niteowl7710

Glanced at this while I was out at the LHS picking up the AMT Ford LN8000 Race Car Hauler, and it clearly says "Parts Molded in Black Unless Otherwise Indicated" on the box bottom square in the middle of the part's runner layout. So someone needed to convey that information ahead of time to people, although since this kit doesn't even exist on the Round 2 website, who knows if that was a last minute decision or what.

The body is arguably more accurate than Revell's since it's based on factory data for the promo model, but the lump of a chassis leaves tons to be desired for it to ever be more than a nice looking display shelf model.

Well what you have there is a '90/'91 AMT Firebird GTA with the hood and nose piece off the '92 Monogram Firebird Formula.

This was never going to be anything other than a re-hash of the existing curbside Camaro kit. But it's sad to see yet another cartoon lightbar, and the total lack of any type of police gear (radio, radar, et al) for the interior. Because I'm not exactly sure what Round 2 feels is the market for these kits. They're borderline Snap-Tite kits, but they sell at the adult-end of the kit price spectrum. It's just a push bumper and "lightbar" slapped in an existing kit as an after thought...tsk tsk tsk.

Hate to be "that guy" but it says on the bottom of the box what color it's molded in on all AMT kits with the part layout. Thanks for the photos though, that just saved me $20 something dollars. There's nothing new about this kit that you couldn't do just scratching up the push bumper and "out sourcing" the lightbar onto the Revell Camaro full-detail kit.

ダンのための一般的なリーズの今年の価値がある！

Can hardly wait, it's enough to make a guy jump and say "Yeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaw!"

Lightly soap the freezer water, and keep tossing it back in there. It might take a couple of rounds to get it to get lose enough to be able to get things apart. No guarantee it will ever break them lose. Or like others have mentioned the sure-fire method would be to mask off around the parts in question.

Assuming you did that, wouldn't that mean the X-Brace would be chromed? Or are you suggesting they offered a non-connie bumper in raw plastic with a note saying "Best of Luck with the Alclad!" Unless they block the non-connie bumper off the chrome tree (MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISTAKE!) I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be in there. They've done two '57 Chevys off this tool now, the Connie bumper is on a separate runner with the windshield frame, vent windows and dual carbs. The ORIGINAL chrome runner has to still be in there for the grill, front bumper, wheels, door handles, et al.

Neat, I'm not sure I've ever seen that Fiat before. The LHS around here that buys collections has one of the Mercs on the shelf. Been sitting there for close to a year with no takers, and the price is in line with what the traditionally sell for these days.

Well since this is all just replication of real automobiles, maybe we should have the 1:1 manufacturers kill off the major auto shows. I don't mean the Regional one that's held in the local convention center by your local chapter of the NADA, but the BIG ones like Detroit, L.A., Geneva, etc where the new cars are shown for the first time. Some of those vehicles are debuted months, or even a year before the general public can buy one. So heck with it! Why should anyone know about the '14 Corvette, or '15 Mustang, or '14 Camaro Z-28 until one second before they roll off the car transporter in the lot? You want a new car, just go to the dealer and see what they have lying around. Want a new model? Just go to the LHS repeatedly eventually new stuff will arrive!

It goes over the exhaust if you look at the instructions it says "LAST" next to the brace. Hmmm perhaps the better comparison would be between the '55 & '57 then, since the '55 was always a convertible first, the exhaust differences between the Vert and HT wouldn't exist since most likely the brace was just deleted out of the kit.

I guess the "difficulty" is that when you do something the same way for say 25 years or so, then you decide you're going to chart your own media relations course, without actually having any...well media relations, people start to get antsy. iHobby (which incidentally annoys me as a name the "i" is for International, but we gotta be cutsy about it cause Apple products use the lower case "i", and they're cool right?) existed before the name change as the RCHTA Show. Religiously for over the two decades plus I've been in the hobby they announced with everyone else (with the exception of the two NNL years when they announced BEFORE anyone else - usually iHobby is the weekend after the NNL), but now their sooooooo special they're not accountable to anyone's expectations? At this point in my never to be humble opinion they should at least toss out a communication "We're waiting on a license/tool/test shot et al, we're so excited to show you what's coming in '14, hang in there, news soon!!", but then that's never been Revell's style of "Radio Silence to the Public". In regards to your other point, well then maybe it's time to re-shore some operations then. Plenty of talented people out there still need jobs in the never ending flat recovery of the economy. Perhaps not as dead cheap as China, but at the same time one thinks perhaps having the tooling/production around Chicago would stop these silly problems (Mustang LX, Reversed Nova gas tank, '57 Chevy X brace) that it would offset the costs of having to go BACK and fix things that could be caught in "real" time.

I'll have to dig out the two 55 kits and see if there's a difference in shape between the exhausts, or it's all location pins. Since the '56/'57 chassis never supported a convertible before it doesn't have receiver holes for an X brace, and the brace itself might cover the exhaust system receiver holes when installed.

I think the only thing we're waiting on right now is getting the box art approved. They're currently negotiating with Speed Hunters for various usage of their photos.

Yes but in the planning of this one they neglected to use the X brace and no one caught that until very recently. So now the exhaust has to be retooled to fit under the brace.

Well in a way model kits are still a "pocket change" expense. Total cost might be more, but it's still something you're purchasing with money you have lying around after you pay your grown-up expenses.

But at the same time with the significant, near re-do tooling issues that the Hudson and C300 suffered from that a long lead time from tooling to actual kit, I don't expect their kits in rapid deployment. Ya know back in the SASE days before the internet and instant communications and it's subsequent bankruptcy (and later revival as Spotlight) a lot of us got the Hobby Heaven "catalog" by mail that would list the new kits with the expected month of release. Of course AMT during the Ertl days had the Blueprinter which twice a year would announce their new kits in the newsletter.

Well I was hanging out next to a grapevine, and apparently Revell was forthcoming the reason the '57 Convertible was due to a tooling snafu with the chassis that was SO EPIC in it's level of embarrassment as to make the backwards gas tank on the Nova seem like a minor error in engraving depth. It's being fixed, that's the delay. That give me two lines of though. Kudos to Revell for catching the issue and fixing what would have been such a glaring accuracy issue I don't think even their most ardent defenders could haul the mail for them. But in the same turn how the in the bleeding heck do you let something so glaringly obvious get all the way into final tooling? You can't blame China, this was a R&D and Kit Design flaw. I have to believe that the computers in Elk Grove Village are simply not connected to the same internet as the rest of the world because even a modicum of research would have shown the correct way of going about things. Am I being deliberately vague, sure. I would just invite anyone who's interested to go look at the Convertible Specific parts that are shown in the Kit Review thread, then ponder a Convertible's unique chassis, then the parts, then the 1:1 chassis, and I think "X" marks the spot of the missing part *cough*

Well do I need it now? Well shoot I don't NEED it ever to be honest, but if you want to look at in those terms it was one of the few kits Revell had planned for the 2nd Half of 2013 I was actually interested in...It was also a kit that didn't require nearly as much work as say the 2nd attempt at the Hemi Cuda, and that seems to still be coming "on time". Besides that Revell never actually releases a schedule to the public, we all know what's coming based on what's posted here and elsewhere by dealers who have the rolling 3 month list and speculation based on the Tower Hobbies releases schedule. Buying it based on be issued "on time" doesn't have anything to do with anything actually. But beyond that I was just saying that in the interest of this thread and the speculation that something on the 2014 release schedule wasn't ready/licensed for announcement yet, clearly Revell is having an issue getting kits they already have announced to market in their usual time frame. I find it amusing that Round 2, Moebius, and ALL of the Asian Manufacturers have announced their 2014 release lines (for Japan that only takes us to January '14 in theory), but for some reason Revell missed iHobby, missed NNL, missed the phantom October 15th date and well we should all just be happy they exist and shut up and build a model. Unless you're heavily into Asian kits the focus in America on models is June and October. They plod along too long and nobody is going to even be paying attention when they do announce because we'll all be busy with our families during the Holiday Season.

In what I can only hope is a outrageous typo, Tower Hobbies is showing a MAY 2014 release for the '57 Chevy Convertible. I don't hold a lot of hope for future release news when current soon to be released kits are getting punted 6 months out.

The Packard was released in 1:35 back in August, but so far only the Typ G4 in two kits (the latter a forthcoming up-top "Civilian" version), and the above posted Opel have been announced in "automotive scale".

Makes one wonder what the chassis is from...because that has to be how it's still registered, as whatever it was prior to this being done to it. In addition to seatbelts, it clearly has a license plate with valid registration. I would presume Minnesota is no different than anywhere else meaning you need a VIN for a title to apply for a license plate. Presume it's insured under the same VIN, wonder if GEICO knows what they're really insuring