Comparing car models to airplane models

[ranma]

If memory serves me right amt retooled a 57 chevy add the bare metal with it and the pro shop came w/photo etched parts and rubber hoses. back in the late 60s early 70s a few corvette kits had real springs

[bbowser]

Some very good points here. In the dark ages it was mostly kids who started with cars and we're still building some of those same tools today (Johan?). The latest offerings are light years ahead and yet still affordable. I like the revival I'm seeing in the hobby and I think it's guys (and gals) like us that are driving improvements in the quality of todays kits. It doesn't come overnight, a market like this moves slowly but surely towards what we want/will buy. Maybe we are cheapskates, but I for one can't afford or justify dropping $100 on a single kit no matter how great it is.

[Guest]

The quality issue is why I never bought either of Revell's 70 AAR Cuda kits. Both releases were not good, the second better, but still inaccurate. Yes, I have a copy of the second, yes, I am buuilding it, but I did not buy it, I recieved it in a trade with some other kits. I would not shell out what little $ I have for something as bad as it was. I will never understand how they could have blown it twice, especially with the uproar the first issue had with it.

[Darin Bastedo]

I think that its unfair to say that all car builders cheap some of us here have a fixed and or low imcome. and simply cant afford higher costing kits.

And do you think all aircraft and military modelers are rich? It boils sown to priorities. do you want to build three cheap kits or one really nice one? I don't have a lot to spend on my hobby, as I make very little and have a wife with cancer and a teenage daughter to take care of so I have to save up change sometimes to get what I want, but because the money is hard to come by, I tend to buy only the high quality stuff. no sense wasting money on the cheaper offerings.

[Scale-Master]

I have seen both sides of the "car modelers are cheap" discussion. Yes some guys will spend $100.00 and more on aftermarket items for a $15.00 kit and use $30.00 worth of finishing supplies to build and paint it.

You can call me cheap, I'll take it as a compliment, but I prefer frugal. I'd rather make what I want than purchase it. So it costs me time, but isn't part of the hobby about the enjoyment of building?

But then I have seen some guys complain about prices of kits without realizing the quality/value of them. That is a different kind of being cheap.

[Chuck Most]

I don't build airplane models very often. Change 'airplane' to 'aircraft' and I have exactly two... Monogram's hoary ol' Ford Tri Motor, and an Airfix Autogyro. Are those accurate compared to the 1:1? No idea, but they look that way to me. I guess my personal accuracy meter is a little on the lax side- to me if it looks right, it is right, and I don't really feel like taking too much time going beyond that. But if a kit is terribly flawed I won't buy it, unless it's a subject I really like or a kit with a lot of good parts.

I remember reading somwhere about a car kit being reviewed by a source better known for military/aircraft kits. In this review, the person writing the review pointed out a few inaccuracies in the kit, but ultimately blew it off, saying the inaccuracies weren't important because it was 'just a car model', or something along those lines. That might seem to indicate that auto modelers don't care about accuracy as much as modelers from other genres do- even though everything I've seen states otherwise.

I do think the game is changing, though- look at the Moebius Lonestar, or the Polar Lights Batmobile. Those two kits, cleanly built and detailed, and photographed against a realistic background, are all but indistinguishable from the real deal. Granted, both were done from either factory CAD programs or 3D scans of the 1:1, but it just proves the manufacturers are getting it. It just seems that things take a little bit longer to happen with automotive models compared to the aircraft and armor models. Or at least it seems that way to me!

[Terry Sumner]

Darin is right. Airplane modelers are no richer than car modelers...and many of us like to build both. I build cars and airplanes and have been doing so for decades. Those guys or gals who actually do build both know exactly what I'm attempting to raise awareness of. If you only build cars then of course you unfortunately don't have a frame of reference to go by. Airplane kits don't cost $100 though.. Sure there are a few that are up in that stratosphere, but those are few and far between...mainly the newer 1/32 scale kits. But 1/32 scale in aircraft modeling is a small percentage of the community. Mostly it's 1/48 and 1/72 scale. The majority of aircraft kits in 1/72 scale are down in the $6 to $15 range. But if you want the high quality Hasegawa or Tamiya, you're gonna have to pay more...like up to maybe $50 for a real high end kit. Same with 1/48 scale. You can get the majority of the kits in the $15 to $25 range. But if you want the high end Hasegawa or Tamiya kits, then you gotta pay $40 to $75 or so. There are all kinds of aftermarket detail sets for these models of course...but when you purchase one of the Hasy or Tammy kits you pretty much don't need any of that stuff as the kits are so good to begin with.

[ShineyM3]

Having recently come over from doing mostly armor and some aircraft thrown in to boot, because I wanted to "take it easy" for a while since the rivet counting, especially with armor guys is the norm. The white metal track sets that I have for my 1/35 scale German Panther tank run about $30 alone. Add to that, another $35-$40 for the photoetch sets (I usually use at least 2 or 3 per kit) and then another good $20 on resin bits and you can see how this adds up REAL quick. All of that is ON TOP of the $40-$50 for the kit. Dragon is probably the most widely accepted leader of manufacturers as many of Tamiya's molds were old with inaccuracies that never got corrected. Dragon on the other hand will re-release a kit after even only a year or two just to bring out the updates and fixes of inaccurate parts or dimensions.

So wanting to remember what it was like to actually have FUN building a model is what pulled me away for a hiatus from the eye-straining rivet and SERIAL NUMBER counting that frequently goes on with armor.

If you really want to have your draw drop, take a look at www.wingnutwings.com . They are a relative newcomer to the model manufacturer world but I can honestly say that this New Zealand based company make the MOST stunning model kits I have seen in any scale by anyone - ever. They are truly a sight to behold.

[Harry P.]

If you really want to have your draw drop, take a look at www.wingnutwings.com . They are a relative newcomer to the model manufacturer world but I can honestly say that this New Zealand based company make the MOST stunning model kits I have seen in any scale by anyone - ever. They are truly a sight to behold.

Thanks for that link! Not only are the models incredible, the website itself is beautifully done.

I will definitely be spending some cash over there!

[george 53]

Terry, I hate to differ with you, but have you PRICED a 24th scale Aircraft kit? Even the old Airfix kits are close to 100.00 off sale. ON sale, you STILL gonna EASY pay 60 bucks. My last Aircraft kit, Airfixes 1/24th scale DeHaviland Mosquito cost me 160.00 ON SALE!. Trumpeters kits NEVER sell for less that 100.oo bucks, even on sale! I have at least 12 24th aircraft kits, They are BEAUTIFULLY detailed, and alot of it won't be seen after it's assembled, but it's there!

[whale392]

That is what I am saying, it is a matter of perspective. I have seen guys toss $100 of aftermarket goods at a $15 kit and still have junk, and I have also seen guys take the same kit and BUILD a wonderful piece from it. Accuracy and correctness will cost you though, in either initial cost, your time to correct it, or on aftermarket parts to bring it up to acceptable levels.

I just spent $75.00 a piece for 3 models of the aircraft I worked on (E2-C Hawkeye and the C2-A Greyhound), plus another $200 on resin aftermarket goodies to render it to a higher level of detail/correct. I am also using a lot of my old notes and pictures to get other details correct. I don't have an aversion to spending what I need to to make it what I want. My perspective. Like I said earlier, a lot of car guys don't have that willingness to take it to the next level, whether it be in financial or time. And I don't hear armor guys complain about kit prices near as much as car guys. You can buy a nice Revell 1/48th scale F/A-18 Hornet for a small entry price, or you can step up your spending and get the Hasagawa/Tamiya 1/48th scale Hornet and be FAR ahead of the Revell kit. Your call. Same with cars.

Never mind. As Terry said, those who get it, get it. Those that don't never will and will continue to belly-ache for no good reason.

[philo426]

Yeah check out my Hasegawa KI-61 Tony!

[Chuck Most]

$100 for an Airfix 1:24 aircraft kit? Last time I was at Dean's, he had two of them (Junkers Ju-87B-2 and P-51 D Mustang) for forty bucks apiece, sealed. Sometimes, if you can find the right deal, cost isn't even a factor.

[Terry Sumner]

Terry, I hate to differ with you, but have you PRICED a 24th scale Aircraft kit? Even the old Airfix kits are close to 100.00 off sale. ON sale, you STILL gonna EASY pay 60 bucks. My last Aircraft kit, Airfixes 1/24th scale DeHaviland Mosquito cost me 160.00 ON SALE!. Trumpeters kits NEVER sell for less that 100.oo bucks, even on sale! I have at least 12 24th aircraft kits, They are BEAUTIFULLY detailed, and alot of it won't be seen after it's assembled, but it's there!

Yeah but George...you're talking about a 1/24th scale airplane kit! That is HUGE!!!! That would be like the 1/8th scale car kits.... I was talking about the "normal" scales.

[Art Anderson]

Of course, we are discussing an "apples & oranges" sort of thing here. But I will start with one comment: In all my years of modelbuilding, I haven't seen a model car body with door, hood or trunk lines as wide as 1mm or .040" (both measurements get used to represent one inch in 1/25 scale), at least not since some of the fairly crudely done car kits of the 1950's. If one measures most any model car kit produced by the major brands back at least to the 1858 3in1 kits, I think you'll find that most panel lines on them are about .020" or thereabouts. As for panel lines on model aircraft kits, most of them are probably .75mm, or .015", which seems a bit wide when you think of it, but then, access panels, certainly on WW-II aircraft weren't always perfect fitting, even from the factory.

Model aircraft builders have carried on long converstions, often vehemently disagreeing as to the accuracy/inaccuracy of particular plastic aircraft kits for decades now. Little wonder that, given that even with the best of photographic references, even when factory drawings are available (for example, Boeing maintains an archival library of all plans and drawings for their aircraft, as well as from companies bought and folded into Boeing, as does Northrop Grumman and Lockheed). Trouble is, the "planform" drawings may well not accurately show some curvatures, and likewise side profile drawings may not quite have them either--to find the drawings for particular contours and shapes can mean digging through hundreds of pounds of paper. Additionally, photographic references may be very incomplete, particularly of former enemy aircraft (read that Axis powers), whose aircraft industries were pretty much flattened into so much crumbled masonry, twisted steel, and a lot of ashes. While model kit designers and mockup makers have gotten much better at creating more accurate shapes and contours over the years, they still struggle at times. One thing that almost nobody points out with aircraft models that while increasiingly perfect they may be, not until at least the second generation jet aircraft (think USAF Century Series fighter planes here), almost all model kits are far more perfect in their surface shapes than any of their 1:1 counterparts ever were! While early examples of just about every WW-II airplane exhibited the finest craftsmanship their manufacturers could produce, by "crunch time" mid-war, the absolute need to build them, get them out the factory door ASAP meant a lot of ripples in fuselages, even in wing surfaces as "Rosie The Riveter" and her German, Japanese, Italian, British and Soviet counterparts hastened to keep up with the pace of orders for planes to replace combat losses. Just look at any picture of a restored P-38, P-47, or P-51 that is in natural metal, you can see where every rivet in the skin has pulled that sheet aluminum inward slightly--1943-44 production German aircraft, when properly restored, by say, the National Air And Space Museum (Smithsonian) show the absolute crude construction of Bf-109's, FW-190's, even the very high tech Ta-152. Fast forward to the middle 1950's--there is a surface characteristic of every Boeing B-52 Stratofortress fuselage that has never been (to my knowledge anyway) reproduced. You do not see any B-52 without subtle wrinkling of the fuselage skin forward and aft of the wings--they were designed that way, the fuselage is meant to flex slightly, both when on the ground, and when flying, and that wrinkling changes once the plane becomes airborne--nose and tail actually droop slightly on the ground due to their weight, and are actually flexed upward in flight--the fuselage of the B-52 being itself a lifting body--aerodynamically it actually aids the wings in lifting the weight of the plane when in the air! I submit that were these ripples in the skin to be reproduced in a model kit, the question would be: "make it in flight, or sitting on the tarmac.

Of course model aircraft kits, with their two-piece (right side/left side, top of wing, bottom of wing) assembly of major portions of a plane, don't have to have some inaccuracies that are inherent in any model car one piece body shell. Because we have come to expect one-piece body shells, the engineering of the tools used to mold those requires occasional built-in inaccuraces just so the solidified plastic body shell can allow the mold sections to slide back away from it upon demolding (ejection from the tooling). There cannot be any raised details or shapes that create undercuts, or those parts of the plastic shell will just simply be torn off in demolding--steel does not move out of the way of plastic. Think of say, a Forward Look Chrysler, Desoto or Imperial--how to get the bottom edge of the rear door window opening (or quarter window on a Hardtop) straight, like it is on the real car, but still have the raised forward part of the tailfins, which start in the same area? Easy to do if you are stamping out sheet metal rear quarters, or making them as separate plastic parts (which modelers have said resoundingly NO to since the early 1960's)

Many of the iconic "Annual Series" 3in1 kits of the 60's had inaccuracies as well--due mostly to their producers having only limited access to drawings and photo's of the real cars, which were themselves still in styling development when model kit tooling mockups were being carved out by hand. Take a look at an SMP 59 or 60 Chevrolet Impala Convertible sometime--notice the upward curvature of the top of the windshield and frame--there is a considerable discrepancy, as the real cars didn't have that. Same issue with 1971-72 MPC Impala Converibles--only this time, the windshield frame is that of the hardtop, NOT the upward arching, slightly taller framing and glass of the actual GM full-size convertibles. Now I might submit that the latter situation was caused by MPC's wanting to limit tooling costs by limiting the number of interchangeable cores in the body mold.

But in any event, any plastic model kit of any subject will have inaccuracies stemming from the way we humans see things, with our "binocular" vision, where no camera has that ability. A camera lens and the film or the light sensitive plate in a digital unit sees any object being photographed the same way any human sees it with one eye or the other closed--both lack depth perception. Laser scanning can be very tricky as well--what the laser picks up can still result in shapes that are just not quite right, requiring at least some finessing of a subtle shape here, a contour there, in order to get the model to at least appear to be a perfect replica. This binocular vision we humans have can also make the model car kit bodyshell appear to be inaccurate in comparison to the real car, even if one is looking at both the model and the 1:1--our two eyes actually can view much more of say, a 1/25 scale model car body than we will ever see when looking at the full-sized car which is identical to that model. You can test this yourself: Place a Hot Wheels or similar size diecast so that the centerline of the body is even with the center point between both of your eyes--on that little diecast, you can see both sides of the toy, because they are each in your field of vision--but you can't do that with the real car, because it's many times wider than the spacing of the pupils of your eyes. Tamiya put it this way, about 25 years ago, in a great video "The Design and Development of a Plastic Model Kit"--in which they clearly state that "It is possible to make a model exactly numerically correct in all shapes and contours, but it may very well not look right". The video then goes on to show a designer and the mockup maker collaborating on altering the contour of say, the roof of the mockup (1/12 scale wood mockup back then) of their Porsche 911, to make that panel appear more realistic to the human eye.

In the 1960's, as model car kits got engines and opening hoods, there was a serious tendency to make engines slightly undersized, the thinking being that given the young age of the bulk of the model car market back then (approximately 9 or 10 to about age 15 or 16 -- when boys started noticing girls and spending their money on real wheels), that making the engines a bit small, certainly in annual series 3in1 kits made them easier to assemble, thus increasing the satisfaction of the young kids who bought and built the bulk of car kits produced back then. The same was partially the reason for "tub-style" interors--ease of assembly by kids, as well as ease and speed of assembly on the lines producing promotional models. Even a "platform" style interior as introduced by say, Monogram in the early 1980's is inaccurate as well--the floorboards of those interiors are above the floorpan depicted on the chassis when viewed from underneath--where on the real car, the floor pan you see when a car is on a grease rack is the same floorboard you put your feet on when driving or riding in it. Again, this type of interior unit was done as it was for ease of assembly. Yet, the first true platform interior assembly goes all the way back to 1955, at Revell, with their neat but small series of 1/32 scale American car kits, and repeated in their 1/25 scale '57 Country Squire and '59 Galaxie Skyliner kits--and in the late 1970's saw the likes of Tamiya, Fujimi and Heller revisit the concept--Moebius kits and a few modern state-of-the-art AMT kits of the past 12-13 years have as well.

OK, so longwinded I am, but I think I've given some food for thought.

Art

[Agent G]

Whale's comment is funny because.......?

Some of the folks here on the forum have, or had, professions where "attention to detail" meant saving lives. For some of us, that meant our own lives.

If your statement is out of context, so be it, if not, grow up.

G

[Terry Sumner]

Whale's comment is funny because.......?

Some of the folks here on the forum have, or had, professions where "attention to detail" meant saving lives. For some of us, that meant our own lives.

If your statement is out of context, so be it, if not, grow up.

G

Roger that!

[whale392]

I am glad I have you on ignore, Jacen, as your laughter shows just how little you really know, and just how socially inept you are. Do you like to fly? Did your last aircraft trip get you safely there? If so, you can thank me and all of my brothers/sisters who spin wrenches on these to make that happen. If you think my job is so funny, think about that smoking hole you would be if I/we didn't have that level of attention to detail. I truly feel sorry for you.

[turn1wonder]

I worked almost 25 years at Douglas/McDonnell Douglas/Boeing in Toronto, funny thing is I like autos more than planes...but I do like planes.

Bob

[Nick Notarangelo]

see I build just for pure enjoyment,every so often Imay wana get into something super detailed to keep theskillssharp but other than that its just for pure fun.

a car kit weather your building stock or a replica of something youhave to stay in that window but a custom car you just broke the frame,now you can also do the same thing with the personlly owned aircraft if you want,but if your doing historical stuff you can't just put your own touch to it and say it belongs there.

its all in what you do I guess.

[RodneyBad]

I thought we were talking about models. not real life jobs..

I'm perty sure he meant some people build models like it is a life or death build.

If it aint Dead on Perfect, realistic and Exact, people will Die..

[RodneyBad]

I build just because they are there..

Nuttin more, nuttin less..

[Guest]

Art, thanks for that very interesting look into model kit design. Very interesting information in there!

[Junkman]

Art, you always explain very neatly where compromises have to be made due to engineering constraints and necessities, which are understandable, unavoidable, and I'm sure (as you mention too) are prevalent in areas in non-automotive models, too.

What this doesn't explain though, is the lack of sharp details in things like belt drives, engine ancillaries, dashboards, etc. Or why the window frames are still molded to bodies in the overwhelming majority of new kits, and not to the windows, where they belong. Or why the chrome pieces are still attached to the sprues so a nasty scar is left in them when one detaches them.

In short, all those things that are still rather unsatisfactory in car models kits, but have long been overcome by the diecast guys, aircraft model kit makers, and model railway manufacturers. And I think it's these things this thread is about, not the compromises that need to be made for engineering reasons.

Edited December 26, 2011 by Junkman

[george 53]

I'm like Rodney, I'll build them because they're there TO build, but Im still a model scale bigot. 1/25 IS my normal scale. I'll build 24th IF I can't find it in 24th, but i don't really care for the scale difference, which IS noticable to me. With the aircraft, the difference isn't noticable, caz compared to cars, they ARE bigger. But that's the scale I preffer, so if it's in 25thscale, chances are I do have it, no matter how weird it is.