Tom Geiger

Looks great! Post some photos of it with the cacti! I had the idea to do the same thing with a small scale car, using a Margarita mix bucket

I'm not sure what your version was, but there was a release that had the wrong interior shipped with it. I believe it was the Vicky interior.

Asbury Park is still there but a former shadow of itself. It wasn't hit in the famous hurricane Sandy. Other Jersey shore towns were devastated. At the height of the storm Long Beach Island was completely underwater with such force that underground utilities and roads were destroyed. Some areas still aren't habitable. The town is going through a renaissance with the downtown area now being trendy. The boardwalk area should be coming back. Steel Pier is in Atlantic City... a whole different animal!

Maybe the dopes think that since they don't move, that they've been abandoned there since the 1970s?

In my dealings with all three model company personnel in their attendance at NNL East, I've found them all very professional and they speak highly of each other at the different companies. There isn't a tit-for-tat competition here. As far as Round 2, there are people who will criticize that they are focusing on reissues, but remember that this is what and why they've purchased. The so called "tooling that's been long paid for" was only purchased by them a short time ago and indeed costs money, so they have to work it so that the investment is worthwhile and to pay for the business debt on it. Anything they reissue now on that deep dive into the kit vault indeed requires investment to bring the tooling to a usable and fruitful state. Speaking with them, there is so much they'd like to do, it's a matter of time and money. More good things to come!

Since the photos have gone to not so old, here's some images from a hobby crawl we took on Long Island NY in 2005. Dave's Hobby is gone. It was an interesting place and a jumble of everything old and new inside.... Yes, this is an aisle in the store! We also went to Gary Weickert's "Get It On Paper" store, which was in a garage building on his home's property. Bonus points if you can identify the characters in the photo.

Welcome to the board Bart! You weren't a kid in the 60s if you didn't paint at least one model car with a Q-Tip! One suggestion I can make about paint, is that Duplicolor automotive paint lays down much better than hobby paints. You must use their primer to protect the plastic, but their colors lay down real nice. Some of them will require a clear coat. Use all the same brand paints.

Ray didja test fate and eat the warm steaks anyway?

I found the boxes the sell at Home Depot to be the best value. They come in three sizes and cost from $1 to $2 each. The large size holds about 20 model boxes. We owned the two houses for over a year, and I went back and forth weekly. So I was able to transport all my models and fragiles in my Dodge Caravan hightop on my weekly trips.

a few years ago Alan Barton was here and we spent an entire day opening boxes in my basement model car storage room. About half way through the hoard he asked me how many Valiant kits I thought I had... I estimated a dozen and he laughed, "we've unwrapped double that already!" We also found twice the number of 65-66 Barracudas I thought I owned including one I swear I never saw before!

Very nice build on one of my favorite old kits!

I did an inventory a few years ago and found stuff I swear I never saw before!

plus whatever it will take to get the tooling out of Chinese debtors prison! From what I understand, the company that was doing the production was owned a whole lotta money. The tooling would be held on a workman's lien.

Yes! I was building a '34 Ford with a sectioned body. I showed the progress shots on the boards to that same "great work" response. FINALLY, after I had finished the color coat, someone mentioned that the roof was an incorrect shape on that kit! Man, I back tracked and did the work to make it almost right. But why couldn't someone have mentioned it early in the build?

Congrats! We went with my daughter to see a house on Sunday morning. It had just been listed on Saturday and had an open house on Sunday. We thought there wouldn't be a lot of people because it was Father's Day, but we were wrong. All kinds of people looking! It was just an older ranch with small bedrooms and a bad family room addition. They put in a bid $2000 OVER list price. Today they find that there are SIX contracts for the house. And it wasn't even a great house!

my workbench is an old hollow core door. Being an old draftsman, I have wrapped it with brown craft paper. I used to change it once a year or so. Now I cannot remember the last time!

Here in the Philly burbs, Amazon employs private package delivery service. Lots of complaints on our local town email chain. Seems these guys slow down and toss the packages on the lawns. We have curbside mail boxes. USPS will bring a large package up to the front door. UPS puts it in front of my garage door. A funny story about Sunday or holiday deliveries. Many years ago USPS announced that Priority Mail would be delivered on Christmas Day. This was back when my kids were kids, and we're opening presents and the door bell rings. Who could that be on Christmas morning? I open the door and there's a mail man with a big smile like he's delivering the holy grail to us that will make our holiday. I wish him a Merry Christmas and send him on his way. I didn't want to ruin his spirit by telling him the package was just some eBay model parts car purchase!

Okay guys... New Jersey Pork Roll and American cheese on a hard roll. Pure heaven if done right!

Back when I lived in New Jersey I had three hobby shops within a reasonable drive. Avenel Hobbies was a 30 year shop, that went out of business a few years ago, right after the Hobby Lobby went in on the highway. Avenel was a kit shop, he had no RC, drones etc. He said that he couldn't compete and his sales went down dramatically. He said that people constantly came in with HLs 40% off coupon, expecting him to honor it. Both the Hobby Shop in Aberdeen (yea, that's their imaginative name) and Hobbymasters in Red Bank are still there. If I wanted to drive 45 minutes, there was Jackson Hobbies. With the other shops closer, it wasn't worth the drive. I have friends in Jackson and we pick up great wings at a shop in the same shopping center so I will go in there to browse. The owner wants to retire and he's made it public knowledge that the shop is for sale. No takers so far, so he's saying he'll close up by year's end. This is the quandary of a lot of shops.... aging owners needing out and nobody to buy the business! Once I moved to Pennsylvania, there is a Hobby Town about 30 minutes away in West Chester. If I need something, I can stop at Mainline Hobbies in Plymouth, on my way home from work. That involves getting off the PA Turnpike and back on again, so it about doubles my toll! There are both a Michael's and a Hobby Lobby in the same shopping area right here in Exton. I could literally walk there! I stopped even going into Michael's to look since HL opened. Michael's selection shrunk to nothing in the 7 years I've been here. For the most part I just buy supplies and paint at shops. There are shows and discount dealers in my circle of friends, where I buy my kits. Still, if I want something new I can get it at HL for a small premium over my usual sources using the 40% off coupon.

I got these five kits as a freebie from a stamp collector friend of mine. He heard I built models and had purchased these, then decided to collect stamps instead! So I will be sending him a nice big stamp care package this weekend!

Congrats to them! My daughter and her husband have been trying to buy a house for close to a year now. It's a hot market in New Jersey in their price range. They've been under contract for at least five houses, and every one has fallen through because unscrupulous sellers continue to accept bids during the attorney review period. In the meantime, my younger daughter has managed to go under contract for a condo on her own. She only lost two before this deal stuck!

in your bathtub

Jim, thanks for digging up this thread. I've been thinking about it lately but hadn't the gumption to look it up. It's interesting to read back to the kit announcements. The attitudes of the peanut gallery on this board were there, just as I remembered. At NNL East we have one category that we announce in January right before the show. (The show is in April). We call it the "Web Theme", in that it hadn't appeared in the flyers etc created a year before the show, it only gets announced on our website by January 15 of each year. It gives us a chance to include what's hot that year. This year it was overwhelmingly the Foose kits. We noticed that they were getting a lot of board space, on all the boards we follow, and people were building them in their own style. So it became this year's Web Theme. We weren't disappointed on what showed up on the tables either!

https://public.fotki.com/ModelCitizen/model_cars/1963-ford-pickup-kit/ For those of you that wanted to see the contents of a '63 Ford Pickup Kit. An Aussie friend of mine went on a buying spree back when their dollar was doing well. He'd have the kits shipped to me and I'd take photos and send them to him for verification. Every 6 kits, I'd fill one of those AMT 6 kit cases and ship it to him.

As we’ve said, buy the regular BMF and follow the advise in this thread, and you should be good. We have a new member in our club this month who had BMF questions. We promised to do a demonstration at our next meeting. Anyone who can be in Perth Amboy NJ on Saturday August 11 is welcome to attend.