Zoom Zoom

They're a lot better than using foil and you can apply Tamiya flat black acrylic to the front/rear pieces and wipe off the excess to expose the inlayed chrome trim effect with relative ease. A panel line wash will give the right depth to the side pieces. I've seen examples built (including this kit for review) and it's a brilliant solution. I can't wait to start my build of this kit; I had already gotten the ZG kit previously and ZoomOn's short-nose street custom conversion for it. I might build them side-by-side. These Tamiya Z car kits are amazing. A good friend of mine - John Zweber - built the ZG as a mild street custom and displayed it at our ACME NNL last year, it was one of my personal favorites at the show and we had about 950 models on display.

Oh wow, that's unfortunate to say the least! I'll reach out to customer service. Thanks for replying. Other than the decal issue the cloned Craftsman kits I've built have been really great kits to work with.

Thanks man, I appreciate it! You're already building circles around me LOL. The GTO is painted Splash Paints Chevy Evening Orchid which is called Iris Mist on Pontiacs. I clear all my models w/Tamiya LP9 clear. Before full clear I mix LP9 clear with the Splash color, they mix just fine. The windshield tint is getting easier as I keep on building each successive model, it's a mix of Tamiya LP colors (transparent blue, orange and clear) for the base tint and to that I add pure blue and black LP for the darker tint strip, followed by LP9 clear. I have three airbrushes set up and ready to go when I do all that; one for color/tint, the other for clear, and a fine line one for doing the tint strip. The black Malibu I cut off the vent windows to make tint strip easier, and cut clear plastic sheet to make new vent windows. In the past year I learned how to get that tint to work (it goes on so smooth and dries fast), and now I'm learning as I go on making antennas. My next new thing to try is lighting, I think I'll get a couple of ZoomOn lighting kits and see what I can do with that.

I've long ago stopped trying to figure out issues like this with Revell. It's always "something" with them, it seems. I do think the decals for US-boxed issues are printed at a different facility than their Euro-boxed models. IIRC Revell USA only has two full-time employees. I'll be getting one of the US-boxed C8's one of these days. I've built 4 different AMT Craftsman kits in the past 16-18 mos. Great kits in general for cloned curbsides, they go together amazingly well. The decals however...what a disappointment. They give you multiple sets of exterior emblems/markings, the artwork is very well done. BUT...they don't bother to print a white or silver base layer underneath most of the emblems, unless said emblem has white as a part of the graphic. So if you've painted your model in any color other than white, silver, or pale yellow, they disappear when applied. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless I suppose to a bean-counter. I recently finished Revell's US boxed 007 Mach I; the Autolite decal for the battery has no white base under the red lettering, so it disappears applied to a black battery. The "OK" markings for the cylinder heads had no clear carrier film! Even though every number for every decal has the carrier film. Otherwise that entire sheet of decals was excellent; the ones mentioned will likely get updated for a second production run at some point. I understand that there might be slight issues with a first-run kit. But AMT seems like it is willfully cutting a step out of their emblem decals. It's like they think nobody will actually build the model, just collect it and look at the sheet but won't actually use the decals. At least this is the case on their '68 GTO, '65 GTO, and '65 Malibu SS all of which I have built, and I've built two of the '68 GTO's. Same issue in all of them over the last couple years. I'm glad the next two builds I will tackle are Tamiya kits ?

When I was packing up your Dad was near the black LX, we spoke for a bit as it had drawn me in because it was black like my former 1:1 and the Cobra R wheels were perfect on it, he is quite proud of your achievements. I won a first in curbside with my Iris Mist '65 GTO. I think that was the only award in that category, I had 4 models in curbside and I think I may have been the only one with models in that category. I thought my newly finished black '64 Malibu SS or my blue '68 GTO might have done better than the '65 GTO, would have been fun to find out what the judging team thought Doesn't really matter, I had fun building all of them. I had two in replica stock where you dominated, my two were the silver '72 Skyline GTR and the light pewter '71 Mach 1 that I forgot to take the hood off to show off the engine, but let's be honest...it was just OOB underhood and your models were just amazing with the underhood detailing. I kind of wish Andy had parked the '33 Ford PU next to the Cybertruck ? BTW we have a 60th anniversary Mustang theme for the ACME show on October 26th in Cartersville, GA. Hope you can make it, we have a blast putting on the show especially w/our new and much larger venue than before. We did have a bunch of flyers in Huntsville to promote it.

Congrats, didn't get to meet you on Saturday at the show but I was blown away by the models. I bought a brand-new black/gray interior LX 5.0 manual in March of '88. Your '82 was incredible as well as the Demon. Everyone was talking about the working dipstick on the '82 LOL. BTW I found out my friend Andy had that black '33 Ford PU out in the parking lot, he gave me a ride in it, that thing is awesome!

They look like bias ply tires that just have the BFG sidewall lettering.

Yes, it seems Fotki got fixed and has been flawless for me since last weekend.

It's been running very slowly for me lately (at least the last month), at least to access the site itself. Once I was in it speeded up so it was fast to open/share/upload photos. This AM it's like a whole new site, blazing fast, for the first time in recent memory. Maybe they had similar issues this site has had.

That's unfortunate! I wondered if the accelerated build and using enamel paint would work out, especially on this one since it requires a massive amount of masking. A group of my friends get together occasionally for 24 hour builds or weekend builds, we've discussed these Tamiya Porsche kits (Turbo & 934) and we've joked about how they seem like great subjects for such builds and the comment has been made several times that these are "The 24 Hours of Masking & Unmasking" projects. Everything else is a breeze by comparison. Lacquers & dehydrators are almost mandatory.

Nice work! Good thing you have a dehydrator since you'll be doing all that masking.

Good luck with the build! It's a good kit for such a build, though when I built mine I masked all the black rubber and trim places on the body so I could airbrush it (hand painting requires steadier hands than mine), that was the worst element of building this kit.

Nothing identical whatsoever. The Tamiya kit is curbside only, based on an earlier snap kit of a 911 Speedster. Revell's latest 911 kit is a narrow-body G50 non-Turbo, full detail and really nice, the tires being the only real negative. Tamiya, Monogram, and Fujimi have made 1/24th 911 wide body Turbo kits. Fujimi's are either Enthusiast kits with full detail, or curbside. Monogram's is full detail. All should be close enough to work w/3D printed bodywork which itself is a lot of fitment work regardless of the body you start with. You have lots of options.

When's the last time you physically saw a bottle on a shelf for sale? It was discontinued in January of 2022.

Yes they did. I can count on one hand how many I've seen built over the years. It was a ridiculously overpriced hot mess of a kit that absolutely never was included on anybody's wish list of models.

This body style is early '70's, yes it was sold as a Corolla. My buddy had a killer SR5 back in the day w/the same factory flares. He'd painted it light metallic blue, not a factory Toyota color (he told me the color awhile back but I forgot). I built the kit at least 20 years ago. I converted it (fairly easy) to LHD.

Since all I'd done was look at AI images, I wanted to at least get an idea of what was going on with it. This was a decent video I found to describe it and also mirrors what I've noticed with at least some of the images. https://youtu.be/_avhEwu0AX4?si=UuKw2KhTPJ2TRupn

A friend kept sending me AI car images on Messenger, I found a decent FB group "AI Automotive Art" and it's got a ton of images, some are really pretty cool and well done. Others...not so much. It's funny to pick out flaws that AI gets confused on. Strange extraneous panel lines, extra headlights, weird perspective.

Does AI mean "alien interference"? Other examples:

I have no idea. I sort of recall something similar at our show but sold by another vendor, is it possible he was helping another vendor or do you know if it was his own product line?

BTW your name looked familiar, I approved your request to join the ACME page early today, Ben is on the ACME page so if you post the photo/tag him I'm sure he could get in touch with you. He's a super nice guy and he's been to our show most every year.

His name is Ben aka Benjamin LeGrand and he's from Colorado. If you're on Facebook he's on there; I'm not sure what he might have been vending at that show, he comes to the ACME show almost every year but I don't remember if he's been a vendor or not.

Ah, thank you! I should have remembered that but my brain's still a bit fuzzy at times - I'm just getting back to normal now after successful open heart surgery 5 weeks ago to replace the aortic valve, get a bypass for a widow maker blockage and fix a dissection in the aortic root and dealing with all of the issues that lead up to the surgery since the beginning of the year when I started feeling ill. Fun times. Not. But what I went through was nothing at all what Lee had to deal with for many years yet he continued living his life to the fullest that he was allowed. He's definitely missed.

Hasegawa did a couple of short runs of their curbside LHD USDM short nose Z car, I built one last year. It's curbside only. I took the beautiful stock wheels from the Tamiya ZG and was going to use them on my Hasegawa 240Z but I didn't like the look of the stock wheels with stock tires; they're beautiful and accurate after I did all the paint/detail including the chrome transfers but my eyes wanted to see less sidewall. I ended up using a set of 5 lug (incorrect, but...) slotted mags from Pegasus and modified them to use the Hasegawa tires as they looked like the wheels that were on many Z cars here in the 70's, aside from being 5 lug vs. 4 LOL. It's built to look like my high school guidance counselor's 240Z, though I used black stripes where her car may not have had stripes or maybe had white stripes. 45 years or so between seeing the car and building the model... I have ZoomOn's conversion kit for the Tamiya ZG and I'm pretty psyched about this new Tamiya kit. Maybe I build the ZG as a long-nose street custom using the ZoomOn conversion. Tamiya doing the street custom serves a much wider market than focusing on a stock USDM Z car. I do wonder if there will be any more variants down the road, but being Tamiya I kind of doubt it.

This looks very much like it could have been the collection of Lee Kirchner from San Antonio who passed away IIRC in Feb. of 2023. I wish I could remember his screen-name here, years ago he was "Airway" on the Hobby Heaven board and he posted here fairly frequently. We communicated off-and-on for many years. He sent me an email once with a couple of super-secret "these are for YOUR eyes ONLY!" photos of the Ferrari P4/5 before it was made public that Jim Glickenhaus commissioned Ferrari to build, they were good friends.