niteowl7710

B is for Belgium, E is for Spain aka "España". Edit - I see as I was looking this up, 2 other people already came up with the correct answers. In which case let me be the 3rd to affirm the correctness...

My wife took care of most of the kids stuff this year, but I got my 11 y/o a Wii for Christmas yesterday, which are surprisingly hard to find despite being the oldest system at this point with the Wii U, PS4, and xBox One all coming out in recent months.

I wouldn't expect more than that, there's nothing else being touted on the Round 2 site about it other than "FIRST TIME AVAILABLE IN DECADES", all of the other old reissues with new parts have been excitedly marketed with their back-dated parts (Ranchero) or restoration of long missing parts (Lorenzen Galaxie, Gremlin, etc).

Well considering it's a Round 2 kit, there's nothing NEW about (other than the probably inclusion of the new Goodyear tires), otherwise it's just a reissue of the old '69 Chevelle Convertible kit from decades ago. Anyone who has one, or has had one knows what's in the kit and can speak with reasonable authority as to it's contents, and problems (like the need for aftermarket parts to replace/fix kit parts). It's not a new tool, like it's a surprise or something.

While I'm not a "Junior" my dad and I share the same name short of the middle initial. We're 30 years apart, and AARP start soliciting when you're 50...so many years ago I was a happy go-lucky 20 year old hanging out in my bachelor 1 bedroom apartment when one day the AARP decided that I needed to join. That was the start of a series of various solicitations, credit card offers, etc aimed at my dad that I proceeded to receive 87 miles away from my parent's house.

HobbyLink Japan is having a Black Friday Weekend Sale, now through Monday Midnight (Japan Time). Everything other than books and other printed materials is on sale. Every kit in the joint! http://www.hlj.com

Based on the photos Tim showed, the body looks like a new piece of steel as several aspects of the body are "crisper" in ways that would be hard to obtain simply by whacking the roof off the existing kit and tweaking the tooling. There's a new interior tub too since the back seat is narrower in the convertible. Revell spent a few bucks in making this kit, and it's one of the few new/modified releases they've done this year I'll actually purchase.

Flown several times out of KPIT in the past few years, also made return flights out of San Antonio to KPIT and I can't say I've ever had a lick of problems with the TSA in Pittsburgh, and the one time in San Antonio wasn't a problem either. One of the group of guys I was flying to Texas with tried to bring a full can of shaving cream onto the plane in Pittsburgh and got his hind-end handed to him for that, but that wasn't MY problem...moron. Been through BWI, Albany, DFW & Shreveport as well, but I was just changing flights, and you don't have to deal with the TSA in those cases.

Not to question your budget, but I will say with the favorable exchange rate, and the ever increasing price of domestic kits, these two are right around the same price as anything from Revell, and cheaper than Moebius if your LHS/Kit Supplier is charging close to MSRP (like Hobbytown USA does more franchises than not). The Gloria/Cedric are $26.00 ($24.80 at HLJ), and the slowboat shipping from Japan is about $7, making them $31-$33. The gap is rapidly closing between prices anymore.

We got about 2" overnight and it's gradually tapered off, and then warmed ever so slightly, so what's falling right now looks like a misty frozen drizzle. Allegedly it's supposed to re-freeze tonight and then it'll REALLY get going and give us another 4". This is going to be one of those - When it changes back to snow = How big a mess it'll be tomorrow morning deals. The school district only has a half-day tomorrow, so I wouldn't be shocked if they just canceled off entirely if we really get anything like 4". PennDOT was on top of things last night and the roads were just wet and clear sailing this morning.

Incredible showing of your belly-button sir, glad you have one like the rest of us...although yours seems to scream "LUDDITE" at the top of it's lungs. Is the styling a love it or hate it proposition. It sure is... Incidentally Juke non-withstanding, the Cube -- which was brought here to compete with the likewise boxy and dubiously styled Honda Element -- was on the market in Japan for 10 years before it ever was officially sold in the U.S. & Europe. Sales of it, unlike the Juke, have been dismal and it's actually been pulled from European markets. Proving that styling for Japan, doesn't necessarily sell elsewhere. Also Nissan operates 2 assembly lines (Smyrna,TN & Canton, MS) and 1 engine plant (Decherd, TN) in the U.S. All of which are running wide open to keep up with the demands of those so easily distracted cologne-intoxicated techno-driven customers Nissan has to fight off with a stick since their running out of factory capacity.

Nissan hoped to sell about 1,300 of them a month, the initial order for the first month was 10,943 of them. In the first four months alone they sold 67,500 of them globally. Might not be certain people's cups of tea, but they've sold a whole ton more than they ever planned on doing.

These were supposedly all new tool, now whether it was clean sheet, or if it shared some patterns I don't know, I don't have the "Best Vintage Car" kits.

Whenever I see listings like this it always makes me wonder if there isn't a wife or girlfriend behind it...which can later be turned into a "Well honey I TRIED to sell them, and no one bid!" scenario. Those two collections combined didn't cost $2,500 to acquire new, and there's certainly nothing in them that increased in value appreciably since then.

Considering the vast amounts of VIP and other wild Japanese styles that have been derived off the earlier 330 Generation Cedric/Gloria that are in the "Best Vintage Car" line...more shall come. Interesting note the 430 Generation (5th) of the Gloria/Cedric was designed in cooperation with Pininfarina, although without so much as a hint of Ferrari

I was just happy to find my bench again this weekend. For the past 18 months I've been gone 5 days of the week, and my work area had taken on a on junk drawer life of it's own. Found that in tossing things out of the way to make way for more stuff that didn't belong there I had mixed a Ferrari and a Mustang parts into one box...Chaos! A clean bench is a happy bench, and now that I'm home and have time to work on things without involving a tackle box, or worrying about little bits flying off into never again seen parts of the truck I can maybe use it again for what it's INTENDED. 18 months of dust, spiders and cobwebs also makes you pretty itchy when you clean it up...

Keep in mind guys it's just a re-box of the Revell of Germany kit that was in the works before Hobbico purchased them. So like so many older cars Revell U.S. have made with funky option set-ups, non-stock engine parts, and other things that weren't quite prototypical it's quite possible the car that Revell AG measured looks exactly like this hodge-podge of parts from various model years.

I'm with ya there, the only thing about kits like the LFA, Enzo/FXX and Carrera is that for all that engine (and especially the entire drivetrain/suspension assembly of the LFA) when you get it all assembled you can't see a lick of it. The GT-R is the far worse offender with the "chunk 'o block" in the engine bay that makes painting it a royal PITA, but in the end all of them end up looking more or less the same.

I paid $40 for my LFA, and $38.40 for the LaFerrari...the price on the GT-R and DBS are around $35.00 these days, at least at HLJ where there's usually 20% the Japanese MSRP on most things. The DBS w/P/E was also a special ABER P/E kit that was well above and beyond the P/E Tamiya themselves offered for the DBS, and was an extremely limited run. The price out of Japan will always be the retail price in Japan, then even when you factor in shipping it's still half-again as much as most U.S. retailers will have it on mark up. This kit hasn't seen daylight Stateside yet, I believe it's supposed to start shipping out tomorrow (Monday) and I'd expect it to be in that $65+ range on U.S. shelves. Those of us who order direct from Japan got it about a week earlier since it didn't have to ship anywhere on a container. The extremely favorable exchange rate is working in our favor right now, as it's just shy of Y100 to $1, making the Y5000 price on the LFA work out to basically $50.

http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=76957&p=1051721

Oh I have no doubt that's what Aoshima is thinking too, no way they tooled these up just to make a pair of factory stockers out of them.

For as annoying as PayPal can be, especially to the Sellers, it has to be better than what eBay was in the first few years. Win an auction, wait around for the Seller's Contact Information, have to get a Money Order made up and sent off, hoping that someday you might get what you bid on. Now with the complete integration of PayPal into eBay I can buy a kit in 2 clicks of the mouse and track it the whole way to my front door, even if it's coming from Hong Kong.

The only messages I get from eBay are the "Watch List Item is Ending Soon", along with the associated messages you get when you bid and either win or lose the item. Plus one weekly e-mail about items on my "Saved Sellers" list, and one weekly e-mail from my "Saved Searches" filter. At this point I am only interested in very particular kits to complete "collections" of certain kits (all the Tamiya Nissan Skyline GT-Rs, or Lexus kits for example) so I opt out of all general "Hey Here's a Model" communication as there are 94,000+ items in Automotive kits right now, but if one of them isn't the single run Aoshima w/U.S. LHD Infiniti Q45 kit, I don't care about a single one of them.

Yeah but people shopping at Hobby Lobby (Michaels, Pat Catans, AC Moore, etc) are probably more interested in CRAFTING things for Christmas and need their supplies more than 1 month before Christmas.

Tried to get the lights up over the past two days, but was told it's not even Thanksgiving yet. I didn't want to turn them on, I just felt that 55+ degree days in front of a spate of snow and highs in the 20's seemed like the prudent time to hang off a ladder. I ain't freezin' to death out there again this year, the better half can get frost-bite or we'll just not have outdoor lights this year. I love Christmas, even more so with two little kids, but when you live in the part of the country where winter means WINTER, you gotta use the nice days when you get them!