niteowl7710

Beans Cove ehh? You're down the road (and out in the woods) from where I work (I'm up at the Wal*Mart D.C.). Welcome aboard.

You went to that Spring Fling show or whatever they call it up there then, the NNL in Toledo is in October.

I know this John! He's so famous he has a rule named after him...

Fujimi is the least, how shall we say, export friendly of the 4 Japanese companies. Even if non-Japanese instructions existed, they'd be in the same garbled machine-translated "English" that the warnings before the assembly diagrams are featured in, and I'm not sure that'd be any more clear than what you got in the kit.

HA! That's not a blizzard, that's a snow squall! Blizzards leave stuff like this in their wake...

That must have been "nice" (I put that in quotes considering what overall damage was done with those checkerboard boxed kits to AMT/RC2), they were $8.98 around these parts.

As others have suggested, I'd e-mail Tamiya USA directly. They replaced a set of decals in a kit I purchased at a show that isn't even currently being produced at no cost to me - which surprised me since I offered to pay for them if they could even obtain a set. As good as Scott and HLJ are, they're not really a go-between, and who knows how many they sold. Perhaps Tamiya was leery of getting into a situation where they'd be on the hook to provide the parts wholesale for dozens and dozens of kits all at once.

I should be able to get these from my LHS afterall, I ventured into the dark empire of armo(u)r kits this morning and after feeling thoroughly dirty I noticed the owner stocks about a half dozen or so of the 1/35 ICM kits. The first kit of this series to be "blown up" to 1/24 (the Typ G4) has 309 (309!!!!) parts in the smaller scale.

You don't think so what? Since I graduated H.S. that year, I'm aware of what I was paying for models then, since by then I was buying them. They were $7-10 at the LHS I had at the time (now long gone). New kits at my current LHS are $21-31 depending on the manufacturer. That is 3 times more than in 1995 is it not? Not to mention for a kid born in 1995, even at 10 years old in 2005, kits were on the other side for $12 since they were gone from Wal*Mart by that time. Now those kids are 18 (like I was in 1995) and for them kits are the same $21-31 previously mentioned and they never saw a $5 kit, let alone a $10 kit.

I think you're missing the point here, for someone born in '95, they've never seen a kit retail for $5, they've always been at least triple that.

I graduated H.S. in 1995, now these kids are going to college? *sigh* Guess that explains why the music I listened to then is filtering into classic rock... As part of the Gen X set of modelers here, I had video games growing up on the original Nintendo (Atari before that) and watched the internet be born (and had a Commodore 128 before that), and yet I and a slew of other people ate all still here, still building, and most if us are proudly still playing video games of one sort our another. I don't understand why some people feel the two "pastimes" are mutual exclusive of one another.

That might work on large scale, but I highly doubt it's feasible at 1/25. Simply look at he divots that had to be carved into the '55 Chevy to have the separate trim be molded thick enough that it didn't break when you breathed on it, and all looks right in scale. Plus chrome has the inherent ability to be attached to the runners in the worst possible orientation leaving large unchromed areas at the attachment points as well as mold lines in mirrors, door handles, etc

A large part of the change between what had always been SOP for the model manufacturers is the thing we're all on reading this thread. If say Monogram put out kit that (like most of them) was a little wonky is proportions in 1988 unless you had access to the real thing, or a magazine featuring the subject matter chance are you wouldn't know. These days there are reams and reams of data, measurements, pictures, color chips, option charts, builds.sheets production numbers, etc on even the most obscure vehicles. Everyone and anyone can access it instantaneously and see exactly what's wrong and what's right with a model. Whether you CARE is another thing entirely, and I think a big part of that is how much you care (or not) about what the kit represents. For example, I care a great deal more about how correct the SSP Mustang LX is than either of the first two Hemi Cuda attempts are. I know both of the latter are wrong, but I don't care, they look fine on the shelf. Call it "innocence lost" or something, but while it might be true that the majority of casual models don't care if Revell goofs that doesn't mean Revell should believe that no one notices.

Without sourcing dozens of steering wheels to backdate the interior (prior to '90 there was no airbag), there are 33 State/Federal agencies that are known to have run '90-'93 SSP Mustangs.

The insult to injury with the 6.1 Hemi is that it's a new engine in new cars. That should be all CAD files, it's not like we're talking about a 60 year old Studebaker or something. It shouldn't be wrong in ANY way, let done vastly different.

To utilize the Ford Focus metaphor for a second, what the hobby needs is a KIA/Hyundai. Sure those cars were iffy quality basic transportation, but after some time they have started providing a scary (to other manufacturers) level of competition by packing their vehicles full of options you'd pay through the nose for elsewhere and including them as standard equipment. The current Ford Focus (styling aside) is a lot nicer car today than it was originally because consumers didn't want to pay more, buy they expected more value for their $$$. Kits are, without saying, better than whittling a block of wood into an Imperial, but there has never been that new company that shakes things up and raises the bar for the industry. Maybe it will be Moebius (though they aren't new-new) Lindberg had been around and now looks dead, Trumpeter might have been onto something with the ALF Eagle, but since then has it's design team wearing beer goggles, Galaxie Limited had been well limited since the original burst of kits, Accurate was perhaps to niche even without the money problems, and the Japanese suffer scale, subject and curbside bigotry.

Nah the '55 Chevy was one of the first post-merger "Real Car" on the HUGE rectangular boxes. Oddly enough the Pace Car Edition which came next had a model on the box which was dropped after the '59 Caddy, '59 Impala Convertible, & Ford F-250/350 kits (along with the Bugatti E-110 & "BMW" Nazca M12 RoG reboxes) and they went with straight pictures on the box for several new tools/reboxes in those goofy sized boxes which included (and I'm sure I'm missing a couple) the '50 Ford F-1, '56 Chevy Nomad, ('55 Chevy Conv as previously mentioned), Ferrari F-50 Barchetta RoG rebox, '65 Impala & '65 Impala Convertible, '59 Cadillac Eldorado Seville, & '60 Impala. While I'm rambling here, I might add I never even knew there was a Eldorado Seville version of the '59 Caddy until Revell re-popped it in 2004, and I found one at a model show in a larger than normal, but not quite as big box that's similar to the larger than usual clam-shell boxes that the '59 Impala H/T and Pro-Modeler kits were put into, but has a top and bottom like a proper box. Then they went dumpster diving at Dunkin Donuts scratch 'n dent sale and came up with those God awful cam-shell boxes for several years. They had to have been made out of the diseased offspring of the trees they make single-ply industrial toilet paper out of, because they wouldn't stand up to a strong cat fart let along maintain their shape once you opened them to grok the contents.

I have the Cabriolet, along with a few other kits from the Enthusiast Series. Nice models, just wish Fujimi had been a bit more enthusiastic with the instructions. All those extra pieces and parts (compared to the 30-50 part standard Fujimi curbside) and a rather bland and underwhelming set of diagrams that aren't any different from kit they've done.

Fixed it for ya, so you don't get a pile of hate mail from the arm-chair hobby super-secret insider experts we have around here.

I'd bet Round 2 is in the process of tooling the '14's up in their current "Craftsman" style unassembled promo kits. Monogram doesn't technically exist anymore, it's a brand-mark of Revell. I especially don't want a low part, simplified, de-contented, 1:24 kit, no matter how much fun those kits were/are to build, it's not 1985 anymore.

Well the quick and dirty answer is the main demographic of automotive modeling at the moment is old, cranky, and above all else cheap. They hate anything built after 1969 and are still tee'd off at the Germans and Japanese. Since no CAD data is available for older vehicles and (remember the cheap part) 3-D scanning is too expensive, you wind up with a fair to middling kit that more or less looks mostly like what it is supposed to represent. If you complain about the above situation you are branded a rivet counter, and told that no one cares about detail, accuracy, value and should be gagged and muzzled before you spook the model companies into all closing their doors and going away forever.

That's significantly more attractive (in my eyes) than that weird roaster that had no windshield concept they did last year.

Poked my head in around lunchtime. Crowd seemed kind of subdued, not smaller, just...quieter. Might have been the weather it dumped about an inch of snow in a few hours right before the show started. As evidenced by the parking lot when it all melted, cars were all akimbo from where the lines on the ground where. Not sure everyone was out of hibernation yet. Talked to some friends, picked up a couple of kits, voted in the contest (although I left well before awards time). Well worth the drive.

SLIXX as Jonathan stated got out of NASCAR about 10 years or so ago. They've since then threatened to go out of business twice since then, but every time they do everyone panics to buy the Drag Racing stuff they still make and it's enough to magically cure them of their woes and keep them around. The line at the NNL East last year nearly went out of the room their table was in, with antsy customers. It was right after that show that they decided to keep going.

Not a bad kit, but it's an older tool that has a metal rear axle and tub style interior etc. The Monogram/Revell tool is probably just as good, but it's 1:24 (if the whole 1/24 vs. 1/25 thing bothers you). Round 2 just reissued the '67 Mustang Shelby GT-350, that's a nice new tool kit from the AMT/Ertl "heyday". But the '68 Mustang that was put out a few years back when they first started really getting the old tools flowing is a old school/old tool kit with metal rear axle. The '69 Plymouth GTX was repopped in 2011 (along with the '62 T-Bird and '66 4-4-2), and the '68 Roadrunner is going to be reissued later this year (Round 2's site says September).