niteowl7710

One of mine concurs with your cat's opinion on the tastiness of styrene.

4th! The "I's" have, the lazy motion passes. We are in recess until we get back to working...whenever that might be...

Well the EX is usually the base model, so I think that's - Everything Xcluded

Those Bill Bozo decal illustrate the problem I've always had when someone tries to make a sheet that covers all the options, but only goes half way about it. It includes proper District markings for all 8 Districts, and goes so far as to include the S.O.D. (Special Operations Division) markings for the K-9 units. But the roof and car numbers are only accurate for a 2nd District car (or a 1st or 8th D cars if you scramble them). I know it eats up decal sheet space, but come ON, live a little and include enough numbers to do all the cars the rest of the sheet offers. *off soap box* The only Expedition of that body style I've ever personally laid eyes on in D.C. is this S.O.D. Mounted Unit.

I'd like to vote "All of the Above" and then pencil in "Model Car Shows" as my essay answer! I only do the Hobby Lobby/Michael's gag if I have the coupon. My local (24 miles away) Michael's has like 0 inventory turnover so it's not worth the drive under any circumstances to pay retail. I use the Hobby Lobby in Laredo, TX when I'm at my company's office down there. I'm only there every month or so, so to me the inventory turns over, and they carry some imported kits as well. My LHS, Hobbys N Stuff in Connellsville, PA seems to price pretty reasonable on his kits. It's more than an online retailer, but it's not the astronomical gouging that seems to go on either. I admit I use his store more for paint and supplies than kits, but I will buy some kits from time to time to make sure I'm throwing him a bone (so to speak). The last thing I need for him to do is close up, then I'd be looking at driving all the way up to Pittsburgh for bottle paint, and that would truly suck. Online I primarily stick to eBay for OOP kits. I've been slowly getting kits that I either missed while I was away that haven't been reissued, or getting kits I slaughtered into glue bombs when I was just starting out. I've also found the joys of importing kits recently, so a good portion of my hobby budget will go over there until some more domestic kits come out that I'm waiting on... Lastly I love going to swap meets/model car shows for my bulk purchases. I have a vendor I have been dealing with for over 10 years, and it is not at all uncommon for me to walk away from his tables with an entire shipping box of goodies. I only do that 2 or 3 times a year, but it catches me up on everything I've not been "needing" so bad I was willing to pay full retail for...

Well those certainly are neat, but are not the polka dot bikinis I was expecting based on the shortened topic title displayed on the outside of the forum

Geez I felt like I was the one being tied to a railroad track by a evil mustache twirling villain when I paid $34 for mine in March., knowing there wasn't going to be a U.S. box. Apparently I was the one twirling the facial hair based on that retail price.

I think more than anything there's a pretty good segment of the hobby population that actually believe that if the kit is "bashed" enough (and by that I mean critiqued, not blended with another kit to make it better) that the manufacturer is just going to cancel all future planned releases within that genre, or to close it's doors and tell everyone to buzz off. I mean after all someone started, and perpetrated a pretty solid rumor that because the truck guys were complaining about the wheels in the reissues of the old AMT truck kits, that AMT was going to subsequently cancel all their plans to do any more of them. Yet we've seen exactly the opposite in that regard with Moebius re-doing the Hudson tooling, and AMT fixing the truck kit wheel issue. Perhaps it's a lack of business acumen, or the fact that this hobby in general is based on speculation and rumor (just think of all the stuff that gets said when the new release schedules are pending), but in reality it's not in any company's best interest to tee off their consumers by producing sub-standard products and/or take their ball and go home when someone has a legitimate complaint about the product. In the end sales are what drives the success or failure of a product. Take that DoH Charger, it's a trash heap of a kit, but you couldn't keep people from buying it with a National Guard Brigade. This "sky is falling from critical commentary" mentality seems to discount the fact that the money on these model kits is already spent, not to mention the product development budget for the coming year. I'm relatively confident that Trumpeter, Revell, AMT, etc are already firming up their plans for their 2012 releases at iHobby in October, and we've yet to see what the late summer/fall 2011 plans are yet...or even see the releases of most of October 2010 release schedule (or some of the late summer/fall in the case of Revell). To wrap this back around to the subject at hand, I wasn't dancing in the streets in expectation of this kit after Trumpeter's previous weak bunts on the automotive kits. However seeing that it has a mini-tub already built into the chassis make me toss all ideas of doing factory/replica stock build, and whirls into using some of the large displacement Ford engines and large street "slicks" I have lying around. I'm actually MORE interested in this kit knowing it's not quite the best in the detail category under the hood and chassis...

FWIW the Testors versions were done by Lindberg, it's always been their tooling, they just were just put in a Testors box. If you look at the box you'll see it mentions the kits being produced for Testors by J. Lloyd Inc. I can get mine for $17 from my vendor, so extreme SHAME on the guy who wants $30. I've opened all 8 of mine and all of them are clean as a whistle. Although I agree the instructions are exceptionally vague and 2-dimensional in several places, it's nothing that test fitting the parts can't fix. One thing I will commend Lindberg on is that in those assemblies where there are multiple parts being attached to a single piece (think the fan belt) not all of the mounting "devices" are pegs and holes, there's some half moons in there, which eliminates the possibility of sticking the wrong part in the wrong place.

and a Fujumi 1991 VW Golf VR-6 which I didn't webcam photograph

I think it was really hot in North Carolina today. I think I'm going to have to get out of my second load tomorrow... Oh wait the engine cover...yeah I plan to use mine, so it will all be hidden. I think a lot of the coloring depends on the year of the car. Similar to the two tone (light gray/dark gray) interior in 2006/07 to the all dark gray interior since then...

Engine is partially together and test fitting all of the various major parts together with the engine & tranny in the chassis...

Two minor things if I may...don't skimp on painting the underside of the interior pan/inner fenders, as well as the upper part of the chassis. In the shot of the engine looking down, and chassis looking up there's a lot of raw plastic poking through otherwise acceptable results. Lastly to echo Harry put the mirrors and wipers on too!

Since I'm already working on it, tag me into this with a NCHP Charger

Well if last night is an example of that Bruins might and Canadians withering, I'm guessing Montreal will take 3 more games just like it.

I believe JNJ did a sheet for this car, and there was a Monogram kit of this car as well.

x2!!

It's amazing what actually communicating with that person you thought was good enough to spend your life with will accomplish.

Let me wade in here with CDL Instruction Statistical Math. After crunching these numbers, this actually seems pretty realistic to me. Of the current 308,785,538 (per 2010 census) people currently alive and kicking in the United States, 10% of them have at one time or another attempted to build a model car/truck kit of some scale and skill. I know some will say this skews awfully high but consider how many people have 3 generations that have at some point built one model kit (father taught son, who taught grandchildren, etc) and that doesn't count all siblings, relatives, scout troops, and on and on. So you have 30,878,553 people who at some time built a model kit. Now for the CDL math. Of anyone who gets a CDL only 5% will actually still be driving in one year. So extrapolate that, only 5% of those people will build MORE than one model kit at some point in their life. From that you get 1,543,927 persons who fit into that category. Back to CDL Math. Of the 5% who still actively drive after 1 year, only 5% will make a life long career out of it. So extrapolate that 5% of that 5% will build model kits their entire life, and make a life long "career" out of it. This wild stab at statistics would indicate that there are currently 77,196 active modelers in the country. You oughta see the faces in a class of 30 trucking students when you tell them only 2 or 3 of them are actually going to make a career out of this $6,000, 3-5 week training they are enduring. But those are the true statistics in my industry, and I think they fit pretty well here too.

On the Maisto Diecast Impalas that had the tampo printing "decals", I got them off with regular nail polish remover soaked into a cotton ball.

Really is that a WV thing? Cause no one asked if I had a valid physical when I renewed in PA last summer. Actually I've never heard of it being a requirement to have a valid physical to renew a CDL through 3 renewals of mine and I've lived on both sides of you (OH & PA). The physical is about whether you can be medically qualified operate a Commercial Motor Vehicle, not whether you can hold a license to operate one.

I really don't think that Welly looks that bad in comparison with the AMT Snap kit, especially when you consider the AMT kit is of a 4wd, and the Welly is a 2wd pursuit model.

I don't have a list of my old kits I built as a kid, but I do have a box of every instruction sheet of every kit I did up to and including my first solo glue ki..eerrr bomb I did when I was 10-11. Showing amazing forethought for my age I kept the instructions, which must have started a trend that I followed right up till I moved out of my parents house at 19 and the wheels fell off the model building train until last summer. There are sheets for things I don't even remember building, which demonstrates the care-free restraint we had as kids. Building so many models so fast you don't even remember doing them.

Abused the Hobby Lobby 30% off sale and got a Tamiya Nissan GT-R.