Aaronw

Oh, so just a tad bigger. Wow, I thought the Payhauler was quite a beast on my work bench, that Komatsu would probably be as big as my workbench.

Other than letting me paint in the house and not worryng about what the weather is doing, are there any other benefits to using a paint booth? Can it improve the quality of paint jobs? My wife just went back to working full time so finances will be getting a bit easier for us. I've never really considered getting a paint booth as it was way over in the might be nice someday list. Now that someday might be close at hand the question is do I really want one? Any pros or cons to a paint booth are welcome. Thanks

Any idea how big those Komatsus are compared to the Payhauler in the AMT kit?

That is exactly my complaint, it is not the price so much as the jump. To be honest $20 for most car kits is an ok price that I wouldn't really complain about, but a kit I could buy last year from Tower for $12 now going for $20? How do they justify nearly doubling the price of an existing kit in one increase.

There really isn't a sales forum, it is a swap, trade (is there a difference?) or free forum. You could get away with a list of what you have for "trade" and leave the fact you are trading cash for models to PM / email but really you are supposed to be using emodelcars for selling. Just giving you a heads up so you don't get bombarded with people pointing out you are not supposed to be blatantly selling on the forum. emodelcars is free to use and has a set price option (buy out) so you don't have to do it auction style. Several members here have sold quite a bit on there so I'm sure somebody could walk you through it if you need help. Also payment there is completely up to you paypal, money orders, cash, seashells, old jewelry etc. It is really hard to say these days when it comes to postage, but you are probably looking at $5 for a single average kit, $15-20 for a package 4-6 kits. The USPS has a handy calculator online that you can use. http://postcalc.usps.gov/ With the size stash you are trying to thin, you really might want to reconsider getting a paypal account.

I'm sure Art will be along with a definitive answer but until then from what I've read on similar discussions the tooling would be capable of far more than 20,000 kits. I think 20,000 would be a small average kit run, because runs of 5000-10,000 kits are generally listed as limited issues. As I understand it, each sprue is a set of tooling, so they might have 5 or 6 machines running but each would be cranking out a sprue, not a whole kit. It sounds as though, yes one kit one set of tools. If they were making kits in the UK and then wanted to change production of that kit to Mexico they would have to ship that tool to Mexico. One of the issues Art and others have described is that the individual tooling sets were often misplaced over time, so they might have 3/4 of the kit tools, but without that last 1/4 it isn't really worth anything unless they are willing to retool that sprue. If not well marked it is just a ??? tool, could be part of a 1965 Mustang or a P51 Mustang. Similarly many were damaged over time sitting in storage, rust, or physical damage (dropped, run into with a forklift, stolen and scrapped etc). Johan in particular used an older style of machine, which may or may not have been capable of the size runs Revell, Monogram and AMT were capable of.

There is some stuff called (I think) rust-all, I haven't used it but it looks promising. It is a 4 or 5 part system so you are supposed to be able to do anything from light surface rust to full body rust cancer. I thought I had seen a post from someone who was using it, but it might have been one of the armor guys on another site. Also just a suggestion, but you might do better with an answer if you include what you want in the title. What do you recommend for doing rust will be more likely to attract the attention of the rust bucket builders than What do you recommend... which could be asking for help with anything from kit selection, paint color, or tool advice.

Were older resins nastier than the current ones? Resin dust has gotten a reputation for being a bit worse than some of the things we play with, but perhaps it is not a deserved reputation.

A post here that you are selling a bunch on stuff on emodel cars might work well for you. It's not ebay busy but with fair prices (for you and the buyer) you could probably move a good chuck of your stash.

All of the white paper I've used is transluscent, I would think they could makle one with a very solid white but no one does that I know of. The only things I found to get around it are painting white underneath it as you mentioned, or putting multiple layers of the white decal paper. Even ALPS printers which can print white have some trouble with white decals over dark colors, it is sometime neccessary to double print the white parts of the decal.

I realized I didn't mention paper. If you go with an inkjet printer I found Bare Metal Foil and Micromark's paper worked well. Testors thinner than the other two which is nice for areas where the decal has to go over detail, but the odd size paper is annoying to use, I ended up taping it to a full size sheet of paper. All are available in clear and white film. I now make decals on a laser printer or ALPS and have been really happy with the Tango Papa paper, but he doesn't sell paper for ink jet printers.

I bought Corel Draw X3 about 4 years ago, it included several very helpful tutorials. There is also a Corel Draw forum on the Corel Draw site, I've used it a few times for help and it seems to have some pretty handy people hanging out. Here are a couple of tutorials related to decals, they are primarily focused on using an ALPS printer but still pretty helpful regardless of the printer used. They also are using Corel Draw so it can be some help there as well. http://www.xs4all.nl/~robdebie/models/decals.htm http://www.tangopapadecals.com/Make%20your...ecals%20101.pdf One of the neat things with Corel Draw is you can convert pixel based images to vector based. These generally need some clean up, but it can save you time by transfering a photo of your design into the program. Also if you don't want to deal with ebay, but don't want to pay full price either look for a student / teacher edition if you or someone you know is a student there is a significant price reduction on those versions.

Wow I didn't know Jada did anything like that. I might have to start paying attention to them.

Dave you are going to put me in the poor house. I've seen Dave's work in person, it is high quality stuff and generally quite a bargain for all the detail he includes.

I agree with you, I love learning new techniques for modelling. Only bad thing about threads like this is I keep learning about more neat toys I'd like and each one seems to cost more than the last.

Um, January, February... have we added some new months into the year and I missed the memo? Hey I'm happy, I've now received 3 issues in about a month and a half, kind of nice getting a magazine every 2 weeks or so.

Any photo quality printer should be fine, you really only need 600 dpi or so and most good printers can exceed this. One of the big things I would look at is replacement cartridge cost which can vary quite a bit. I've had good luck with HP printers, but Canon, Epson, Kodak etc all make decent printers. More than the printer I would suggest you consider a vector based graphics program like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator to get the most from your printer. Using a pixel based program like MS Paint, photoshop etc letters start to blur when they get below about to 1/10", with a vector based program you can print crisp lettering that requires a magnifying glass to read. Vector based programs also allow you to work on your artwork at a large size and reduce to the print size without distortion, pixel based programs distort (pixilate) as you adjust the size. If you try to get the latest greatest version it can be expensive but you can usually find older versions fairly cheap and they should work just fine for decals.

You might have heard of AMT, Lindberg, Tamiya, Revell of Germany, Hasegawa, Italeri, Fujimi etc, there are a few other model kit makers besides Revell. I've seen the comment about the auto manufacturers wanting more for licensing, that may be possible for new kits but what about those already available. Two of the kits I noticed increases on were the '50 Ford Pickup and '41 Chevy pickup, why repops of long paid for, license negotiated for kits jumps 80% in one year doesn't seem reasonable to me.

Yeah, I've been a bit shocked at some of the increases. Tower had a lot of the Revell kits for $11.99 the past couple years, now many have jumped to $20.99 which seems just a tad excessive. I'm not exactly on a boycott, but am definately shopping more carefully and it makes me happy to have 500-600 kits in the stash.

Yeah, it was kind of funny Compaq was considered much better than HP when I bought my first laptop. A few months later HP bought out Compaq and planned on using it to replace the HP line of Laptops. When I bought my second laptop a few years later the Compaq name had a bad rep but HP had a good one. Maybe it was timing but I good luck with both of mine.

I have owned a Compaq and an HP laptop and found them both fine. I did have a warranty issue with the HP but their service was great, they sent fedex to my work to pick up the computer and I had it back within a week. One suggestion I was given when I bought my first laptop was to go to a store and play with several different brands. Get a feel for the keyboard and mouse, look at the different screen sizes. Being comfortable using it can be just as important as what is under the hood (to keep it car related ). Laptops have really come down in price, so you don't have to spend a ton of money for a good basic computer.

If I am thinking of the same GM cabover it was not a Budd cab, but did have a similar look to the Ford C.

I am planning on being there, I've got a couple kits I'm trying to get finished between now and March 6.

That doesn't sound right, I thought Round 2 was doing much larger runs to lower the per kit cost. The Model King and Stevens runs were small which raised the cost.

I frequently refer to the three speed column shift in my Land Cruiser as an anti-theft device.