niteowl7710

The aero tails were supposed to be good for fuel mileage, but the automatic nature of the deployment and stowage tend to fail within a few months of use and then require the driver to go back and manually deploy them. Which usually means they don't bother, or forget they are out and then promptly back into another truck, trailer or fixed object (or get backed into by another truck) and damage/destroy the "wings". My company bought a number to test and between equipment failures (if they get stuck open you can't open the trailer doors) and backing incidents we stripped them off all of the trailers that still had them left.

The story goes Tamiya chose 1/35 for their armor because it was the size required to house the motor and batteries for motorizing them and it just sorta stuck. 1/72 is the go to scale for Japan in modern days as even 1/35 & 1/48 prove to be to large for substantial collections in the tiny apartments many urban residents call home.

There's actually three sets of them on there, there's one also listed for $3,800 before shipping - which eBay claims it can't calculate because ya know the town my family has lived in for the past 100 years apparently doesn't exist. This stuff only sells for as much as it does because it just passes from one wild eyed hoarder to the next. I'd love to know if any of these guys have actually turned a profit on any of it that they actually paid for from another collector (as opposed to found in a garage, or at a flea market). I see a lot of people SAY they want large scale stuff, but I never really see any of it get built - beyond the one forum section here. I can probably count on one hand and half a foot how many large scale builds I've seen at a model contest in the past 5 years. Even the Big Boy Scale section here which has been on going for years is about to be eclipsed by posts into the newly created "Other Racing" sub forum. Model companies can't survive on the potential sales of the "Missed Out" and "I'd Buy a CASE!" guys.

If you read through all of that going back years now it was all because making this model would be the key to getting him out of Hawaii and back to the mainland U.S. At this point after...stea...borrowing money from several hundred people (since several people bought more than one, it's not 500 individuals) totaling into the 5 figure range, one has to wonder - How much does a plane ticket to California cost these days? I mean it's not like you have to save up the cash to buy gas along the bridge back to San Francisco. That's a definitive - get to the new place, and buy new stuff when you get there type of move. If it's taken him 20+ years and $20k+ and he still can't figure out how to get to the airport and board a plane...I doubt he'll recreate a model kit out of whole cloth in his lifetime.

The ProStar is considered to be a "legacy" model at this point the same way Freightliner still builds some Argosy cab overs, and Coronado "Classic" trucks. The majority of them are built and shipped to overseas markets, very few of them are sold in North America outside of heavy haul and very specialized use. We have a multi-location International Dealership chain locally that's been in business with International for 76 years and always seem to have at least one of everything they make. But in order to get a Legacy ProStar, you have to special order it from the factory.

Round2 expects most of them will be left sealed in the package by collectors of Supernatural memorabilia.

It would require a substantial amount of subtle modifications to the entire front end of the truck. The hood, front bumper, mirrors and whatnot are all different on the LT than they were on the original Moebius kit. Shame the ProStar sold so poorly as it would have been quite easy (a bumper) for them to update it to 2014+ spec up until they dropped the shared "star" moniker. BTW RevellAG reissued both of the International kits and I would think those would be far easier to find in Europe than the original Moebius boxings.

It's on the Round2 Distribution list for August as it stands right now. MSRP - $71.95

That would be where the split bumper lower front fascia should go. Tim is right, it seems that AMT tooled up a near mirror image insert for the B-M kit that has the big rear spoiler in the same position that the smaller real spoiler sits on the original split and this reissue as well. 99.9% they both don't fit in the tool at the same time, so they can't run the kit with both spoilers in it unless they wanted to reset the tool and run it again to create a duplicate front frame, lower chin spoiler, lower fascia and big spoiler. There's no where else on the B-M Runner "Map" for the spoiler to be.

That does make sense, but with the way the tooling is physically constructed (with the upper half of the front fascia tooled into a section of body core) there's no way to do that without including two bodies. Now that is something that Aoshima has done with a handful of reissues where 95% of two kits shared the base tool and only the bodies were different. But I've never heard of an American company doing that.

Do they like them to the tune of $199 or so? The U.S. MSRP for one of the Tamiya 1/12 Porsches is $185, with the Japanese sale prices being somewhere in the $135 range. That's for a tooling that's as old as I am, and been issued at least twice before. The new tool Italeri Fiats run in the $160 range and the reissues of the older F1 cars fly close to $200.

One small note from the photo commentary. They didn't modify the "old" tool's front core piece, they designed an entirely new one. If you look at the Z/28 and/or B-M kit you'll notice there is a seam line that runs along the front edge of the fascia that goes down the sides of the headlights and then across the entire top of front end directly "above" the headlights/turn signals/grille surround. That is where the top of the mold separates from the front core piece. Part of the issues with re-tooling this full bumper kit was making the newly tooled front core piece actually fit into the rest of the tooling. As they explained in their live stream the top of the front fenders are not exactly what one might call uniform side to side, so when a new piece was made that was uniformly shaped - there was a miss fit between that front piece and the fenders. The lower fascia piece has always been a separate part, so tooling a new one for the full bumper was quite simple. If they were to have modified the tooling instead of creating that new core piece they would not only "destroy" the Z/28, but also prevent the B-M version from being reissued.

The "re-use" of the Monogram name is already hit or miss under the revised management. I too pointed out the use of the Monogram logo on the El Camino when it was announced back in the Spring as to maybe keeping the proper scale heritage to their models, and Casey promptly rained on that parade by accurately pointing out the reissue of the '86 Monte Carlo SS was branded as a Revell kit. But then the Grand National was a Monogram labeled kit. And on and on this inability to pick a branding for 1/24 kit continues... ?

Correct the Trumpie/Magnafire is what is most recently being discussed in the thread.

Kit was released in Japan this morning, and Hobby Search has photos of all the parts, plus the entire instructions. https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/image/10696114

Another thing to consider is that for the Gen-X crowd SA(e) had always existed. I had subscriptions to SAE and Car Modeler back in the day as a teenager, but when I "came back" to the hobby in my mid-30s the forums existed and frankly I didn't see a need for a paper publication. Since then FB Groups (for all the good and the bad) and YouTube channels have become more and more popular. Also having grown up in a hobby that has always in some form or fashion been on the "internet" - in the early 90s I actively participated in a Prodigy Message Board about Model Cars & Trucks - I didn't need to "re-find" that the hobby existed. I knew it was still there, and it was just a matter of shaking the dust off.

I wouldn't throw Spotlight into the heap of 2020 necessarily until it's seen what happens with the new owners. After all Spotlight is a Phoenix from the Ashes story in it's own right after Tom had to close down Hobby Heaven. It survived once, it's possible it continues to survive into the future.

Tom is annoyed with Hobbico...and I guess if he wants to take it out on the current Revell US management that's his prerogative, but it's not like that is going to garner him any income. He's left before and eventually came back into the fold, so I'm guessing they're going to try to wait him out again. The problem for Atlantis would be even if they could strike an arrangement on the US based tooling to buy/lease it, a good chunk of the TD stuff is actually in China which adds a 3rd party and more costs into the equation. In addition a lot of the TD stuff has underlying Trade dress issues - the Baja Bandito for example has to be licensed by Volkswagen since it's obviously their vehicle and uses their logos on it. That's a licensing costs a larger company like Revell - particularly with German owners who have a very active VAG license - could carry, but then Tom got all bent over the fact he wasn't going to get the money he was owed by Hobbico and pulled out his portion of the licensing. In a way I don't blame Tom for being rightfully angry about that, but at the same time hundreds of Hobbico employees were also completely shafted on back pay and their ESOPs, so it wasn't like Tom's situation was particularly unique.

It does make one wonder what they could have gotten from this sale. I doubt anyone was exactly trying to elbow Atlantis out of the way to buy it instead. I'm guessing the end of the Fiscal Year came around and someone asked someone else why they were paying $xxx per month in storage fees to ABC Warehouse to store all this old scratch 'n dent legacy tooling from the 1950s that they certainly weren't ever going to use again. It wouldn't totally shock me if the cost savings from not having to keep around is as much/greater than the sales price.

I wonder if the do-gooders will allow them to be produced though. There are a few companies in Japan that produce replica - usually 1/4 scale - firearms of various types, and most vendors will not export them to the U.S.

That's just what the market needs...an "assortment of eclectic historic kits"... Round2 is probably high-fiving themselves all over the office to stop having to store all that old junk and turn a profit in the process. Do we have enough eclectic vintage builders left to make this work for Atlantis though...

They would have the stuff that Lindberg tooled up for Testors during the mid-late 90s when RPM owned both companies. Kits from the 80s that were provided by Italeri and Fujimi are retained by those original companies are were just contract runs of kits - the way Italeri did in 2019 offering trucks and trailers that were boxed as AMT kits.

Well you have to consider that one of the leading "problems" - aside from the 2 month lead time that makes any new kit review totally moot between forums, FB, and YouTube - is someone has to write the articles. SA & MCM counted on the Tim Boyd's of the world to produce their content. How many people submitted one or more articles, and right, wrong or otherwise it didn't make publication - and they never submit anything again. There were numerous kit review people who were added and dropped as they couldn't meet deadlines, were too honest in their reviews, or shared exclusive content before publication of the magazine. At least 1:1 car magazine have(had) staff writers or freelancers who were paid - compared to the more or less voluntary nature of a niche hobby publication. Personally I think Kalmbach made a huge pooch punt when they forced out the younger guy they installed as Editor because he had the complete and total audacity to dare to suggest there should be more modern stuff tooled up, like Hyundais. There's a delicious sort of irony involved that they caved to the flood of angry hate mail of people demanding MaH Hot Rods, and MaH GAAASSARS. Since then Academy released the Hyundai Santa Fe, and Belkits is knee deep on a Hyundai i20 WRC car... ...and the magazine is dead. Say what you will about that "kid", but he was a car guy leading a car modeling magazine. There's an upcoming pivot point in the hobby - and I'd say some Asian brands are actively embracing it - where more and more late 70s through early 90s cars are going to have to be produced if you want to keep the interest of the guys coming into their 40s who are the ones with the upcoming disposable income as more and more of the "top end" guys age into fixed income and the fact they already have huge walls of model kits to build that they've been saving up for when they retired. Chasing off some young whipper snapper because CHANGE IS BAD M'KAY GET OFF MY LAWN WITH YOUR IMPORTS was a bad move. Because in the end how many people REALLY would have canceled their subscriptions, and as of yesterday - what difference would it have made?

Except they don't have access to them. When Round2 bought the AMT/MPC stuff from Tomy, the Ertl stuff specifically didn't come with it because Tomy US still actively uses the Ertl brand in diecast toy and collectible tractors. If Tomy was going to run off those Ag tools, the time to do that would have been several years ago when Heller released their new tool tractor and Revell followed suit with the Porsche Junior. RevellAG did that Deutz tractor as well, but it was all but a wet whimper it terms of being stocked by anyone in the U.S. since it was released. Atlantis has been very careful in what they've reissued from the Revell Scratch n Dent collection to avoid things with any significant licensing costs. If there's anything that costs more money than a Harley-Davidson license it's John Deere.

All modern tooling, say '90s and newer (this got started in the U.S. with Revellogram kits like the '69 Camaro, '32 Ford and Tri Fives) are designed to be modular with the tooling just needing specific inserts and possibly sections of the body core swapped out between runs to produce different kits. All of the tooling is done upfront at once, so none of this "new tooling" is actually NEW per se, but is just the first time the consumers are seeing the kit run this way. Perfect example of new that's not NEW is the recent reissue of the Jeep Wrangler with more stockish "Day 2" parts (compared to the Tomb Raider) that were tooled up back in 2004, but for whatever reason Revell never saw fit (probably sales related) to issue that kit in that variant until 16 years later when the new German owners decided to maximize their investment and issue it.