niteowl7710

Makes sense the Revell Germany kit was released first.

Pursuit Plastics did a line of decals during the "Golden Age" of the 90's of mostly Philadelphia area agencies, but did have individual sheets for NY, NJ, PA, MA & DE State Polices that included multiple sets of markings to build cars from every decade from the 1940's through the present (1998). Now finding those decals is the fun part since PP went under after a few years.

The LFA was only $70-80 stateside, I bought mine from HLJ right after it came out for less than $50 shipped. With the exchange rate as Peter mentions the kit is actually priced at $40.43 today.

I know it's a different model year, and perhaps would have better sales being full-detail, but from what I've seen you have to pay someone $20 to take one of the Hasegawa Polizei Beetles off your hands. I've seen them as cheap as $12.50 with no takers.

Glad to see they're finally catching onto that idea after all the past troubles. Perhaps they can share that revelation with the people in Illinois too.

Yeah mine has some nice flash excess too, which goes more to my point. Why is this brand new kit so flashy. Actually the last several releases from Revell and Moebius have had really unacceptable levels of flash. I'm not talking about molding lines, but rather literal thin flashes of plastic connecting parts to the runners. No pride in manufacturing I guess, and whomever is actually packing them when the get stateside apparently aren't inspecting them before sending them out.

I picked on of these up from the LHS on the way to work last night only to find that about a third of my chrome police parts runner must have been sticking out of the tank as the runner and most of the rotator base have no chrome plating to speak of in any way... Revell Quality Control - Taking Strides to Remain Mediocre!

If you order something that is Out of Stock, it will be showing "Back Ordered" the next day. How long you'd have to wait depends on how easily back stock is obtained. I've only had one item ever be on back-order for a couple of months only to have it turn up discontinued. Point of advice, if you want something from Aoshima especially order it when you can, their spot runs are only a few thousand pieces world wide and items go in and out of their catalogs in sometimes as little as 90 days unless it's a sales leader like their Aventador. If you order something that is ALREADY showing Back Ordered the wait will be determined by how long ago the person in front of you ordered it (or if it's a recent issue and they're waiting on more stock). I've ordered a back-order item figuring I'd have a month to wait, and got the purchase notice three days later.

Two main problems with eBay are the exchange rate advantages have not materialized on eBay. The Yen is down nearly 25%, but I've yet to see a corresponding drop in prices like I have at HLJ and Hobby Search. Also shipping on eBay is ridiculously high compared to shopping at either of the two venues. Still much like for a domestic OOP kit, eBay tends to be the only way to acquire vintage/OOP Asian kits as well. At least I never seem to see too much floating around the vendor tables at shows I go to...every once in awhile something will come along that's off the wall like the Tamiya Volvo 850 Estate Wagon I found this Spring.

Completely trustworthy, completely reputable. As a result I'm completely loyal. The member thing us because they have a feature called "My Private Warehouse" which allows you to hold items you've purchased for up to 60 days so that if you order an in-stock item, a backordered item, and a pre-order item, you can hold the in-stock item (after paying for it - you don't pay for backorders or pre-orders until they are in stock) until everything is ready for shipment instead of having to pay for three seperate shipments.

Yeah well when my local hobby shop starts carrying a plethora of JDM kits I will purchase them there. But since many kits that HLJ sells aren't available to the middle men of the hobby distribution world for my LHS to even be able to order them from...now what? I can't build what I want? My, your, and the OP's LHS aren't losing any money to HLJ unless they're really stocking import kits heavily. No one in their right mind is going to order a DOMESTIC (Revell, Round 2, Moebius) kit via HLJ unless they want to pay $45 for it, and then have to reimport the thing. HLJ also carries all things Japanese/Asian, not just model kits. It's an entire niche of the hobby, that allows us in the U.S. and elsewhere to get hobbies and toys at market prices in Japan, rather than trying to find them locally and paying the associated importer's markups.

So far from the photos Aoshima had shown it's going to have an engine more in line with a hybrid of the export version of the Aventador, a "tub" engine bay with just the top end pieces separate, and a separate engine "bottom" insert that fits into the chassis pan. For those people who require an actual engine with all the requisite pieces, this will again be seen as an epic disappointment if the whining that occured over the 86/FR-S & BRZ engines not having an oil pan therefore rendering them useless and a waste to the hobby is any indication.

No I suppose Flickr isn't "selling" anything, but when I spend money for a yearly membership for more than a decade I should have the option to turn that "feature" off. I can understand for the free account people, particularly before the recent changes giving everyone a TB of storage in exchange for the ads all over their accounts. Dead-linking is a matter of traffic, every time this thread loads Flickr is getting dinging for loading the image you posted. They decided that if you're going to cost them money for that server traffic you're going to advertise the fact you're hosting that photo on Flickr. I beg to differ that the kick-back functions as any sort of copyright at all. Considering the fact that within Flickr you can choose everything from Free Use, a variety of Creative Commons licenses, and of course All Rights Reserved, with the ability to offer you work via Getty Images. It could possibly drive traffic to your Photostream. My website, also a decade in existence is my own work, or the work of thousands of contributors whom have sent me their work to use. I credit them by their real names, rather than some screen name. Considering I just had to file DMCA against an online car "magazine" who lifted my images directly from Flickr without so much as a hello and then had that photo make the front page of Yahoo! as a featured article without any credit to me, don't presume to lecture me about photography copyright.

Well if this is just for display purposes and it's not for "show" (aka if there's weight back there, you don't care if anyone sees it), I'd suggest the lead weight they sell for Pinewood Derby cars. I dunno if those are something that Hobby Lobby/Michael's carries off the top of my head, but any full-service hobby shop will carry the wood bucks, wheels and weights. They basically come in a bar like a Nestle Crunch, so you can break off how many ever you want per section.

You were always permitted to link to other website, you were just stick with that little Flickr link-back which is still clearly right there. What you aren't allowed to (then or now) is dead-link them. Meaning linking them to another website by right-clicking the photo properties and just linking the photo without the Flickr kickback. Not a big deal on a website like this, but when you have a website that all photos, it breaks up the page to have 32,000 tiny Flickr "ads". Fotki allows dead-linking as they aren't a "Photo Community" like Flickr likes to claim, but rather cloud storage for photos. Sure there are social areas on Fotki, but it's no where near as social with groups and all of that like Flickr.

The McLaren is still in tooling mock-up stages, the Lambo which was started before - but just recently announced is in it's first round of actual plastic test-shots as seen back a few posts in this thread. The Lambo is tentatively scheduled for October, and the McLaren for Christmas, but a bunch of their "Summer Releases" have been back-sliding into the fall as well, so time will tell.

The only thing about Flickr is, if you actually follow the TOS, you're not permitted to "dead link" your photos to another website, you have to use a bit of coding that adds a "Hosted by Flickr" advertisement.

Tamiya sold out the entire first run of the big scale Enzo, don't know how many kits were in that run, but people bought them despite the three-digit price tag.

I think this begs the equally intriguing, yet slightly different question. That being - How much have you spent at one time on models? I have dropped 5 bills at model shows on more than one occasion when I was building up my stash. To the original question, my serious answer would be $85 for the Revell AG London Bus kit back right before the price was jacked up to over $125.

I had to trade my camera as part of the deal...

I once paid twice as much as that.

Lets face it every survey where personal opinion is the guiding principle is going to be overly subjective. Even if you managed to segregate the various "factions" around here into their building groups -- aka Drag Guys, Muscle Car Guys, Modern Car Guys, et al, you couldn't get the inner group to agree on 10 of the Best/Worst/Most Wanted "Insert the Survey Title Here", let alone the greater population at large.

My English teacher weeps for whomever wrote this article. A "Drive In" is an outdoor movie venue. Most Embarrassing Car to Be Seen Driving perhaps...

On CHiPs another half-dozen vehicles (at minimum) would have haphazardly plowed into the wreck, including at least one vehicle that would have flipped over via barely concealed stunt ramps.

Other than the Aventador Roadster or Aventador J (the one with basically no windshield) along the Veneno (which while neat, is a car which only three are going to be made) - none of which I would particularly discount in the future, the only place for Aoshima to go is backwards. Frankly they can do a Diablo and Gallardo too and blow those Fujimi kits out of the water while they're at it.