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Everything posted by Tom Geiger
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When you have a kit that has a red molded tail light but the real car has a multi color lens... I wrapped the whole unit in BMF, then used red and orange Sharpie for the lens. The white is gel pen. Seat belts - I had white ribbon, needed brown seat belts. Just 'dyed' it with brown Sharpie. Now I'm just going to buy black and white ribbon, with Sharpies I can have any color seat belt I want from the white ribbon. Before you BMF trim like vent windows, run your silver Sharpie in the inside corners. If you don't get your BMF perfect, the silver will fill in those tight areas and make it appear that the BMF is in there. A few notes about black Sharpie... around windows it can appear purple if you don't have it defined dark enough. And DON'T clear coat it! I had black Sharpie trim run and ruin a paint job.
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White Interior Combinations
Tom Geiger replied to Fabrux's topic in Model Building Questions and Answers
Here's some ideas to spice up interiors.. just imagine white instead of black on the last one. These were 1980s cars, I don't even remember which ones, that I posted for someone many years ago! -
Just do what I do. Build your model. Wait for it to snow. Take pictures.
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AMT Stealth promo worth?
Tom Geiger replied to chunkypeanutbutter's topic in Model Building Questions and Answers
Gotta love those promos from the 1980s. I guess they made them in quantities that the market still hasn't absorbed. I bought a 1982 Cavalier at a recent show for $5, loose no box. I got a Chevy Blazer and pickup for $5 and $10 at a show in September. The Chevette I redid as my sister in law's car was a $15 promo as well. These can be taken apart and redone as a quick project. -
Food Odours ... of the UNpleseant Kind
Tom Geiger replied to 1972coronet's topic in The Off-Topic Lounge
It's a good thing it was years ago. Today that would be called a "bias crime" and he'd be out the door pretty quick. At my prior company a guy was fired on the spot for telling someone to stop acting like a retard. -
Stephen, no problem with your enthusiasm! If it wasn't for new blood coming in and posting new stuff, this place would get pretty boring. Just get onto a photo site like mentioned above and learn to post photos here from photos stored on that site. I'd get on one of the more robust services where you can set up photo albums and such. It will come in handy for storing and sharing photos from things other than models. I have family folders and a lot of car reference folders on my Fotki account. Here's my site, you can take a look at how I have it organized: http://public.fotki.com/ModelCitizen/ I keep an album for every model project and all my finished models. I've been at it better than 10 years, and I have over 26,500 photos at this point. When I'm posting on the board I can usually pull up a photo or two to illustrate what ever I'm talking about at that moment. Pretty handy to have it all on-line. In fact, the other day at work we were sitting in a conference room at the end of the day and my laptop was hooked to the projector, so I showed photos of my latest project to the guys.
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Ronnie, I've never used the kit supplied radiator hoses for that reason. I use after market hose (it's rubber covered wire) because I can cut and bend it any way I need.
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Painting during construction
Tom Geiger replied to aurfalien's topic in Model Building Questions and Answers
And I built the other 5% -
Food Odours ... of the UNpleseant Kind
Tom Geiger replied to 1972coronet's topic in The Off-Topic Lounge
In my career as a facility manager for Fortune 100 companies, I've often been asked to referee in office food smell issues. I once had two ladies sharing an office and one of them would eat a banana in the office every morning. The other lady hated the smell of bananas! She complained that she was allergic and wanted me to get in the middle of it. My third sense said they just didn't like each other. I turned it back to her department head with a copy to human resources. Another one was microwave popcorn cooking in the office. I don't like this smell, it smells like feet to me. Someone left their popcorn in too long one time and it caught fire, setting off the alarms and sending everyone into the street in the cold rain. It was easy to ban microwave popcorn after that one! And we let the Safety Department take the hit for that one. The worst one was a group of Russian employees who brought in a huge pot of crayfish, that they heated in the cafeteria microwave. And then they sat at one of the big round tables in the middle of the room with this steaming pot! It made the entire building smell like low tide! Ugh! Yea, another one for HR to handle. -
These guys are providing a service, they have done nothing illegal. I cannot fault anyone from trying to earn a living. And people do buy this stuff. When I looked, the high price guys had all positive glowing feedback! When I see interesting business angles on eBay, I investigate them to see if there's a strategy I could learn. First thing I do is see how many current items the seller is running. Then I take a look at their closed auctions, as far back as eBay will allow. Then you figure out how much work this guy does to get all those auctions in print, the cost of doing so, and what his return was on this investment. Then you can judge how much he really made. I've figured that for every sale on eBay, you have an hour or two invested. That's from deciding what to sell and pulling it out. Then you need to photograph it and upload / edit the photos. You write the description, make sure the auction reads well and post it. Then you have to manage it. If it doesn't sell, you need to go through those ads and decide which ones to renew and which ones to ditch. Those are ones you have wasted your time on completely. Once something sells, you have to manage the sale and ship it. That includes finding / buying shipping materials, packing it up and getting it to the buyer. That's a fair amount of work. So how much would you want to make per hour? $10, $20? Then you'd have $20-40 in labor tied up in each auction. Sell through rate on eBay is at an all time low. Decent sellers only sell 10-20% of their listings in each run through the system. And I've looked at the parts business guys. There are guys selling parts for $2 or $3 and there are those selling theirs for $10 to $20. Funny thing? The sell through rate is about the same for the guys at both ends of the cost spectrum. So you might as well ask top dollar. Even those guys really aren't making any money. And this isn't a phenomena only in the model car category. It's actually much worse in the collectors stamps and postcard categories. There is one stamp that I watch. It's a stamp that catalogs about 50 cents, but so common that nobody would ever buy it by itself. There is an auction for one for 99 cents. But it's got a big corner missing out of it, damaged and worth nothing. It should just be thrown out. But somehow, this seller has renewed that item over and over for more than three years now.
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What Did You Get Today? (Not Model Related)
Tom Geiger replied to LOBBS's topic in The Off-Topic Lounge
Pennsylvania car registration renewals all came in the mail today... so I went outside and applied the stickers to my license plates. Now I get to ferry cars to my local garage for state inspection. Yea, all five cars are due! Argh! Silly Pennsylvania still makes you do an annual inspection. -
God bless her! I have lost both of my parents. My wife has her mother left, but she's incoherent in a nursing home. Enjoy your mother while you have her! I miss mine!
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I wish I could find the quote, but someone I knew once had a plaque with a long quote about how kids today are lazy, show no respect to their elders and are going to hell in a hand basket... it was signed by one of the ancient Roman or Greek writers... written around 2000 years ago. Some things never change.
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Scott, I get something weird too. There is one poster who always appears in blue script when I'm on my Iphone. Doesn't matter if I'm in phone view, or full view. Same poster, same posts here on my laptop are in regular text. Howz that happen?
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What Did You Get Today? (Not Model Related)
Tom Geiger replied to LOBBS's topic in The Off-Topic Lounge
That changes the visual image significantly! -
AMT Parts Pack prices
Tom Geiger replied to Ben's topic in General Automotive Talk (Trucks and Cars)
Rick you are indeed Krazy. You provide no facts, only your own angry opinion that things are too expensive. But you cannot provide any numbers or evidence to support your position. You can rant all you want that 'big mean corporations' are picking your pocket, it's obvious that you don't know who you are talking about. There are those of us in the hobby who have met and know the people behind Revell, Round 2 and Moebius. All of them are real model guys who are as excited about the hobby as we are. No corporate ghouls. Knowing the integrity of those involved, as well as their intentions to provide us with new products, I trust their judgement and support them. And yes, I stand behind my statement that if we don't buy the product, there won't be more in the future. If a company cannot make a profit on a product, it's only common sense that they won't repeat the mistake. Where you guys see buying the product at closeout in the clearance bin as a win for you, you don't understand that it's a major FAIL for the hobby. It means that somewhere in the supply chain, somebody lost their shirt on the product. And business can't afford to repeat that. Personally I wouldn't be in the business of providing product to this market. Overall, we are known as cheap. It seems everyone is on the band wagon demanding better, more detailed kits and accessories, but when the manufacturers listen to us, we then retract back to "oh, I didn't mean I'd spend money on it." Quite frankly if I was Round 2, I'd be doing detail kits for military modelers. They don't seem to have a problem paying for what they want. And production costs are less expensive in China. Some of that has resulted in better product. Cleaner castings, better chrome, small items individually taped for protection... all this involves labor that wasn't being done in the US. We seem to forget that we'd get parts slammed in a box with scratched glass and flaky chrome. And since it's been maybe 15-20 years since we sent production off shore, who is to say what kits would cost if we had continued to make them here? Probably a lot more than we are paying now. -
What Did You Get Today? (Not Model Related)
Tom Geiger replied to LOBBS's topic in The Off-Topic Lounge
Pictures, we need pictures... -
I don't think VW / Porsche was too focused on Japanese competition in those days. I lived in Germany then and there weren't any Japanese cars. The 914 was produced for their home market as a low cost entry into the Porsche family. They were hoping to grab the youth market, who would eventually trade up to a 'real' Porsche.
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Isn't that the Italian airline?
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I had a strange upbringing since my father was a US Army officer and we lived in different countries. In the time frame where everyone was experiencing a lot of great stuff, we lived in Izmir, Turkey which was still in the stone age. There was no TV, nothing to buy, sparse air conditioning (and it was sooo hot!), and no refrigeration in the markets. The US Forces had one radio station that played old radio shows, and we listened to those for entertainment, like the generation before me had done. We read books, played with our friends, and took very good care of our toys since there was no replacing them. And we thought Coca Cola was meant to be drank warm. We got back to the USA in 1968 and it was sensory overload. So much to do and see. We caught up on TV in reruns, dove into Hot Wheels and model cars! We thought it odd to drink cold Coke because it hurt our teeth. We learned about pizza. But in 1969 it was off to Europe. A little better because we had one US TV station that played reruns from the year before. There was German TV if you could learn to watch the Brady Bunch in German. We could buy our Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars on the local market. There were some model car offerings but very expensive. We returned to the USA for good in 1972 and again got absorbed into things kids took for granted like McDonalds and Burger King, which hadn't penetrated the Euro markets back then. And again we had to catch up on TV. We discovered that the Bradys indeed spoke English, although they had different voices. And I remember my first trip to Two Guys department store that had a good hobby department. I almost died seeing an entire aisle of model cars. And after pining for US muscle cars and funny car models for years, what was the first model I bought stateside? Revell Porsche 914! I had wanted it when I saw it in a German hobby shop for the equivalent of $10 so I never could afford it. Here it was for $2.50 so I couldn't resist!
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AMT Parts Pack prices
Tom Geiger replied to Ben's topic in General Automotive Talk (Trucks and Cars)
Actually the cost of a kit or a parts pack are essentially the same. And that's been forever. I remember Bob Paeth telling me the story behind the Surfite kit. Revell felt that when consumers opened the box and saw that little bit of parts in there, they wouldn't see value. The answer wasn't putting in a smaller box since the industry was standardized to the typical kit box. Everything from the box folding equipment, to the cases the kits ship in benefited from that standardization. So they decided they needed to better fill that box, and that's how the Tiki Hut came about. He remarked that the cost wasn't in the amount of plastic in the box, but in the supply chain of every other thing and step to providing that product to the store shelf and then to your work bench. Several years ago I needed a small plastic clip that held a roof part in place on my 1991 Geo Tracker. I went to my local Chevy parts counter and was amazed that the clip was something like $20. The parts manager explained that it was a $1 part, but the cost of handling it, inventorying it and getting it into my hand cost the other $19. -
I use another photo site, www.fotki.com. They have both free and paid accounts. I've had a paid account for over 10 years. I find this a lot easier to use than Photo Bucket. And there are others..
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I got my first apartment in 1978 and bought a 13" color TV. And it was something like $400 in those days!
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AMT Parts Pack prices
Tom Geiger replied to Ben's topic in General Automotive Talk (Trucks and Cars)
You have no point. There is no situation with a $2 cost and a $400 price. Fantasy. I had said: "and have priced the product to their best estimate... that rather fragile balance of the price the market will bear VS the cost of providing this product."