Brett Barrow

OK, so pickups and big trucks are segregated from each other and then segregated even further from other models. Makes perfect sense now Lemme see if I've got this right with a few example topics: Asking where to buy Alclad = General Asking how to use Alclad = Q&A Asking which is better, Alclad or Metalizer = General Asking what is the better shade of Alclad for painting a specific part = Q&A Coming right out and telling everybody how you use Alclad = Tips & Tricks Coming right out and telling everybody how much you hate using Alclad = General Saying "Hey everybody, my hamster died" = General (located at the top of the page of a modeling site) Saying "Hey everybody, we're having a model show" = Model Shows (located at the bottom of the page of a modeling site) Saying "Hey everybody, my house burned down" = General (located at the top of the page of a modeling site) Saying "Hey everybody, my house burned down - but it's where we held our model club meetings" = Model Club News (located at the bottom of the page of a modeling site) I bought a kit today = Big giant thread on General board I bought a kit today and took some pictures of the sprues = Car (or Truck!) Kit Reviews I bought a kit today and took some pictures of the sprues and started working on it and took some pictures of that = On the Workbench I built a Monogram Little T as a roadster with a turtledeck = Cars Under Glass I built a Monogram Little T as a roadster with slicks and a number on the side = Drag Racing I built a Monogram Little T as a roadster with a pickup bed = Trucks Under Glass I built a Monogram Big T as a roadster with a pickup bed = Big Boyz Again, I'm no rocket surgeon, but it seems like if you set up a forum ostensibly under the guise of a modeling forum, then take all the time to come up with all these little compartments for different subjects, then your "Ah, screw it, everything that doesn't fit somewhere else goes here" board ends up being the largest and most trafficked board and is given the prominence of being at the top of the page, then maybe you didn't do too good of a job when coming up with all those little compartments in the first place...

I really don't get this place, never have really, I mainly stick to one board, the New kit reviews. I don't get the segregation of cars and trucks, especially putting pickup trucks with big trucks. Or splitting large scale off by itself, I mean what's difference between a large scale car model vs a regular scale one? I don't get the point of the "General" board - it's supposed to be a catch all for post that are somewhat off topic and don't fit any other category, right? Then why is it right smack dab at the top of the page and the largest forum on the board? I've never seen another board where the "off topic" forum was given such a place of prominence and was the most posted in by a wide margin. I think that if you're running a modeling forum, your focus should be on modeling, not TV shows, or sick dogs or the weather or who has the best BBQ in East Decatur, etc... But I gotta give this place props for being one of the few public places on teh interwebz that keeps politics and religion off the board, I dig that about this place and that's why I come here.

4 years might be about right, now that I think about it. That would be right about the time the AAR Cuda hit. Think that might have convinced them that starting from scratch would be a good idea. I thought you were saying it had been 4 years from the 2012 iHobby announcement to now. If it comes down do it, I could probably find out exactly when Mr Mueller* first started in on the design work... I don't know him personally, but I know someone who does. edit - *This might not be a Meuller design, now that I think about it. Thought it was, but re-reading some of the early posts makes me think it's not. Have to check. Know he did the 57 Ford, though...

There's only one drink that should have a whole lifestyle built around it. And that drink is whiskey.

On a related note - are today's race cars done with vinyl wraps or heat-set Mylar wraps? - 'cause Mylar is much shinier than vinyl. I've seen some time-lapse video of race cars being wrapped and they're not even fully painted underneath, the urethane front and rear clips are still raw black and the body was the same grey they do the roll cage in, every bit of "color" on the car was printed in the wrap, pretty much everything except the contingency stickers on the front fenders.

i understand that, especially since the first part was critical of them for not doing a black primer (which IMHO would sell like hotcakes and make all the fantasy figure painters need a clean pair of shorts, but that's beside the point...)

Why does it take so long? Well, for one thing, test shots come from the tooling house where the tool makers actually physically cut the molds, they'll have an injection-molding machine there (usually a small, run-down, old one) where they can put a mold into, run a handful and see how it comes out. Once it's been signed off on and deemed ready for production, usually after 3 or 4 rounds of test shots and revisions, the molds will move to a facility where they do large-scale production molding (typically on much bigger, much faster, better maintained, and newer equipment), but you have to go to the back of the line and wait for all the car stereo knobs, lap top shells, cell phone cases, etc... that are in line in front of you to get produced. Sometimes the facilities are in the same complex, sometimes the same town, maybe even the same building, sometimes they're in altogether different countries, but regardless - when your stuff is ready for production, you're put at the back of the line and have to wait your turn. And it seems like we're pretty close to reaching a tipping point where it'll be more profitable to ship the tooling to the US and run the production molding here. You probably won't see actual tooling back in the US for a while, it's been gone for a generation or two, and there's not very many people here that are left that know how to do it, and they'd be up against a pretty steep learning curve with modern techniques. The Chinese, like it or not, are pretty good at it. Then there's box art and decal artwork and licensing approval, etc... all the stuff that's totally unrelated to the production of the plastic parts that has to get done, boxes, decals, and instruction sheets have to get printed, then everything has to get bagged and boxed... It's at least a 2-year process from green-lighting a project to final kit on store shelves, and that's if everything goes absolutely 100% smoothly. Most companies (the upstarts are usually a little more forthcoming with info during the start of a project) don't even reveal their plans to the public until the process is well underway. Tamiya is probably most notorious for keeping a tight lid on future releases, by the time the public knows about a kit of theirs, it's usually in full production and only a month or two away from release. I'd say Revell is somewhere kinda in the middle, usually they officially announce a kit within a year or so of when it'll hit store shelves, which means they've been working on it for at least a year already, and it's possible the designer (which a lot of the time are freelancers under contract, not full-time employees) would have also spent several months working on the first round of drawings and photo studies that were used to create the master patterns, which are what are then used to make the molds (though the trend in the industry is moving away from physical pattern models and right into 3D computer designs that go straight into the cutting of molds, with STL printed mockups used to visually check the process along the way, but I think that would depend on the design team and what medium they feel comfortable working in). And all that time you have probably 10 or 12 other projects to keep going back and forth on. They've got something to keep them busy at all times.

I'm quite the dust collector... Come to think of it, I really don't have a real hobby anymore, since I work in the hobby and do it in my free time. I was the same way with golf, I worked in it and eat, slept, and breathed it 24/7/365. Guess that's just the way I am, whatever I do, I do 100%. My dad was that way and so is my brother. We do something all the way or not at all.

I have to admit to being drafted as a young teen or pre-teen to be given the task of helping to wipe down Kyle Petty's Felix Sabates-owned #42 Mello Yello Pontiac at Martinsville (my hometown - whoo hooo!!!) with some strange industrial strength spray-foam cleaner/protectant the Sunday morning before the race. I can't recall what it was exactly, I was just a kid with a camera and a pit pass (if you even needed a pit pass back then) and they just grabbed me and asked if I'd like to help out. The car was pretty rough and stone chipped and orange peeley and had visible runs, and the decals were cut vinyl, but this cleaner/protectant stuff left it looking nice and slick and shiny as snail snot - and this was Martinsville, a short track - the shortest track to be correct. From a distance, like how we would typically view a scale model, it definitely looked smooth and shiny. All the teams were out there that morning cleaning up the cars before the race. Now I know in this day and age with regulations, liablility, the big bucks, and all that there's no way a kid plucked from the crowd at a Nascar race would ever be allowed to touch an actual race car... When I built Nascar models back then I always thought putting Pledge over raw decals gave pretty much the exact look of how that car looked after we'd wiped that cleaner on it.

Other than the difference in years between the base car and the "custom" parts, there's really not much difference between that and some of the more tasteless customs of the 50's and 60's... Modern Grecian, anyone??!!?!?

I see the Florida tags, but I gotta wonder where exactly it is. That looks like something some kid out in B.F.E. would think was cool (Where they probably also think Monster Energy is cool...) . I will admit I grew in a small town and there were plenty of beasts like this running around, but since I now live in a heavily populated part of the country where kids have something to do in their spare time, I don't see nearly as many here. That's just pure small town boredom setting in right there.

A bone-stock 98 626 isn't worth $1500. And customizing (as anyone knows, even going back to the customizing heyday of the 50's and 60's) just decreases the resale value of a car. Might as well just sell it for parts or scrap. dumb people think this stuff adds value to a car...

Oh, I'm not perpetuating anything - I know that what we see now, especially if it's a 3rd-round test shot, will most likely be the exact plastic kit I hold in my hands when it's released, so I'm not playing the "it's just a test shot" defense. Test shots are for checking how the plastic flows through the molds, not for checking shape issues. Shapes need to be fixed while still in the design or pattern stages. As it stands, warts and all, this will be me when I finally get to hold this puppy in my hands -

I'd venture a guess that the real deal was candy apple red over a gold base, which would have been the norm for custom painters at the time, I doubt it was an off the shelf factory color. The white was the factory Spinnaker White. Funny, but in Davis' Super Stock book, the Lawman is referenced as "White and Orange" in the text, but "White and Candy Red" in one of the color photo captions. In the color photo of the 2% Hemi car after Joe Aed bought it shows up as more red than orange. That's my call, anyway - candy red over gold, giving an orange tint in the right light.

Doing a little googling and came across this post, has pics and details of the built-up prototype box art model - might have a little relevance now... http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=24175

The Belvedere hardtop would be 100% correct if done as an early '64 season Stage III Max Wedge. The 2-door posts and 2% Hemi Lawmen (Lawmans?) came later in the '64 season. I would hope for separate lettering to do allow the modeler to do the candy orange (or is it red? - color pictures show tinges of both) as paint, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if they also offered the orange on the decal sheet. All they have to do separately is the "Al Eckstrand" in white. If they wanted to throw a little bonus in there, they could add the decals to do the 64 2% Hemi post car as Joe Aed's '65 season C/Altered class record holder (Eckstrand sold him the 2% car after the 64 season and Aed gutted the interior and added Hilborn injection but kept the paint scheme intact with new lettering) - but that was a post Belvedere with 2-light grille, though. Still had full trim on the sides. Round 2 could have fun with this tooling, a 2-door post body and 2-light grille and Hemi scoop (though early Hemi cars still ran the Max Wedge scoop), would open up all sorts of possibilities for them to use the Hemi from the Petty Nascar version. I wouldn't put it past them, but not right away.

No - it's a version that previously would have taken the purchase of 2 kits (A 64 Belvedere and one of the Dodge Super Stocks) and a seriously inaccurate set of decals from Fred Cady to build a reasonable facsimile of this car. The Belvedere was only done as a street car and Nascar HEMIs, it was never done as a Super Stock. Lindberg's sprue layout made it close to impossible for them to easily box up the parts needed to do it, you need something from almost every tree in both kits to build it. Would a 2-door post or a Savoy be cool, if not cooler, sure, but that would take a new-tool body. Maybe we'll get it down the road, but for now getting Lindberg back to relevance for as little $$$ as possible would appear to be Round 2's mission. There were resin Savoy bodies (R&R?) out there, made for the Johan kit IIRC.

Oct 2012 to Nov 2013 is 4 years on what planet exactly?!?! 16 pages on a kit that's got another 6 months before anyone holds one in their hands, 3/4ths of the posters can't tell a 70 Cuda from a 71 Cuda... I'm done with this, see y'all when the plastic hits the shelves. Peace out.

Absolutely nothing. Simply stating that for anyone who doesn't understand the point of a pink primer. It's the way the real cars are painted, so paint the models the same way. Read the lines, not between them...

Decals. And the price.

Having seen some of the Trumpeter masters (a couple of them still reside in the very building I work in) in the flesh, I have to say that it wasn't the pattern makers that let those designs down, it was definetly in the tooling. And still, I've asked, and nobody has ever responded - what are the acceptible innacuracies and what are the unacceptible innacuracies? Since perfection is obviously an unobtainable goal (and save the pre-written "nobody is asking for perfection" schtick...) it seems like roof lines and wheel openings/fender flares seem to garner the most "outrage". Because it's a little hard to follow the logic of "we can live with this" for one subject with flaws and "this is unacceptible rubbish" for another subject with flaws. And everything has its flaws - they always have - and they always will. As I see it, if they release this kit as it stands, it's still going to be number one with a bullet, and if they "fix" it, I doubt it will do substantially better, we're definitely into the 99.9th percentile - and you'll drive yourself crazy chasing down that .1% that will never be satisfied - but let's face it, that .1% are the folks that tend to populate message boards like this one.

A Foose candidate, maybe?

Funny you would invoke the 57 Ford as a comparison, since it's the same designer doing the 70 Cuda. That particular designer has a 50 year history in the model industry and is a member of the industry's Hall of Fame. I know I always have a little different perspective on these discussions since I often know a little more of the human element that goes into these kits. And the 57 Ford has its issues - take a look at the inside of the fins compared to the 1:1, though that could have more to do with molding limitations than a design flaw.

Hey hey! I knew the Lawman would see the light of day!!!

I get a better feeling about a lower-end 57 Ford wagon. Don't think we'll see a Country Squire. Get a better feeling about a Ranch Wagon or Courier. I don't get that good of a feeling about a Ranchero, either, though personally I'd love to see one.