Tom Geiger

I think both Revell and Tamiya release that next month!

Bingo! It was absurd that people thought investors had purchased Revell and weren't going to exercise the assets?? And walk away from a lucrative market? On what planet?

Okay we've reached consensus... Tamiya tape for the fine edge and then painters blue for covering the rest! Even painters blue loses stickup over time. I just painted my daughter's new condo and brought a few rolls I had at the house. I noticed they weren't sticking well. So I went to the pack of rolls I had bought that day and it worked fine. So the old rolls went in the trash!

Wow! Dirk woke me up by quoting my original post! I hadn't seen this thread was back from the dead until now. Nope, the VW is still sitting. I would like to get back to it. Funny, the last few real oldies I pulled back onto the bench required total reworks that didn't leave much of the original work intact. Maybe the VW will be one of those. But I'll offer up this project as another long languishing project. One that winds up on the bench every few years, progresses a bit, then gets pushed aside once again. This puppy was started back when this was a cheap kit. Cheap enough that we didn't care if we cut a few up. I got just so far and realized that my body splice wasn't straight. I also had puttied over recessed door handles and had issues with scribing proper door lines. So in the box she went. It's been out a few times since. At one point a friend said he had side slabs from a project. It took a few reminders to get them, and when I did, the door handles had been sanded flat. Another attempt, someone online sent me door handles, but cut them too close to splice into the body. I tried carving and the whole body shattered in my hands. So take three... or was that four... or maybe even five... and we took another brand new body, and this was just a few years ago once they were pricey, and redid the entire thing. That's the photos you see here... a body that sits straight with door handles! And somehow it got put aside again. So she sits!

Wouldn't ya know... as soon as I posted the last entry, I went to my email and there was the ad... first the whole ad, and then a blow up so you can read the text. That's our Ollies, jumping right into TRU's grave!

Yup, old story... my sister in law worked at Toyz corporate as a college intern and rose to a directors position. As part of their jobs they had to do a proposal for new business ideas. She tapped me and we presented "The Hobby Shop at TRU" . It was a concept of a full aisle of model kits, tools and supplies. She got a good response as a presentation, but it never went anywhere. Back when I got started in this hobby some 30 years ago, Child World did a clearance on their model kits. I went store to store and literally pushed my cart against the shelf and dumped all the model cars into it at $2.50 a kit! I wound up with a lot of duplicates as trading stock. My Pyrites Paddler '53 Ford pickup was one of those $2.50 kit!

Thanks guys! Keep in mind we all love old cars. We forgive them because we love the design and are nostalgic for the part they played in our lives. I will forever have a shelf of models of them! But I wouldn't want one as a daily driver, especially on my 180 mile round trip daily Turnpike marathon! I'd much rather be cruising at 90 mph effortlessly listening to satellite radio in air conditioning as my little Hyundai delivers a trouble free 32 mpg. Awhile back there was a cover story in the Studebaker Drivers Club Journal, Turning Wheels. Some guy gave his beautiful 16 year old twin daughters each a butt ugly 1960 Studebaker Lark as their first cars. He was quite proud of himself! We know better today! Chances are that one of them will have an accident in their first year of driving. If you saw that video where they crashed a 1959 full size Chevy head on into a modern Malibu, it was annihilated! And even that perfectly restored car gave a huge plume of rust upon impact. When my daughters started driving I made sure they were in modern, crash ready cars with airbags. And I kept my collector cars for fun rides.

Mine is 2.5 years older than me! That's what happens when you are the youngest guy in the office!

Happened to my wife on the Turnpike. Blade flew off, metal holder stayed on. She kept driving home and metal holder dug a deep enough groove in windshield that I had to pay to have it replaced. Christmas Day. My bro-in-law's Honda minivan wouldn't start as his family tried to leave for home at evenings end. I look and find that a battery terminal end had rusted clear off. We are at another tool-less family member's home. I McIver it with tin foil and get it started. I tell him to get the family home and the very next morning to go to the garage. I text him a week later to see how that went... he told me the tin foil was still holding!

I know Don and Carol and will echo that they are first class people. They were vendors at NNL East and I will say the only vendor, that after the show, offered us an extra donation because they did well. That kind of class act. And I'm pleased that they will still be around in some capacity.

As romantic as we want to be about old cars, they really were poorly built and designed to last only a short time. When I got my license in 1975, a 10 year old American car had visible rust holes in the body and was likely not to have much left of a floor. The interiors were in tatters and they were lucky to make 100,000 miles. I remember many cars me and my friends had that fit that bill. The junkyards were full of five to ten year old cars. A tri-five Chevy rusted out above the headlights in 2-3 years. Note that JC Whitney made a chrome cover to hide this. It was likely to need engine work in the 30,000 miles range. A 50s or 60s car going 75 was shaking like a space ship leaving the atmosphere. You were lucky to get 10-15 miles per gallon. And God forbid if you got into an accident in one of them! Today, I have a 2015 Hyundai Elantra that delivers 32 miles per gallon. It's a basic appliance with more comforts than a fully loaded 60s car. I can be going 90 on the Turnpike and not notice. I've driven it 48000 miles without a whimper. It's designed to crumple itself to protect me. None of my 2000s cars, even at 200,000 miles has any body rust or interior tears. We view the good ole days through rose colored glasses!

Bingo! It's amazing that 1. the tooling some 50 years ago was so over engineered that it has lasted all of this time, with constant reruns of some kits! and 2. the tooling survived, some of it through poor inventory control and bad house keeping. No company today would allow assets to sit idle for decades. People just don't get what a miracle it is that this stuff still exists. And some back story on the good ole days. We cannot compare the industry today to what it once was. Speaking with guys who were involved back then, first they had no idea that there would be a collector market some 40-50 years later. They were in the toy business. A kit was hot for that season. If a promo got ordered for the next year, it went forward. Otherwise it was seen as obsolete and anyone who could design a new kit around that tool was pulling in money for the company. The market today is what? 5,000 kit runs VS 500,000 kit runs in the golden era. The company had full staffs of designers, engravers and other professionals under roof. It wasn't hard to make a profit. I was told you could sell 100,000 units and that was a bad kit.... think of some of the MPC customs from the late 60s! There isn't that kind of money to invest today.

I found the last two in the same parking lot!

Anyone else see the irony of the Germans selling us Rommel's Rod?

You have a garage named Diana?

and in any 1960s-1970s show or movie when a car starts up.... any brand car... the sound was a Chrysler starter? In any Quinn-Martin Production show, EVERYONE drove a brand new Ford. Except when a criminal drove an old Chevy you knew it was going to go off a cliff!

Thanks for clarifying that Rick! It looks good! I saw in another thread that someone is going to cast all those goodies, so I'm in!

Fantastic! Put me down for a Travelall, and two sets of the underhood goodies! I had been scratch building the stuff, but I see procrastination is my friend once again!

Alan- since you have both versions... the original version, the first Round 2 release was devoid of under hood details. The photos that Ranma posted above showed an off road version with all the goodies under the hood... heater, master cylinder, coolant bottle... did they add all of that into the offroad version? Or did someone add it to the built kit shown?

Back in the day there were a lot of counties that had the Sunday closing laws. Most of those laws fell as big chains moved in, stating it was religion based and therefore unconstitutional. Bergen County, NJ still does. I don't know how they have been able to sustain it, Paramus Mall which was the first mall in the USA and one of the largest is there. In New York City you will find businesses owned by Orthodox Jews closed on Saturday as that is their religious observation.

Super sad to see those one. Looks like it was a very nice car. I saw this in a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike yesterday. Roof flat, looked like it was rolled good. Not a straight panel on the entire car. This wasn't on the flatbed right after the wreck, it was on a transporter headed somewhere.

I'm digging that Caravan project! Nothing like TV and movie cars! And that is the Brookfield diecast I was thinking of. I was hoping that someone cast it!

Do a cost analysis of time and materials prior to offering any product for sale! The curse of the aftermarket is people who have not done so and sooner or later realized they were selling product at cost or a loss. Note that in this market with everything being produced by hand, there is the time factor. The downfall of a lot of producers is that they have attracted many more orders than they can fulfill in a reasonable time frame. And customers are unforgiving. They will hold you to eBay instant turnaround and will scream bloody murder on the internet if you are slow to deliver.

Can't be said enough... 'PRICE EVERYTHING!" If you don't have prices on kits, people will assume you want too much and won't ask! And price them on peelable labels... even if you have to buy them! I know one goob who was having a broke sale... he priced everything on the box front with a Sharpie in large letters! He couldn't figure out why nobody wanted to buy his stuff.