Mike999

https://public.fotki.com/drasticplasticsmcc/mkiba-build-under-c/instruction_sheetsh/instruction_sheets/revell-4/revell-bass-busters/bassbusterinstructions.html

Thanks. Again, you made a not-too-interesting kit more interesting to me than it would have been. Good old Matchbox. Your review reminded me of how diverse they really were. They boldly went where no other kit manufacturer dared to go. You probably know this, but for those who don't: way back in 1988, Matchbox released a kit of the obscure Heinkel He-70 (or He-170) "Blitz" between-the-war aircraft. It could be built with a radial or inline engine, as a Lufthansa civil airliner, or a Condor Legion bomber used in the Spanish Civil War. Unlike the poor old Provost, it actually included different interiors for the bomber and airliner versions. If you didn't like the Matchbox kit, well, then you could go buy an expensive resin He-70 or a vac-form. No one else kitted the He-70 in plastic for TWENTY YEARS! In 2008 Roden finally released a nice modern kit of that aircraft. Matchbox, always ahead of their time...

I enjoy owning them, too. It may sound weird, but there are a lot of happy memories in that stash: found this kit at the big Keller show in Orange County, CA. Traded for that one with a nice guy on the MCM board. Found those 2 in the back of a hobby/barber shop in Ft. Dodge, IA (that really happened). Found those ESCI kits at a toy store in Saudi Arabia. Snagged that rare kit at a flea market for a fraction of its real value. Etc. No counting here, either. I could do that, because I keep spread-sheets of models & accessories according to type and scale. But that's to make sure I don't buy dupes (unless I want to). When I get tired of some kits...or start running out of shelf space...I have an eBay sale (as I'm doing right now). The money from eBay sales goes into a special account, which is used to...buy more models for the stash!

At a flea market a while back, I found a partly-built Trumpeter 1/24 scale P-51 Mustang. It was cheap so I grabbed it for the Merlin engine and other possibly useful parts: 6 machine guns, ammo belts, seat etc. That kit also comes with 3 one-piece 1/24 scale resin figures, but not very good ones.

Some years ago in Los Angeles I had an insurance adjustor at my house (long story). She was a nice young woman, and while we were looking at all the model kits in the garage, I joked that sometimes I worried about turning into a (plastic) hoarder. She said, "Nah, this is a collection, not a hoard. You can trust me on that. I've dealt with hoarders. They aren't nearly this organized." She may have been a little biased. A few minutes later she was eyeballing one stack and said, "My boyfriend builds models, and he really likes those Tamiya kits..." For those of us who build more than car kits, the stash adds up fast. My house has a "basement and a half." The bigger basement is the workshop and storage for all the car kits, figures and accessories. The half-basement is for military vehicles/figures/etc., aircraft, motorcycles, 1/32 scale cars and Miscellaneous Kits...like the 1/8 scale resin figure of Alfred Hitchcock. I mean, how could I pass that up...? But like the woman said, at least it's all organized. More or less...

Thanks to everybody for taking the time to answer. I appreciate it. Looks like everything is OK, just 2 stubborn bidders. Which is something I like to see, as a seller.

For any eBay sellers out there, just checking if you've ever seen a bidding pattern like this. I've been selling on eBay since the 1990's and never seen it: At 8:22 AM this morning PDT, Bidder #1 placed a large bid on one of my kits. At 4:26 PM Bidder #2 started bidding against him. Bidder #2 placed 11 bids, all within 2-4 seconds of each other, so that was some kind of Automatic Bidding. He came within $1.00 of Bidder #1's top bid, then quit. At 5:34 PM, Bidder #1 placed a second bid, for the same amount as his first bid. Both are long-time eBay users with lots of 100% positive feedback. I still wonder why Bidder #2 only started bidding 8 hrs. after the first bid was placed. But maybe they live in different time zones or something. I'm probably just being paranoid and everything is fine, but this struck me as weird.

Irking started Sat., when my U-verse cable box suddenly horked up the message "Please Wait." That can mean it's rebooting but did not, since the message stayed on-screen. Went up to the website and did the procedure for a soft recovery. That keeps any saved shows in the DVR. It ended with a big red "X" on the screen and the number "1." The handy guide on the website said that means hard disk failure. Ack! OK, let's try the Disaster Recovery. That wipes the DVR. Big red X did not go away. Website said, Yep, your box is dead. Just choose your model of cable box from this handy list. My box's model number was, of course, NOT on that list. Gave up and called Customer Service, as usual a nice woman in Mumbai or somewhere. She stayed on the phone with me a long time and ran thru a couple of other tricks, including a reboot from her end. Nothing worked. She said they would get a new box out immediately, UPS should deliver it today (Monday 10/22). Waiting impatiently... UPDATE: Box did arrive, booted up and worked with no irks.

That makes two of us! I wanted that Hasegawa Kate for a long time. Several on-line reviewers said the interior detail was so good, there was no need for any after-market stuff except seat belts. Finally found one on eBay last year for a decent price and jumped on it. Earlier this year, Sprue Bros. had a clearance sale and I picked up its kid sister for a good price, the Hasegawa B6N2 Jill. Here's a Hasegawa kit I had once, traded off and decided I wanted it back: the Hasegawa Zero "Strange Insignia." Nothing but the basic old Hasegawa Zero, but the decals are for American and British evaluation aircraft.

Same here in Upstate SC. Both of those kits just showed up. I have a new HL very close to me and check it just about every week. This store also finally got the Revell '85 Olds 442/FE-3X. A HL about 25 miles away has had that kit for a long time but not my local store. The store only had 1 of those left on the shelf, so they must be selling well.

Sorry, that hurts. You might camouflage them with these, photo-etched Eduard Fauna - Small Animals. But they're not the right scale either, being 1/35. OTOH, bugs, spiders and rats come in all sizes.

Well...not exactly a rip-off. Ford Motor Co. and the Soviet Union signed a licensing agreement in 1929, and Ford shipped unassembled Model A's to be bolted together in a Moscow assembly plant. Ford also agreed to help the Russians build a new car factory in Nizhny Novgorod. That factory was the Gorki Automotive Plant, or in Russian Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod - GAZ, where those "Ford-skis" were built.

And now for something really obscure...Russia's GAZ M-415 pickup truck, based on the GAZ M-1 passenger car. The good news: model kits of it exist. The bad news: only in the scales 1/72 and 1/48. And a very hard to find 1/35 scale kit from the Russian company Maquette, released around 2004. Maquette had already done the GAZ M-1 car in plastic; the pickup kit used its chassis, but Maquette made up a new resin body, fenders and interior. Sounds weird, but it's a nice kit. The resin parts are almost as thin as the plastic.

Howdy! I'm also in Upstate SC. I never finish anything.

That hasn't happened to my Aztek (yet). I'm fumble-fingered and dropped one on the basement concrete floor several times. Finally set up the compressor etc. so it can't get to the floor. I recently did something really stupid with an Aztek. Loaded the cup, pressed the trigger and paint shot all over me and everything else. Turned the air blue, screaming and asking what was wrong. Know how the opposite side of the paint cup has a little black plug, so you can mount the cup on the left or right side? I had forgotten to put that plug back in. Duh...

I just looked in the box. Only the 4 Goodyear GT Radials are included, with white lettering. Exactly as shown on the box side, under the "Special Bonus" hype. No other tires.

The fe-mail carrier just dropped off my Heller 2680 tractor from the UK (see post above). I placed the order thru eBay on Oct. 8 and it arrived today, Oct. 15. One week to come all the way across the Atlantic! Can't beat that, and the price was fair, too. Yep, the ancient Heller tradition of doing...interesting things with clear parts. Their Hispano-Suiza K6 kit has an interior limousine divider with fantastic detail molded into it: wood-grain storage drawers and cabinets, frame around the divider window etc. But it's all molded as one big clear piece. The interior side panels also have great detail, including a readable clock. And are also molded in clear.

Ouch! That's pretty close to one recent eBay auction. 3 have sold recently: Sep 15, 2018 AMT 1964 MERCURY COMET CALIENTE MODEL CAR KIT $56.00, 7 bids Aug 3, 2018 AMT 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente $76.00, 13 bids. Looks like that one turned into a bidding war. Jul 24, 2018 AMT/Model King 1964 Mercury Comet, with extra resin teardrop hood $41.15, 12 bids For reference, I have one of these kits with the original hobby shop price sticker on it: $24.99. That shop gave me a 20% discount, so I paid about $20 each for the ones I bought. I feel very lucky. I happened to go into that shop on a Friday when the new stuff came in, and they were still unpacking these. By the next Friday, the shop had already sold out of the Comet.

I just checked the instructions for an original Revell 1:87 Global Van Lines truck. Along with the sofa and 2 chairs, you should also have a refrigerator with separate opening door, a coffee table and a grand piano. I recently found 3 of those kits at a flea market in original Revell boxes. All are missing parts, mostly the tires and wheels. On another forum once, somebody mentioned that the piano is often missing from these kits. Maybe for that HO scale diorama you mentioned.

I ordered a '40 Ford 4-door sedan body from in July of this year. It came pretty quickly. As everybody else has said, I emailed Steve first to make sure he had it.

I always do that. If the rust is all one shade, it looks more like red primer. After the base rust coat, I always seal it with Dullcote or some other flat clear. That makes sure none of the later coats soaks into the rust. As for salt, try Kosher Salt, available at the local Dollar Store. It's pretty coarse and I like to mix it with regular table salt. Here's a Work-In-Progress Toyota BJ-44 "gun truck" as used in Beirut by a local militia. I put a little too much salt on the hood and got more rust showing than I wanted. Fixed that later. The blue and gray "camouflage" is something I read about. Beirut is right on the Mediterranean Sea and often hazy/foggy. Combatants would often camouflage their vehicles by grabbing ordinary spray paint cans from hardware stores and shooting them randomly onto the vehicle.

If you want to do something unusual with that Imperial, how about a 2-door station wagon? At least one was built in 1958, pic below. For some reason, 2-door wagons were pretty popular in the late Fifties. Mercury built the 2-door Commuter wagon for '59, and as everybody knows, Chevy also had one. But an Imperial? A luxo-barge of a wagon with only 2 doors? That has to be one of the most impractical cars ever built. One use I can think of is a Technical Support vehicle for remote road tests. A couple of engineers in the front seat, the back seat folded down and the "wayback" full of road-test equipment (like that stuff in the last '65 Grand Prix re-issue.) At a kit swap meet a few years ago, I found a resin kit of a '58 Imperial 2-door wagon. It's pretty basic, with no chromed parts and a vac-formed windshield. But it was cheap and weird, so I picked it up. At another meet I found a resin kit of a '59 Mercury Commuter wagon.

For those in or passing thru Upstate South Carolina: Hit a huge Ollie's store today in Greenville, SC. Unfortunately it had pretty much the same kits as the smaller store in Anderson, SC. Two different Stroker McGurk kits, "Ghost of the Salt Flats" and the Hemi-powered surfboard. Piranhas, Danica Patrick and another NASCAR Ford Fusion. And the Flintstones car! No '29 Fords or '57 Corvettes. I'm starting to think Ollie's allots its kits by geographical region or something. It's interesting to read this thread and see what kits are in stock where around the country, anyway. Also stopped by a Hobby Lobby in Easley, SC. It had ONE Revell '85 Olds 442/FX-3 kit left on the shelf and I grabbed it. There are 2 other Hobby Lobbys near me and neither store has that kit in stock. I didn't even see a shelf space marked for it in either store. Maybe HL will refresh the kits as it gets closer to Christmas.

I'm surprised anyone would open kits and steal parts, here in the age of constant video surveillance. I know that HL, like most stores, does not allow merchandise in the bathrooms. So it seems pretty brazen to open a kit right there in the store. And risk going to jail for what, a chrome tree & decal sheet? Good grief. My favorite cable channel, Investigation Discovery, has a show called "See No Evil." It covers crimes solved with video footage. Sometimes the cops have to piece the story together from 10 or 12 cameras mounted at different stores, gas stations, parking lots etc. But it's amazing how many times they break a case, starting with nothing but the video footage. And the crimes would often go unsolved without that footage.

Congratulations! The "Autobahn" version of that kit is very hard to find. The "Prestige" version from 1987 is easy to find. Four of those are up on eBay right now, mostly for reasonable prices. According to my spreadsheets, I paid $10 for one at a kit swap meet a few years ago. That AMT Prestige series was sort of weird. All the kits had extras, but they had different extras. These are the ones I know of and their extras: Gullwing, '63 Avanti: car show display accessories '63 Ford, '63 Chevy Impala, '65 Continental, '65 Pontiac Bonneville, '69 Corvair, Silhouette show car: display base with pen holder. (Yawn...) '65 Pontiac Grand Prix: no extras, but included the road test accessories from the original kit. These are the same accessories in the last reissue. '63 Corvette roadster: the best extra of all, the "Drag Strip Accessories" with TV camera, drag strip lights, etc. Those were a separate "Parts Pack" in the early 1960's. They had not been seen since, until they were released inside that Prestige kit.