niteowl7710

All of the ESCI tooling went to Italeri after Ertl sold it off and ESCI went under 30+ years ago. Italeri has been (and will be) reissuing a bunch of that old ESCI tooling over the past 18 months. Considering the fact that Italeri ran off two trucks and two trailers for AMT earlier, I suspect this is a continuation of that "tool sharing" agreement.

Yeah shipping out of Japan (and most of Asia) is pretty miserable right now. Japan Post will not accept any mail bound for the U.S., Hong Kong Post just started allowing EMS shipments to the U.S. & U.K. - which along with a few other European Countries are the only places you can get things sent airmail. Everything else has to go by boat and shipping times on that seem to be trending right around the 60 day mark. So the only thing available in many cases is UPS/FedEx/DHL, which are of course very quick, and a bit pricey to put it mildly.

And in the "never say never files" that Road Rally MG-B I said had never been reissued was announced this morning for an October release.

Generally speaking (and I'll leave direct explanation to those who understand the subject better) you can't recoup attorney's fees unless you are the party doing the suing (aka little Johnny's bereaved family from the early example) or you're the defendant and the lawsuit was filed to directly oppress you and you (as the defendant) won in what's known as "Equitable Remedy". Otherwise it's seen as the cost of doing business for a major company - and like Dave pointed out there's a liability release on their end, but that's part of what you're paying for in that licensing. There was a group, probably 10 years ago now, testing the water with Ford to get licensing for a modeling project and Ford wanted a flat fee up front, a per unit percentage on revenue and a mandatory product liability insurance policy be carried by the party getting the license specifically to keep Ford out of any blanket suit and provide them a way to recoup their legal fees if they were.

To add to Dave's point, in this litigious society we've evolved into, the method of suing people is to blanket sue everything that isn't nailed down. So if little Johnny choked to death on the Goodyear branded tires from his Revell NASCAR kit, in addition to Revell getting sued, so would NASCAR, the team, the team's main sponsors, GM or Ford, and of course Goodyear. Because how could of all those entities be so negligent as to allow Revell to produce such a deadly toy car...blah_blah_blah

Geoff is correct, there is no LHD dash as part of the tooling itself. There are two versions of the kit, and the rubber bumper one is the one to get if you're not sure which version you want to build as it includes all the parts for both versions. The "new" wheels must have an interesting story behind them as the kit itself was tooled by Aoshima in 1993, and the new wheels were tooled in 1994. It's like someone realized the wheels were wrong for a 1974, made the correction - and then either due to lack of sales, or perhaps the licensing expired they were never included. The Euro Sports Club Series only had 4 kits that I'm aware of the two "civilian" MGs and then a road racing, and rally racing versions that have what look like a set of Minilites that have never been reissued. The two "civilian" MGs got released in the equally short fated "Lightweight Sports" Series in 1998 that also included things like the Honda Beat, Suzuki Cappuccino, and a Mazda Miata MX-5 that until it was reissued last year was (and still is) the only LHD 2nd Gen MX-5 kit. They tool shared the RevellAG Mercedes E Series Wagon as a Euro Sports Club RV(I suspect that's when RevellAG got a run of the MG kit for their sales) and the Range Rover was done (and also tool shared with RevellAG) and *poof* European experiment over. ?

Not at all in terms of releases for U.S. kits since it's all based on what Round2 told Platz to tell their Japanese retailers. We get them months in advance of when they're distributed in Asia.

Retail is $47.95, no date as of yet, but usually stuff with finished box art is in the 90 days away realm from when it's finalized.

That's a screaming deal, that's only a few bucks more than they're selling for directly in Japan.

It's on a substantial pile of "TBA" kits that might be out before the end of the year if things don't go sideways with the world.

15-20k in tooling for the engine parts, then a few thousand bucks in mods to the body core tooling to remove the hood, then another grand or two to mold a separate hood. Probably makes the kit cost $5 or so more...it's already $42.

Usually clear parts do not receive their final tooling polish until the kit goes into production in case any last minute changes have to be made in shapes/contours before hand.

I totally understand your point, but at the same time it's a bit like buying a KITT Firebird and then complaining it doesn't come with a stock dashboard and steering wheel.

It is correct for the vehicle it represents.

The livestream video that was done was the 31st of January and they were on just starting their second go-around trying to get the front core tooling sorted out at that point. So while Coronavirus has invariably delayed things since then, there was 0 chance that kit was ever coming out in February.

I dunno $24.50 is well below the box MSRP on those, and $8.61 for shipping is reasonable since the actually shipping is gonna be $7, and that buck and change probably offsets all the eBay and PayPal fees and contributes a few pennies to the packing materials. The cheapest one up there right now is $32.99 which is right at MSRP. Sure it would be $19.77 + tax at Hobby Lobby, but I'm not really sure I can see the organization that is HL carrying that product. Not something that necessarily fits within their "value system" as it were.

It was confirmed in that live stream that the problem is the new tool 70.5 Camaro from the 90s isn't actually equilateral when comparing the two front fenders side to side so the new front nose piece didn't fit...at all. This is the reason these "new" kits based on old tooling are so labor intensive and take so long to finish and you see things like the Vegas just getting entirely new bodies done.

I can't speak to that particular site, but my LHS got them in on Thursday and there are several vendors selling them on eBay, so they are out there.

The sticker on the box lid in the video says - New 4 Piece Body. One would hope that means NEW NEW, and not "New"ly reissued thing we tooled up previously.

Japanese - U.S. relations have just normalized after the debacle of that Supra. Aoshima reboxed it with both body kits and aside from being the entirely "wrong scale" from what people expected, it's also a total flop when compared to the Tamiya Mk.4 Supra kit. It's probably the most loathed cross-Pacific tool sharing in decades.

It will show up in a few days, there's quit a bit of backlog at Round2 that is scheduled for release in June. The Impala and the Haul Away Trailer are at the point of that log.

Model Roundup expects theirs in on Monday.