Tom Geiger

My father was in the US Army when I was growing up and we lived in Germany from 1969-72. Back then my parents both got International drivers licenses. The license plates were standard US size plates marked "USA" which had silver letters on a green plate. The car also had the white oval "USA" sticker on the back. In short, especially if it was an American car, they stuck out like sore thumbs in local traffic. I still have a pair of those plates. The US authorities handled the whole thing. Americans never needed to deal with German DMV. Personnel over a certain rank were eligible for the government to pay for boat shipment of one car, both over and back. A family could have two cars, with the second being bought locally. There was a fair trade of cars being passed on by servicemen leaving to new arrivals. When we arrived in 1969 we bought a red VW Beetle from someone leaving. When we left we sold it to someone arriving. My father shipped our 1966 Valiant to Germany and back again. In those days, the tax situation was that if you bought a German car and drove it locally for 6 months, it could be brought back to the US duty free. The German companies all sold US spec cars to servicemen. So there were a lot of VWs and Mercedes driving around US army posts. BMWs and Audis hadn't really caught on yet. US cars could be disposed of by selling them to another US service person or turn it in for scrap. The army post had it's own junkyard where you could get US car parts. I remember going there with my father to get a starter for our Valiant from an old Dart. Thinking back, the cars in the junkyard weren't all that old, some of them less than five years old. I don't know what the deal is today. I expect it to be more complex. And I think it would be a pain in the tail to ship a left hand drive car to England. I think I'd just buy a local right hand drive car when I arrived.

I had been wanting a PT Cruiser convertible for some time. I kept looking at shows and hobby shops but nobody seemed to have one. Then I sorted out my hoard and found two of them. Never remembered seeing them before!

That's too cool Andy! When the subject came up, I remembered those builds from Toledo that far back and went through my albums to find them. I also remember someone did have a built Riley Elf but couldn't find the photo.

Since I'm an Evergreen junkie, this is important to me. My local Hobbytown USA has an Evergreen and Plastruct rack, as well as a good selection of woods. Last time I bought $75 worth. They seem to stock two of each stock number, so if someone buys both, the spot will be empty. They do have a computerized sales and ordering system so they reorder what they sell pretty quick. When I asked, the owner told me the one I wanted would be in on Thursday. On the other hand, they don't stock Tamiya paints. They have a whole aisle of Testors, every friggin option, and a Pactra rack. They also have those paints the gamers use. When I asked about Tamiya, the owner said, "Yes, a lot of people ask for that." ... soooo where is it then? LOL

I like the dirty engine bay with the brand new carb on top of it all. I've tried to duplicate those things in models and have been criticized because I didn't weather that part. Some things don't translate well to models.

I don't believe so. They don't do RC and are focused on plastic modelers of all genres so I believe they do a good kit business. They have the largest selection of auto / truck / motorcycle etc kits of anywhere, including all the foreign stuff nobody stocks. We're talking an entire aisle, at least 50 feet long, double sided, so over 100 feet of kits, floor to ceiling. People do go there to buy kits at retail, I see them checking out with a stack of them. I do see guys who are in my clubs, or go to shows where kits are sold cheaply, buying kits there. I've asked and their answer is that they want the kit NOW. So they pay. I have noticed the shrinking model aisle at other hobby shops. Those are the ones that don't have anyone on staff that have a clue about our hobby. I know some just get two of each new release from their distributor, and when those two sell, they're gone forever. In my local Hobbytown USA, they have a decent selection of kits, but those hot sellers are completely missing. I would have bought a Revell '57 Ford or '50 Olds, but they don't have any. And the bigger stores like Michaels seem to have a 3-6 month lag on new issues so here's a niche the hobby shop can fill. I wonder how many buyers have stopped going to that shop because they never find the new kit they're looking for there?

BMF or Alclad.

can we just call it fine jewelry and leave it at that! Spectacular work!

Neil, your truck grill is wrong. The model car police will be landing their helicopter on your lawn shortly. Kindly surrender the model so they can incinerate it so there will be no evidence. Then the world will once again be safe.

Good question. Does anyone know who this is? The auctions list Ocala, Florida as the location. He states in his "About Me" that he's an award winning modeler. It also says the product comes from a smoker friendly home, so we know he smokes. Do we know anything more about him?

Note that the aftermarket companies you list are the same ones I listed as having product available to wholesale. In fact those all sell to distributors, who then sell to hobby shops. That stuff is not hard to get. The aftermarket I was speak of as hard to obtain are the resin kits etc done by the smaller companies that just don't make enough product to wholesale. Some of them are one man part time efforts that are behind on their retail mail orders. You would never find Modelhaus parts, Replicas & Miniatures of Maryland product etc in hobby shops because they do a good business on their own, and are already working to capacity just filling their own orders. But guys will be disappointed that they can't find those products in hobby shops. Randy at Avenel Hobbies tried to get this kind of product for his customers, listening to what they wanted, but just wasn't able to get reliable shipments from smaller concerns.

Okay guys... here we go, by popular demand and the need for hobby education... Here it is, my Auto World Auto Cutter. I knew where it was stored in the hobby room. It hasn't been used in maybe 30-40 years. I hadn't seen it in a long time, and found it in my father's garage when I sold his house after he died. We didn't figure that Auto World actually manufactured this unit, but I was surprised to see exacto on the silver band with the two screws. The end of it screws on and the blade tightens just like a exacto blade does in a knife handle. Mine is frozen stuck with melted plastic from years ago so we'll leave the blade in it. So let's fire this baby up and see what she'll do. So I broke the seal on a mint sealed MPC '71 Duster kit for this test... actually don't panic, I grabbed this broken body from the depth of my parts box. It had already been robbed of an A pillar because it was warped. And here's the results of our test. Once heated up, the blade did slice through plastic, leaving a melted path behind it. Hotter seemed to be better because it would cut faster. Whenever it slowed down, it melted a wider path. And here's a close up of our work. My first pass was the back cut, which came out fair since it was a straight line. Still once cleaned up that would be about a 8 inch door jamb. Not good. Then on the front edge you can see where the knife stuttered on the curve. Not good. There is no way to turn a corner, or start a cut where you don't have an edge to start with. See the bottom line. I'd have to cut that another way unless I just stabbed it until the blade sunk in enough to move forward. I'm not saying I couldn't get better with some practice, but why? I already know a bunch of techniques for cutting plastic and opening panels that don't involve melting plastic. So that's our real life adult modeler test of the ancient tool of our youth. We can say that the results are about the same as we remembered. And my model room now smells just like my room did when I was 12.

I'd keep it as a wall hanging. It is very old, just look at the logos on the blade packages and the fact that the C-clamps are metal and not plastic like the ones they sell today. Any idea just how old it is?

You're all invited to the NNL Eats, the Friday evening before NNL East. Each year we all hoist a few and catch up with one another! It's as fun as the show... well almost! Oh, and I am having a few beers with ya'll right now!

that's pretty easy. On eBay go to the Advanced Search page and scroll down to "Sellers". There's a little box that says "include", but if you click on it, you can choose "exclude". Enter his ID and he's out of your search.

On eBay it works the other way. One guy finds a niche and makes good money. Ten more guys see that niche and figure they can do that too. The market gets flooded and nobody sells enough, so they start lowering their prices until they reach a point where nobody makes out. Look at Half.com, an eBay company that sells books. At first everyone was making money selling books. Now it's so flooded that you can buy nearly any title for a dollar. So nobody is making any money.

The wheels in the Revell Corvette snapper were the first thing I though of when I saw the GMG Nomad. Side by side, they're not the same but may be close enough, depending on what else is out there. Sorry to hear about the suspension. That's lousy. And Gas Monkey did a matching cooler you can see in the back of the Nomad in above picture. That would jazz up the plain bed area.

It's very difficult for hobby shops to get a decent supply of aftermarket parts. As we know, the aftermarket is rather fickle. Many can barely keep up with demand for their own retail and don't wholesale. Others will agree to supply a store, but fall short of delivering the order. Avenel Hobbies in New Jersey used to stock a lot of aftermarket but stopped because they couldn't get reliable supplies. I was in the store one Saturday when Randy was trying to phone an aftermarket company, only to have to leave a message with a kid. He also mentioned that even those companies that would ship resin, would only do so after their own demand for retail had subsided, so he was buying 'old news' pieces. So he pretty much gave up. Except for companies that do wholesale well like Model Car Garage, Pegasus, Jimmy Flintstone and the like.

Yes. Hendrix Manufacturing makes one.

Can't pass up a $5 Omni or other small car of the 1980s! I have my share of them, Cavaliers, Ford EXPs etc. I thought I had a $5 Beretta at a recent show, but upon opening the box, someone had lopped the roof off it. So I passed.

Just look at his feedback. Most of his buyers have hundreds to thousands of feedback. Not newbies to eBay.

Very nice work! I also have an unbuilt Traveler. I should look to get that one on the shelf. Here's a few pictures of finished models that I saw at Toledo back in 2002. I don't know who built them.

Very nice work Jon. I keep meaning to build a Dart but haven't gotten around to it yet, other than my half finished demo derby car. Where in PA are you? I'm in Exton, near Philly.

Great Bill. We agree. I won't be buying anything from him either. I just like analyzing business models.

Ah, but there are still enough people who will pay that price for a part they want or need. He doesn't need the blessing of everyone in the hobby, only the agreement from a small percentage of modelers to make his business model work! For instance, when Chrysler brought out the original Ram pickup, it was a radical design that looked like a big rig. Their intent was to capture 10% of the pickup market in the first year of that design. And that made the project financially feasible. So they intentionally built a product that 90% of truck buyers would dislike. Same here. That 10% of modelers who will pay his prices are his customers. There is a model dealer here on the East Coast who vends at shows with this huge wall of amazing old kits and annuals. He has everything! His prices are enormous. $200-300 for a prize kit. When he was vending at NNL East, modelers literally hounded me that I needed to 'make him sell them cheaper'. Like that was in my abilities. But at the end of every show, I'd see guys lovingly going through the boxes of the kits they bought from him. I'd ask and they'd say things like, "This is my holy grail, I looked for it for years so I bit down hard and paid the $300." So this vendor was selling kits. If he wasn't he wouldn't be able to travel around to shows and pay table fees. So this vendor's business model was to sell a few kits at say, $100 profit each, rather than sell a bunch at $5-10 each profit. That means that if he sold 10 kits at a show, he made his $1000. These are all rare, hard to find kits, so if he put them all on sale for $50 each, there would be a stampede and he would be completely sold out, (Never mind that many of the buyers would be popping them on eBay for their own profit) and he wouldn't be able to replace that large inventory easily. Instead, he just needs to find 10 rare kits to fill the holes in his inventory. You don't have to buy kits from him, but enough people do to make his business viable. And if you want that rare old kit, you know he has it. Perfect business model. PJ pretty much works the same way. All in the laws of supply and demand. Note that if he reduced his prices to half, his results would probably result in the same number of sales. There are many auctions for parts for $1 that expire without a bid. So it's all in the chance that someone will need that part, at that time, and be willing to pay the asking price.