Tom Geiger

tie dye or psychedelic

In threads like this, whether it's Revell or Round 2, I find there's a lot of undue criticism of the operations, mainly from people who don't understand business realities. Those of us who are business savvy, not just the model business, but business overall, understand the situations, the restrictions, bandwidth, budgets, and how / why some of the decisions have to be made.

You could spend all day watching them crush cars on YouTube

Find out why your insurer didn't cover it. You met your annual deductible. Call them both, then let them fight it out.

never finishing one!

Here's mine! The most I've ever spent on a model. I believe it cost $425. I bought it on eBay from Joe Wheat about 9 years ago. Every time there was one up for sale, the timing was never right for me! This time I was in the middle of my complicated three house move to Pennsylvania. I started to pass on it, then I said WTH and hit that "Buy It Now" button. These are the photos from the listing. Mine is a silver blue. This is a red one that Tom Carter had for sale (his photo). I don't remember the price. This one is Dean Milano's. Notice something interesting... it has a Barracuda center grill. Here's a yellow one that was on eBay back around 2008. Again, notice the Barracuda center grill. I don't remember the price on this one. The auction said it was from the collection of a retired Chrysler employee. So the ridiculously elusive '66 Valiant was produced in at least 5 colors I have documented so far. So that means it wasn't a very limited production piece, that would more likely have been in one color. And here's my conspiracy theory: As per the usual process, no doubt AMT got preproduction blue prints to produce the model. It appears that Chrysler had a second thought on the roof line on the '66 Valiant, as the body is more squared off than the previous years models. So they squared off the roof on the Valiant line. Only AMT didn't know and produced the promo with the wrong roof! I have owned 1:1 '66 Valiants, and yes it's wrong! Here's the correct roof line. See the difference? Promos I've seen state that they came from a Chrysler employee's collection. So my theory is that the complete promo run was produced, a batch was sent to Chrysler and they balked at the roof line. Thus, the entire run was scrapped, but the ones that had been sent to Chrysler somehow survived. Note that this was the last AMT Valiant. Each year they had done a promo, then a curbside kit. No kit this year either. Continuing on... what happened to the tooling? It became the Fireball 500. I've examined the inside of an original '66 Valiant against the Fireball and there are matching marks. Note that the Fireball didn't come from the '66 Barracuda tool since that still exists as the Hemi Under Glass. The one you showed for sale wasn't perfect. There's a glue mess around the tail lights. There are a few resins that have been produced of this car. R&R did one years ago and Motor City Resin Casters does / did one. I have two copies of that one. I've also seen someone trying to sell a painted resin copy as a faux promo on eBay. They admitted it was a copy. That's all I know! Feel free to add to this, disprove my theory etc. I'd love to know the whole deal.

Back when I was doing some soul searching for a career change, I thought about opening a hobby shop. There was nothing around me here west of Philadelphia. At the time my outplacement from my former employer put me at Right Associates, a firm that helps you with your job search. I belonged to their "Senior Leaders" group and one of our exercises was to look at your hobbys etc for your next career move. The group looked at me and suggested I go into the hobby business. This group had a bunch of out of work Vice Presidents, so it was a pretty business savvy assembly. They took the concept and with their over enthusiasm had us opening three locations to start. They worked with a landlord with shopping centers in the burbs and got excellent terms on 10,000 square foot units in good locations. The landlord even had the demographics for the areas, with median income, percentage of owners vs renters, traffic reports etc. They even had venture capital guys they spoke to, this thing was way outta control and I had a feeling I'd wind up doing this, like it or not! We looked at the Hobbytown USA franchises because it was an instant startup. They provide a lot of support, including a complete POS system and starting inventory necessary. These guys looked at the fees just as a cost of doing business, figuring it would take us a year to figure out everything on our own. So what stopped us dead in our tracks? Sales potential. Just to keep the doors open, between rent, inventory, interest on financing, salary for me and pay for everyone needed to keep the doors open from 10am -7pm 7 days a week, we figured that each store needed to do $1000 a day in PROFIT. So at $10 per kit profit, that's 3,000 models a month. The cost of running the business was just overwhelming. So "2 Cool Hobbies" died right then and there! And a few years after that Hobby Lobby came storming into town. You could walk there from what was to be my primary location!

Somebody email him that he needs to use 12 Gauge wire, then he can hook that hemi up to a 20 amp breaker!

and lie awake!

I liked the prehistoric GPS tracking device in the T-Bird....

The photo is from New Jersey yesterday, the thermometer actually got up to 103 and it was like standing in a pizza oven. Then a storm blew in early evening. One wind gust actually moved a huge gas grill! Fortunately no damage at my daughter’s house, they did lose a huge tree in last week’s storm. Surrounding towns weren’t as lucky. Lotsa damage, large trees into houses and across roads, tons of power lines down too. Many people we know still don’t have power. Fortunately no injuries reported. It’s in the 70s today, quite a pleasure after the 100 plus temperatures

Back when I used to pass through Montvale, NJ on my daily commute I’d see all kinds of interesting things on the local roads. Montvale was home to Mercedes, BMW, Volvo and Mini and occasionally you’d see camo cars, but also Euro cars like the complete Smart range, and competitors cars like Peugeots and Renault’s not sold in the USA. Of course all before cell phone cameras!

Nana’s stinky beer

You should have it resin cast! ?

One FB thread that had me pulling out what little hair I have left was on foil. Clowns were saying that aluminum foil from the dollar store was better than BMF! And the examples shown were awful. I responded that BMF was cheap since you can foil several cars with one $8 sheet. A guy responded that he didn’t have money to spend on model cars. I clicked on his profile and he had a nice house, a speed boat and a racing motor cycle... priorities I guess!

You did ask for photos...

We have several business fails to thank for this! 1. Back in the day, before computerized design, we overbuilt everything because we didn't know any better. Figure a model kit was going to be issued for a season or two and they made this tool that survives some 50 years in constant production! 2. Bad to no inventory control! Back in the day, they just tossed obsolete tooling into a warehouse. No accounting, no bar code identifying it. Business today tracks the cost and depreciated value of every asset. Anything that's not producing enough to justify it's space on the pallet rack, would efficiently go out as scrap! and thank God for this! We still have a good amount of the kits that we remember from our youth!

Facebook modelers drive me nutz so I don't try to help them anymore. It makes you appreciate the folks on this board! Worse is guys like this video who people believe because they come off as experts doing videos. Videos where a guy shows you how to paint all the parts still on the tree by spraying the entire tree with Krylon. Forget any prep work, never heard of primer! And people watch this stuff, then post questions on Facebook about their failed paint jobs and they don't have a clue why. They did follow the video! It's like if you want to build substandard models go do it, but don't teach others how to be as bad as you!

I don't know yet! I will go through my cap collection and see what comes close in size and shape.

When I saw this photo, I figured you were finished with the paint job! And it looked familiar! Here's my '34 below. It's sectioned but not chopped. Check your PMs. I sent you a message with '50 Ford dash details.

Lookin' good Alan! I'll be watching!

My no progress report! Since my July 4 report, I've spent a week in Seattle on business and this week my daughter had twin baby daughters. So we are in NJ babysitting my first grand daughter. Life comes before model cars! I have been pluggin' along on the '50 Ford. I have the decals.. round two... on the body and finally am satisfied with them. And I went through the parts inventory and added the missing bits, prepped and painted them all. At this point, when I get time, I believe we are in the home stretch on this one! Then it will be onward to the Nomad.

of Nana's coat

Twin granddaughters! Meet Allison and Brielle! All is well in my world tonight!

Ok Chuck! That's one scary monster! Great build.