Mistake most want to be corrected in molding of kits.

[Monte's Motors]

#1 . Distributors should be able to put in with wires that will go in holes already there.

#2 . Front suspension more detailed with coil springs, shocks, and a-frames.

#3 . Front grilles that really can be seen through.

You favorite or other.

[slantasaurus]

I think the biggest problem with kits, both new and old are tires. Many times they are the wong size or type for the car and the lack of sidewall detail is just maddening. I know the sidewall issue is due to licensing, but the fact that there are still kits out there with the old Good Year GT Radials and Michelen TRXs is unexceptable. The TRXs were only correct for those Mustangs with the oddball wheels and the Good Year GTs haven't been in production for at least 25 years.

[Nick Winter]

My favourite, Proper lug patterns, Ie AMT '69 Trans Am with stock 5 lugs and 6 lug custom wheels, or MPC '87 Shelby Daytona 5 lug stockers, 4 lug custom, AMT '81 Datsun 280ZX stock-4 lug, custom 5 lug,

Is this really that hard?

Nick

[Longbox55]

The TRXs were only correct for those Mustangs with the oddball wheels

Also used on BMWs. Virtually impossible to get for the 1:1 cars, Coker is the only dealer for them.

[Draggon]

I vote for wheels that arent attatched to the tree by the front side of the wheel, especially when the attatchment point ruins the edge of the rim. If the Japanese can mold their wheels attatched on the backside the American companies can too.

[Harry P.]

I vote for wheels that arent attatched to the tree by the front side of the wheel, especially when the attatchment point ruins the edge of the rim. If the Japanese can mold their wheels attatched on the backside the American companies can too.

I agree. Sprue attachment points are a real pain. The kitmakers could pay attention to that, but too many times they don't.

[Longbox55]

I'll third it, and throw in headlamp/taillamp bezels in too.

[Rob Z]

I agree. Sprue attachment points are a real pain. The kitmakers could pay attention to that, but too many times they don't.

I'm with you all there and I also really dislike the sprue attachment point for injector stacks, instead of attaching them at the top how about on the bottom where they can be hidden...

[ra7c7er]

Sprue attachment points would be number one on my list especially for chrome parts.

[futurattraction]

Sprue attachment is probably a bigger bugaboo to me than wheels, since I almost always am going to swap wheels and tires anyway.

[oldscool]

Tires are an issue with a lot of newer kits. If they could do it well back in the day then they can certainly get it right today.

Gus

[LDO]

Lack of a detailed Ferrari 365GTC/4 engine.

It would be perfect in so many street rods, like the Roy Brizio-built 1987 AMBR winner.

[Drake69]

1: generic tires/no name sidewalls when a few extra decals showing "Good Year" or "BF Goodrich" could be added to the kit.

2: Part placement on sprue trees. Nearly impossible to properly clean up chrome sprue points.

3: BUILD FITMENT. Getting 95% of the way through only to find out that when you try and mate the body to the chassis something breaks, seams, or just comes completely loose. (E.G. - Plymouth Duster side windows that pop away when the interior cab is slid into place.) Also, NO EXCUSE FOR NOT HAVING MOUNTING HOLES FOR FRONT AND REAR BUMPERS. Attempting to glue on bumpers with a perfect paintjob and only having the SEAM of the bumper-to-fender available as a glue point is downright retarded. Why even paint the thing if you're going to get fingerprints all across the model?

4: Make and sell more customizing kits and necessary add-ons. I'd buy entire sprues of wheel/axle retainers, wheel backsides, Dana axles, leaf packs, suspension lifters/risers, shocks, kicker boxes, amps, etc..., if they were made more readily available. They already do it for engine blocks, why not have added suspension choices for nice Pegasus wheels? (Note: there are resin sources for speakers and amps, just would like to see more choices out there...)

Edited June 1, 2011 by Drake69

[Jim Gibbons]

I'm totally on board with the open grilles. Yes, it's more of a tooling expense, but is it really that much harder? I've built a couple of the Tamiya Mini Coopers, and they managed to tool a very fine open grille on those kits. Wouldn't something like a '55 Chevy grille be a heck of a lot easier? I know it would be impractical to do on a very fine grille mesh, but there are obvious examples out there.

[Guest]

My biggest gripe is the mold lines in bumpers followed closely by ejector pin marks in the interior floors. There really isn't an excuse for those IMO. Would it be that much to have the ejector pins on the bottom of the floors where they won't be seen?

[Monty]

As a builder of cars with chrome bumpers, I'd prefer to have all bumper overriders molded separately so I can choose whether I want to use them or not.

For a street machine look, I'd prefer to leave them off

while a replica stock version might look better with them

Again, let me make the choice.

[Scale-Master]

My biggest gripe is the mold lines in bumpers followed closely by ejector pin marks in the interior floors. There really isn't an excuse for those IMO. Would it be that much to have the ejector pins on the bottom of the floors where they won't be seen?

Ejector pins have to be placed to "eject" the parts. While it seems better placement could be done in some cases, there is a logical reason they are in the inside of interior buckets...

[Bernard Kron]

In order of importance:

1) Sprue attachment points, especially on chromed parts.

2) Ejector pin mark placements, again especially on chrome parts where they can't be cleaned up.

3) Molded in exhaust systems and floor pans.

4) More frequent updates of tire/wheel tyles on re-issued kits. Those wide front tires and wheels on Old School rods are really a drag these days! So terribly out of date, don'tcha know...

Edited June 2, 2011 by Bernard Kron

[RyanSilva]

As great as the new lonestar kit is, the sprue attachment points on the chrome wheels are just like AMT truck kits!

After trimming the attachment point off the face of the wheel, i'm, left with 3 protrusions under the chrome.

[Art Anderson]

One of the biggest problems in laying out the tooling for a model kit (any subject) is simply that steel dies do not back out of the way of any undercut in the finished styrene part. This makes molding parts such as those 1950's-early 70's bumpers impossible to make in one piece without a mold parting line were tips of the bumpers, as they wrapped around the sides of the bodywork--it just cannot be done with the bumper as a one-piece unit (in stamping the real bumpers, it took several strikes of stamping dies to achieve that--the biggest reason why Chevy went to 3-piece bumpers for most of their cars from 1955 to the end of that sort of chrome bumpers (except for the so-called California bumpers, which were one piece units for many years (who knows why that was, I sure don't). It might be possible to mold say, a '55-later Chevy bumper in styrene, IF the hobbyist would accept a 3-piece assembly, which I rather doubt, particularly if one had to assemble the bumper guards over the top of that seam (which happened with a lot of Chevies of the era).

Tires are always a huge consideration with any model company. Short of the body shell, a tire mold can easily be the most expensive single tool in the tool bank, and as such model companies try whenever possible to get the maximum mileage out of those molds. For 50's and 60's subjects (even 70's and 80's as well) it was a lot easier--there were numerous tires that fit a lot of cars, just slap them on (both model and in real life). But, in any product development conference, if the subject of tooling new tires comes up, someone (and rightly so) will ask "How many more units of Kit X will you sell if we spring for a new tire tool?". That is a legitimate question, and one that is very hard to answer; short of a crying need to replace a badly worn tool, the answer is almost surely to be "no".

With the Japanese companies, the tradition has been, tires (and often wheels) come from sources other than the company who produces the kit they are a part of. The Japanese model kit industry has never been a stranger to outsourcing. Even Monogram, back in the late 1950's and early 60's, farmed out their model kit tire production (for models having rubber, as opposed to plastic, tires) to a toy company in the Chicago area who was making rubber tires for the toy vehicles they produced. Sometimes, the tooling for those Monogram rubber tires was unique to the model kit, sometimes not. The smaller subcontractors could, and have, sold their tires to muliple manufacturers many times, even sold them on the aftermarket (American Satco, for example).

Neoprene rubber gives the most realistic model car kit tire, but it lacks long life--how many times have modelers lamented the cracking and splitting of tires on their Tamiya, Hasegawa, Aoshima et.al. builds? PVC works better, in that it doesn't fail upon exposure to light and air nearly as rapidly, but used to have universally that ability to rot styrene wheels ("Revell Tire Disease"), and still can if close attention isn't paid to the compound during manufacture. But, PVC won't give nearly the crisp detail, particularly with tread patterns as can be achieved with neoprene--so it becomes "trade-off" time.

Side windows are another question: By tradition, US made model car kits seldom have had them, probably since promotional model cars didn't, for the most part once they got interiors. In the few kits that have had them as separate parts, I've not seen many installed. One of the reasons may be a combination of material thickness (actual scale kit glass would be only about .010" thick (1/4 inch in scale) to be proper, but that's too thin for injection molding without the glass being extremely fragile.

Mold ejector pins in those old fashioned "tub style" interiors? Simply put, they have to be where they are, if the interior tub was to be successfully pulled from the mold in mass production, not much way around that, unfortunately.

Hope this helps the discussion a little bit.

Art

[thesnake87]

Maybe interior door panels that glue into the door instead of the chassis. This would bean the body would have to come off easier in most cases instead of having to bend and flex the body to fit over the chassis. So annoying...

[Harry P.]

It might be possible to mold say, a '55-later Chevy bumper in styrene, IF the hobbyist would accept a 3-piece assembly...

Mold ejector pins in those old fashioned "tub style" interiors? Simply put, they have to be where they are, if the interior tub was to be successfully pulled from the mold in mass production, not much way around that, unfortunately.

In your hypothetical example, I think if you took a poll, the majority of modelers would prefer a multi-piece bumper with pieces that have no visible mold seams, and joints that would be hidden by bumper guards, over a 1-piece unit that needs to be sanded smooth and re-chromed in order to look good.

As far as ejector pin marks in interiors, the molds could just as easily be made so that the pins strike the area that will be hidden under the seat instead of the area that's not covered by the seats and visible on the finished model.

Side glass scale thickness is an issue? 99% of kit windshields and rear glass is grossly out of scale, thickness-wise. So why is scale thickness the "reason" that side glass isn't included???

A little more attention to detail in the designing process would make a big difference in the finished kits. Too many times the excuse is "that's the way it has to be," when in fact the real reason is probably "because it's easier/faster/cheaper for us to do it the way we do it."

[Chuck Most]

In your hypothetical example, I think if you took a poll, the majority of modelers would prefer a multi-piece bumper with pieces that have no visible mold seams, and joints that would be hidden by bumper guards, over a 1-piece unit that needs to be sanded smooth and re-chromed in order to look good.

I'd vote for a mutlipiece bumper!

[Erik Smith]

The newer Nova kits from Revell don't have ejector pin marks on the interior. Others do have them located under the seats.

Tires are a big issue. I admit to buying kits for tires.

Chrome is a pain too - keeping it clean while cutting it loose.

How about emblems? Tamiya makes really cool metal transfers for some of their kits - they are easy to apply, self sticking, and look a lot better than one layered with paint and covered with BMF.

Edited June 3, 2011 by Coyotehybrids

[Greg Myers]

Packaging inside the box seems to have been addressed by most manufactures. It's a real bummer to open up a kit and find the tires stuck to the glass.