niteowl7710

Actually pretty much everyone who had anything to say about the Mustang's myriad issues said their piece and moved on having made their decision on purchasing one or not. There have however been snide sarcastic comments in every conceivable thread by those who would lick the warehouse floor out of gratitude of Revell's mere existence making reference to the Mustang's issues and how they cynically relate to whatever the subject matter is, and it's critics as needing to let it go while none of us have said boo about it in a month or more.

Not in the slightest, bit then it's hard to compete with sales from 1983 anyways.

Well the big picture as you put it would be the kits being successful in sales, thereby funding further projects. But both the Hudson and C300 had to be stopped and have a bunch of issues back-fixed before the kit was brought to market that could have been avoided if they were taken care of before the tooling was cut in the first place. The "rivet counters" made the Hudson a model 10 times better than what was shown in the pre-release test shots. Now if you want to go back to getting a couple of blocks of balsa wood and whittling kits yourself, by all means...

It will take a little while for the order to appear on your account's page. Now the question is, did you order something IN STOCK, or was it Out of Stock/Back Ordered/Pre-Order? If it wasn't in stock, you didn't have to pay for it until it comes in, and then you will be asked to make the payment via PayPal.

I don't know if it's technically still in the catalog or not, but finding one isn't very hard. The best of the old AMT cabover tools that was released in terms of ease of building is the Chevrolet Titan. The tooling it for it seemed to be in the best shape, especially compared to some of the multi-part cabs that have come up since then. http://www.round2models.com/models/amt/chevy-titan90

Copen is from HLJ, found the other two on the Clearance Rack at the new hobby shop that opened up this year. Guy used to run the thing out of the backside of his drug store two towns over for years. Not sure why he suddenly decided to retire and open a strictly Hobby shop - retirement FAIL . The M3 still has the drug store's price tag on it.

I think it's a win-win for Moebius to show the tooling mock-ups in advance. It's impossible for Dave to really come forward and go "D'OH! We didn't know that xyz wasn't correct" as it would make the development team look incompetent, so it's hard to know what incorrect things that were critiqued were on the "To-Fix" list and which ones were genuinely oversights. But if anything can be learned from the original Hudson and C300 kits is that it has to 100 times easier to fix the tooling patterns before dime ONE is spent cutting steel than it is to go back in and spend a mint fixing a bunch of tooling issues that delay the kit for months on end. Aoshima is the only other manufacturer I've seen who will share their advanced designs and concepts for public input. If a certain Illinois based company were so forward thinking then perhaps their litany of "whoops" wouldn't be so long.

One other thing about bandwidth. When you "hot-link" a photo to here (or any forum for that matter) every time someone reads the thread you're getting dinged for the bandwidth. So say you post a build with 5 high-rez photos that are 4MB each. That's 20MB of bandwidth each time someone views the thread whether they actually even look at the pictures. IP Boards is scaling all the photos smaller to maintain the forum formatting, but PB is still transferring the full image to the forum. Now yor build gets 100 views and bam you're at 2 Gigs of bandwidth. Fortunately forums work on the law of diminishing returns, as eventually everyone who wanted to see the thread will do so relegating the bandwidth draw to the occasional dribble of a random view. But post enough photos of enough new builds in a month and that's another way to smack the bandwidth limiter regardless to the "private" setting since the photo can be seen by everyone on the forum when it's hot-linked as proven above.

Bandwidth (or through-put) isn't necessarily just someone downloading an image, ANY time someone just looks at the image that generates bandwidth. So if enough people just come in.and browse around you could bounce the limit especially if the files are large.

The Revell kit could certainly pass for current equipment if you were aiming to build a representation of an independent car hauler who does auction work. The thing about a fancy-pants over the sleeper Cottrell system is it's REALLY expensive, somewhere in the 6 figures range if you supply the truck. The upside is more cars, the downside is you're limiting yourself to a "coffin" bunk truck. Can't stand-up and only 4 foot deep. Running a 5-6 car 5th wheel style like the kit and you can put it behind any tractor, and it's half the price. PMTG who used to run all-enclosed car haulers recently switched to 8 car over the sleeper Cottrells on Western Stars which other than Peterbilt appear to be the only trucks you can order with small flat-top sleepers on Lo-Pro tires and rims now that Sterlings aren't made anymore.

My LHS started giving out free tubes of glue with every model. I took one the first tube because I didn't realize it was in the bag, but for 8 months now I have to give Marc his tube of glue back. I could open a tube glue distribution warehouse had I kept them all. Better to save him the money and let it go home with the kid/returning builder who that free tube might make the sale.

From chatting with an Aoshima rep they said it'll slot in a little higher than their Aventador did, so that puts it in the upper $40 range. The A Vent! A Door! was $42 at first, but the Yen free fall has it priced at $32 today. It's going to be a full kit with at least some engine parts - all the exact development is hush-hush - but they claim it'll be their most detailed kit ever. They went to England to tour the factory, and measure/scan the car firsthand, so expectations are running high on this one to say the least.

Glue is a tool, and like any tool you need the right one for the job. In my arsenal... Testors Liquid Cement Tenax (similar to Ambroid) Loctite Super Glue - Ultra Gel Control Aleene's Clear Gel Tacky Glue (My preference, but there are several water soluble choices like Testors Clear Canopy Glue - the idea being you can clean up residue/finger prints with water and it dries completely clear.) I also have some 2-Part 5 Minute Epoxy, but I don't think I've had to use it yet.

I just have my paycheck direct deposited into HobbyLink Japan these days.

While I can't comment to the beds, I believe option-wise you're seeing the "glaring" difference between an old kit backed by manufacturing blueprints and support. Versus.a new tooling which is going to (for better or worse) option the truck exactly like the real truck they're making the kit to represent. If the 1:1 has odd optioning ordered, so will the kit.

I dunno depending on how much vintage and import kits you own once you start getting into the mid-three digit amount of stash kits drinkin' and chasing women is probably less investment with about the same result.

But that's not what the poll result showed. It showed what companies the surveyed people PERCEIVED to have the best reputation based on what they heard, not what company they liked. For example Pilot Flying J chain of truck stops has a major fiasco scandal right now owing to the fact they screwed all of the trucking companies out of the rebates they were to get back when they signed bulk fuel purchasing agreements. Now whether or not I LIKE to stop at Pilot Flying J - which was neutral, and how I perceive them - as a bunch of lousy crooks - are two different things. My perception of Pilot Flying J has severely suffered due to their copious amounts of fraud. It's not like they were running T.V. ads - Now at Pilot Flying J - RIPPING YOU OFF!! The same thing could be said for Toyota during the "Unintended Acceleration" period. Most people who are over WWII and own Toyotas are repeat customers, they like their cars, they like the brand, and overall people thought Toyota were reliable vehicles. Then cars started to allegedly drive themselves and BAM the PERCEPTION of Toyota changed for a lot of people negatively. Also the article says they supplied 1,100 brands, that covers the entire Fortune 500 TWICE. Sure polls in the overall sense are hincky and can be (well are) manipulated, but if you're going to poo-poo it, at least do it factually.

It says 5,000 people per DAY, makes me think it's a rolling poll that is constantly taken to gauge the popularity rise and fall of any given brand based on a statistical average.

Embossing powder does look granular (hey it's powder after all), but once applied looks a great deal more in scale than chopped up carpet fibers. Get a "shaker" (the top usually has a bulk "applicator" and then a smaller side that looks like a salt shaker) in clear, paint out to match the inferior, and for $2.89 you'll have whatever color carpeting you want for a few dozen models.

I get what you're saying, and I don't necessarily disagree, and I really don't want to run this train down a siding, BUT I just think that if you're going to speak of building mistakes then there are plenty of things that can be improved that don't necessarily involve after-market (or creative home remedied) detail products. Just between you, me and the lamppost Harry we all know there are builds shown here that have glue emanating from joints, joints that are gaping/misaligned, finger prints in places and in media that shouldn't exist, hand painted trim (especially black trim) that looks like it was applied like the lady did her make-up during the landing in "Airplane!", and paint jobs themselves that could be used for Lunar Landing training. Yet more often than not those builds also have a litany of "Awesome build", "Beautiful model", etc attached to them. Yet there are a couple of people around here who live to point out in "Under Glass" threads that an otherwise cleanly built model would "look better with plug wires".. I just find it amusing and perhaps ironic that in a forum where honesty in building critique tends to get people pilloried to the point most people here are either scared or disinterested in participating in actually encouraging the growth of their fellow modeler in correcting actual MISTAKES in technique and increasing overall skill sets, we see threads like this one that pop up discussing the most minute of mechanical detailing nonsense like proper firing order.

But there-in lies the problem with every thread like this that crops up around here. If you don't care about "floating alternators" or anything else, then they aren't common building MISTAKES, whether it's "laziness", preference, or especially if you're building contest level box stock and can't add things like a bracket, wiring, P.E., etc. the way Person A chooses to do something doesn't make it a MISTAKE, just because Person B is "annoyed" by whatever the offending component happens to be. When does a preference, building style, or building class become a mistake exactly? Who gets to be the arbiter of that decision? Because frankly for all the bally-hooing about brackets, wiring and all these other re-hashed pet peeves plenty of people on this forum haven't even got an median grasp of painting or clean final assembly skills.

Kit value has two components. First is the recent spate of shows on various reality TV channels all touting how everything old is worth a small fortune no matter what it is...that deludes people into believing their plastic models are cast in platinum encrusted diamond dust. You see this with a lot of 80's/'90's AMT & Monogram annuals. They are $10-15 kits all over eBay and at shows, but there's always someone trying to sell them for $50 or more. Second as Cliff points out is rarity. The one thing that drives the price on a lot of AMT Annuals is the fact that those kits were changed each year that the tooling was run. So that if the tooling exists at all it's "stuck" at the last year or modification that the tool received. Now we have seen recently where Round 2 has been willing to backdate some tools to stock condition - in the case of the Gremlin, or through all of it's variations in the case of the 1:16 DoH Charger/Street Charger/Petty Charger. Obviously a bunch of people with older kits got "burned" with those back-dates were done, but it's not likely we'll ever see Round 2 backdate the tooling to say a '61 Ford F-100, if that annual tooling even exists at this point. The other side of rarity is what you see with JoHan and Aurora. Where the tooling (or the majority of it) has ceased to exist either through maleficence of employees in the first case, or a train crash in the latter. Those kits will never be run again because the tooling had been melted down into a refrigerator three decades ago. Lastly for newer kits it's the "OOP - One Run" syndrome. Basically the kit is out of production, and was only ever run once. You can see that in the prices of things like the '58 & '59 Corvettes that Revell/Monogram did in the mid to late 90's. Both of those kits fetch a hefty mark-up over the $12 they cost new because for whatever reason Revell hasn't ever run them a second time. The prices on the '65 Impala Convertible was in the $40-50 range right before it was reissued (mercifully, as I refused to pay that kind of price for that kit) recently. That can also be what you see in the spike of prices on certain kits at certain times. When the news comes out that a kit that was either once several several years ago or last done a long time ago - The AMT Ford Racing "Wedge" Hauler is a good example it's been 30+ years since that was run last - you see everyone who bought the kit as an actual investment scramble to try to unload them at the "rare" price before the reissue hits the market and guts the price down to the MSRP of the reissue - or perhaps even lower since who knows what kind of shape that decades old kit and decals are in, when you can have a minty fresh one. The "OOP - One Run" hits Asian kits a good deal as well, they do business differently there, and their runs aren't 10s of thousands at once. They may run off a few thousand of a specific variation, and then that variation may never be reissued again - or at least not for a decade or more. One thing you have to also take into consideration is that just because a eBay auction is completed, doesn't mean it actually involved a sale. There are two different categories when you search "the past" one is Sold, the other is Completed, they're not the same thing. I think it's somewhat of a fools errand to collect models as an investment. Now perhaps for some of us it's an investment just because we wind up with stashes well beyond our years of existence to be able to build them all, but to do it solely for financial reasons seems dubious. It's not gold, it's not a stock or bond, and it takes up a lot of space and is going to stick your kids/spouse with a mound of boxes that is more than likely going to be bought for pennies on the dollar and then sold on at a premium to the next collector. I know a few people who have purchased a "rare" collectible kit just to open it in front of the vendor. Not sure the morality involved in trying to kill a vendor via cardiac arrest. It's perhaps not pleasant to think of it this way, but the Baby Boomers all will go the way of their parents and grandparents and at some point in say 20-25 years there's going to be a glut of old "rare" and "hard to find" kits all come on the market at once with not nearly as large a group of people willing to purchase them. What will the value of these multi-hundred dollar kits be then?

Good to know, I've only seen a YouTube video of the one Aoshima used for their kit that has the pink insides.

Yes and 1:24.