/2000. I fully expect to sign on to whatever it is on the web that pulls my chain on 12/22/12. and in addition, see a nice sunrise. Frankly, how people get sucked into all this urban rumor ###### simply escapes me--was it ME who fell asleep in HS classes, or what? Art

Eldon is still around, but left the toy industry behind, now a major producer of plastic office equipment. The model car tools you mention were last run by Doyusha of Japan, about 20 years ago or so, and frankly, they didn't sell very well, otherwise they would have been rerun more times, and in larger quantities. It was pretty much the same as when Eldon brought them out the first time. Eldon was primarily known, in the 1960's, as a maker of cheap, often crude plastic toys and low-end slot car racing sets primarily for the discount store market, so when they brought out their small series of wild custom show cars, they just weren't taken very seriously. As for old tooling made decades ago by the major model car producers, none of those outfits had any sort of "crystal ball" (nor did hobby industry people, and I submit very few modelers back then much cared once the next year's offerings hit the stores). So, model companies revised tooling where they could, make a new version, in order to generate new sales from a ton or so of hardened steel, rather than just have the molds sitting on a warehouse rack, cosmoline attracting dust and dirt. Some tooling also disappeared, either because it was made from rather valuable metal (JoHan used primarily beryllium copper inserts, and supposedly a lot of those inserts walked out the employee entrance in lunchboxes, next stop unscrupulous scrap dealers), or went through several forced moves at long distances, in which many inserts were unceremoniously crated up, separated from their original mold bases (AMT and Lesney AMT) which would require a major effort, possibly hundreds of man-hours to sort through hundreds of tons of crated, unlabeled tooling, just to figure out what goes with what. Along the way, some tooling may well have been damaged by mishandling, rust or corrosion which makes them rather unusable without thousands of dollars of rehabilitation, even to the point of having to be recreated. Also, it is wise to remember that nearly all those annual series kits of once new cars were done from promotional model tooling, produced to orders gotten from the Big Three Automakers along with AMC and Studebaker, and weren't particularly hot sellers when they hit the shelves in the 60's, and likely would not generate anywhere near the sales required for major investments in them today will require just to break even. It's sad of course, but very true unfortunately. Art

Check me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the E-type one of the very first cars to get an electric fan, due to its low hood line and long nose shape? As for Big T, Big Deuce, cars like those tended not to be driven either far, nor often, and certainly not in heavy city traffic--as if they did, they would have boiled their engines rather quickly. There's a whale of a difference between a Model T 4-banger and its primitive, if very workable "Thermosyphon" cooling principle, and any V8. which Ford and Ford buyers learned to their frequent frustration with boilovers of their 21-stud flatheads. If one looks closely at vintage pics of rods that were primarily show cars back in the late 50's/early 60's, you won't see many cooling fans either. The way those OHV V8's were mounted didn't allow for much space for the belt-driven fans of the era, and the modern thermostatically controlled electric radiator-mounted fans were still in the future. Remember, even the flathead Ford V8 had its fan mounted high up, almost above the block, as in a 30's Ford, the engine was buried far below the level of the hood, so this arrangement was needed in order to get the fan into the middle of the radiator core vertically. The same was true of inline 4's, 6's and 8's of the era as well. In the case of a T-bucket, the relatively small radiator which was often chopped to get it down to the lines of a channeled body shell, left very little room for an effective belt-driven stamped steel fan, due to clearances for the upper and lower radiator hoses, and even a Deuce Highboy could have that problem as well, with a modern (for the time) V8, as most OHV V8's of the 50'and 60's have their fans mounted so low that the arc of the blade would be well below the front crossember of the hot rod chassis. Art

Ken, Under the seat perhaps, but there is NO ROOM behind the seat in that closed cab for a gas tank! Check the fit of the interior in a '34 Ford pickup kit, you will see what I mean, the back rest of the seat is hard up against the back of the cab, in fact, the bolts holding the wood that this mounts to come through the back of a '32-'34 Ford pickup closed cab. This is why the '33-'34 cab has that extra raised beltline molding across the rear of the cab, due to cracking problems with the '32 cab unit. But I stand by my original statement in this thread, ALL Ford pickups from 1925 through 1941 used passenger car frames and suspension systems, the only difference being the number, and thickness of the spring leaves. Art

Ken, and anyone else who thinks that AMT/Ertl had actually started tooling either the ''49 Olds 88" or the bulletnose Stude as plastic kits, you are following one of the enduring urban rumors of this hobby! As I have said numerous times before, model companies in this country, for years, have pitched new product ideas to their immediate customers (mass retailers and the hobby wholesaler pipeline) to get their interest before moving to that next step, mastering and tooling the kit in question. Most often, this presentation is done behind closed doors, out of the public eye. Tom Walsh, then the product manager for AMT at Ertl, told me up front at the 1999 RCHTA show (I had known Walsh for several years by that time, due to my aftermarket involvement) that those two concepts were a last minute addition to their line of proposed kits--hence the public proposal which appeared to consumers to be an actual announcement. I attended RCHTA on Saturday that year, after the "trade days" when only members of the hobby industry trade were admitted, and Tom Walsh told me rather firmly that it didn't look good for either subject--the mass retailers and many wholesalers, and not a few hobby dealers in attendance panned both subjects more than those who signed up for a presell order. By 1999, it seems, any new car idea from a model car company just had to have that particular "pizzazz" in the minds of industry buyers in order to sell, and those people are ultimately responsible to the upper management of the companies they work for--too many mistakes, too many "bad calls" and their bosses will be advertising for a new buyer, plain and simple. As for us modelers having a strong input, yes we can, but as can be seen from other threads here, as well as on other message boards, it's really rather rare for there to be a broad concensus on any particular possible model car subject, we modelers have become that "fractured" a community it seems. Ask 50 modelers, completely at random what they would like to see manufactured, and likely you will get at least 25 DIFFERENT requests--very hard to get a read on what really might sell, although there might be some confirmation of thoughts back in the company conference room--doesn't always happen, but likely it can. As a kid, my dad would tease me about my "wants" changing more often than I changed my clothes, and in a real way, he was right--I suspect that is just as true today of a lot of model car people; either that, or their individual wishes have become both adamant and eclectic. A very good example of the llatter is the Monogram 1/24 scale '91 Chevy Caprice police car--hotly requested by a very determined police car modeler's lobby. Of course, WalMart said they would buy X number of a kit, IF it included a battery operated light bar (which turned out to be a toy sourced unit out of Hong Kong), and that was the turning point. However, beyond the police car, and a so-so taxicab variant, the kit died very quickly on shelves, only to be ressurected when Monogram modified the tooling into the 1995 Impala SS, which did sell reasonably well. One of the toughest things about making a real, and believable push on a model company for a particular subject is being really objective. In that, it seems to me that one needs to get beyond the ME factor, what I want stuff. Does anyone REALLY KNOW that everyone else wants what he wants? Come on now, get real--none of us truthfully know that with any degree of authority, if they did, they'd be one hot commodity in the world of consumer goods in general, model companies in particular--but real life likely will never turn up more than a handful of those clairvoyant types in a generation. In addition, I've sat in more than my share of product planning meetings, even when I was just doing box art buildups for AMT Corporation as an independent contractor some 30yrs ago, to my doing product development for Johnny Lightning Diecast Miniature Cars for Tom Lowe in his Playing Mantis days (also a few Polar Lights model car kits as well), Trust me, the ideas in these brainstorming sessions can flow like Guinness on St Patrick's Day in Chicago or South Bend, but in the end, there are just so many dollars available for new products at any time, and FAR more ideas than can be made. So the process of winnowing through a ton of great ideas gets pretty intense at times, it's a matter of deciding which product ideas have the greatest chance for success--and that is likely just as true with the 1:1 automakers, in fact just about any manufacturer of consumer goods. In addition, retail and wholesale buyers also have their "open to buy" or the dollar limit of what they can spend for new merchandise in any year or season of that year, and FAR more proposed products of all kinds than they possibly could afford to buy--so that winnowing happens once again, LHS's have the same problem, far more products in the hobby industry than the vast majority of store owners have the capital to put on their shelves (indeed even their local customer bases), so they winnow down what goes on their shelves as well. Last but not least, we ourselves, as hobbyists, as consumers, face the very same issues, our funds are limited, so we have to make those same winnowing-down decisions, we can't have them all, so which ones do we grab up, carry to the cash register, and which ones get left on the shelf? You see, this same sort of decision, albeit for perhaps different reasons, gets made, every day, by all levels in the chain--from the manufacturer, all the way to us, the ultimate customer/consumer. Art

Actually, '32 Ford pickups, both roadster and closed cab, used the very same chassis as passenger cars, so a pickup would be as easy as a new cab, pickup box, possibly new fender/running board unit (pickups had wider rear fenders to mate up the the very parallel bed sides), the appropriate interiors, and new hood sides. Doing different rear suspension parts (IRS for example) likely would mean a new chassis unit, which may or may not be feasible, depending on how the originall tooling was designed. Some model kit tooling is designed so that the molds for some parts, notably wheels, can be removed, and replaced by new and different ones, but many parts are tooled into the solid steel mold bases--very difficult to change out, and often, the addition of more than a few small parts is often not feasible, due to space limitations in the mold bases themselves. Art

Well, Revell did, what about 1999-2000???? And guess what? As BluesmanMark stated, they were such sales dogs (those gorgeous engine kits) that hobby shops were glad when the last ones left their stores after months, even years of tying up money, they were so glad to get rid of the fleas, the shed fur, and their incessant barking. There were that poor a seller for most stores, and for Revell-Monogram as well. It was a case of Deja Vu, in that in many ways, most of the Parts Packs, even their vaunted motorcycle kits, gatthered more than their share of dust in the halycon model car boom of the 1960's, with AMT, Aurora, even Monogram with their 1/8 scale accessory packs for the likes of the Big T and Big Deuce discovered as well. 15-20 yrs after they were first released, there were still hobby wholesalers stuck with full, unopened cases of them in their warehouses. The rule of thumb here? "If something doesn't sell well at all, don't make more of them!" Art

In many ways, our hobby mirrors real life, the true popularity of an actual car often translates into the model kit having similar high levels of interest. Not always the case, but I suspect more often than not. As for stock versions of the '64 Fairlane, I suspect that at the time this kit was tooled, a stock version would have had about as much popularity among the majority of model car customers as a bowl of leftover milquetoast--just a model kit of a used car--look at the real ones, generally they don't bring much on even the collector car market, although there is a dedicated following for them. Model King's buying up relatively small reissues of older kits is, in terms of costs, far removed from the notion of a model company tooling up an all new kit. The old kit tooling is already in existence, perhaps a bit of tuning up of the tools, a minor bit of cleanup, load the molds into the injection molding press, squeeze out perhaps 5000-6000 pcs, print up some new instruction sheets, new boxart, pack the kits, and go. Compared to doing an all new tool, the cost for doing this is much, much less. In a population as large as ours here in the US (300,000,000 or so) just about any $20 product can be sold to say, 5000 people, but it takes way more than that for an all new kit to get the payback of invested dollars. Art

It's been done. Monogram first did this with their '53 Corvette, '56 Thunderbird, and '48 MGTC, all of which were first produced with cast metal bodies along with plastic everything else. They then did the same with their '48 Jaguar XK-120. However, tooling for a diecast body shell can leave lots to be desired, due to the engineering necessities of molding in hot, molten zamak, most notably the incredible thickness of body sides, due to the often deep undercuts caused by the tumblehome in the shape of the original body--the inside mold has to have straight sides, with a bit of draft angle in order to be able to pull away the hard metal body, where a normal plastic body shell can be sprung off a mold that apes the exterior shapes generally. The other engineering issue is that of engraved panel lines. While those can be represented in styrene only tooling with very thin ridges making very small grooves, most generally in diecast production tooling, those "ridges" must be extra wide, in order to delay their "burning" off of the surface of the tool prematurely. This makes for door lines that often appear way too wide to most eyes. In addition, while it is quite possible to engrave scripts, even very delicate chrome trim spears into the tooling for a diecast body, the marketplace for those cars simply has dictated the use of separate plated parts for door handles and side trim, the side trim requiring a deep, wide groove that roughly fits the chrome spears, but not so close as to be invisible once assembled. This is due to mass production requirements when those products were first introduced, intended to be heavily painted with production spray guns, then assembled by hand, quickly, on an assembly line. Art

Conservative is a rather relative term, it seems to me. With decades of data on what has sold, plus what is selling today, it only makes sense to at least look at that. Beyond the AMT Fire Apparatus, I can think of a car kit that had a lot of requests for reissue, back though the 1980's, that being the AMT '53 Studebaker Commander Starliner--apparently, when that kit was introduced, in 1964, it laid a very large egg in the marketplace, even for as fine a kit as it was then, and still is. It was reissued in the late 1970's and I was told at that time, it just did not sell in numbers large enough to have justified it. So, it was very surprising to me to see it repopped in the early 1990's, and in fact at that, the kits gathered a lot of dust in a lot of stores. As late as 2002, The Studebaker National Museum Gift Shop in South Bend had huge stacks of that early 90's kit, a decade after they were produced. Hardly the stuff of good sales numbers, yet someone at AMT Corporation, back in the 60's decided to go forth with it. Monogram's gorgeous sprint car kits of 1986 sold like Sno Cones on the 4th of July--to sprint car fanatics, who bought them by the case lot (I sold, in my hobby shop, something like a dozen cases (144 kits) to a single buyer, and then never saw him again. Same thing happened elsewhere, and then, as suddenly as they took off, they died on shelves. The Monogram '64 Thunderbolt came out with great fanfare, kudos in the magazines, great excitement from builders, but guess what? Monogram still had stacks of cases of them, 10 years later, still in their warehouse, from the first production run, again, a somewhat speculative kit that promised a lot to someone at that company, but was a huge commercial failure. Model companies aren't into running museums, or maintaining a hoard of unsold product, they are in the business of selling what they produce, pure and simple, to put money in the till for future products, in addition to paying wages and salaries and hopefully dividends to their stockholders. yet on the other hand, a Corvette is almost a guarranteed sellout, probably the most popular single model car subject of all time in the US. 25yrs ago, a Lamborghini Countach was a no brainer, make it, sell the hell out of it--nearly every maker of that subject in kit form had a long waiting list, it was that hot for about 3 years or so in the US. And, to add to the mix, in 1977, the late Bill Brown, then the Marketing VP of AMT Corporation told me that if he could get KMart to buy 30,000 of any new kit subject, the company would go ahead, as they could surely sell an additional 30K kits on the hobby shop market, and that was in a very dark period for model car kits. Obviously, not very many new product ideas made it back then, those were years of perhaps a dozen new model car kit (and truck kits of all sizes as well) releases annually in the latter half of the 70's. So, being conservative (meaning very cautious with new product dollar investment) meant survival of the companies producing them. Comparing model car kits to model aircraft kits is almost an "Apples and Oranges" thing though! For starters, the military aircraft modeling market is, in comparison to model cars, HUGE, as it is worldwide, in most countries much larger than that for model car building, and almost always has been. One very real reason for this is, aircraft tend to be built in multiples by those enthusiasts, particularly if the plane in question is of their favorite air force, or their favorite type. Also, in much of the rest of the world, models of American vehicles, while interesting to some locals, don't mean as much as the cars they see themselves on the street. and until fairly recently, in most countries, not all that many cars either. The second issue is one of tooling costs. To do a one piece car body shell takes generally, 6 separate mold cavities (for top, innner surfaces, two sides, front and rear mold cavities, all but one of them movable (body side molds, body end molds and body top molds must pull away upon demolding the body shell, sometimes the inner cavity (the male part of the mold) must telescope inward from the ends, to release the styrene body shell as well). That multiple sliding cavity tool has to be huge and heavy compared to the simpler two-way opening tools which make say, engines, chassis, and all those small little parts in a kit. In addition, the sliding core mold simply has to be very precise in its operation, to minimize misalignment, those damnable mold parting lines. All this makes for a very expensive part of the tooling for a model car kit, as it seems that nobody very much likes a multi-piece body shell in a kit (I say that after years of reading comments on old Revell kits, or more current Heller or Italeri kits) and decades of hearing those same comments over the counter in a hobby shop. By contrast, the tooling for aircraft and armor can be (and with armor often is!) done in the much simpler and less expensive two way opening tool, which can also be cut in materials far less expensive than hardened steel, due to the much lower stresses involved, and virtually no sliding cores (if indeed there are any needed). To kit say, a 1/72 scale P-51 Mustang likely takes but one tool for the colored plastic, a separate one for the clear canopy, both of which can be made in China for about $9000 ea in US Dollars--a far cry from what it costs to do a model car tool, even there. In addtion, there are almost no royalty fees charged by aircraft makers, although licensing does exist there, primarily required by Boeing Aerospace (owner of North American Aviation, Sikorsky, and of course Boeing, and agent for several others) and Northrop Grumman, who in addition to planes by those makers, also has rights to several ship builders), they being more concerned with accurately presented models than commercial income from royalties. Addtionally, no licensing is needed for most national markings, nor even the personal markings on aircraft such as nose art, that sort of thing. (Before anyone goes off on a tangent here, all US Military aircraft were, and are, privately developed to meet the specs of an RFQ, not designed by any branch of the military--the military was and is, just the customer). Thus the comparison between what model companies worldwide do with military aircraft and those few who do model car kits just isn't a very valid one. Art