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PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2011 11:00 pm 
Is the Tamiya 1:350 New Jersey scaledeck available??

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 10:22 am 
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Hello John,
You have in your product list. A 1/350 Arizona and a 1/350 Arizona high detail decks listed. Can you tell what's going to be the difference in the 2 decks once made?
Mark


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 10:50 am 
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underway wrote:
Is the Tamiya 1:350 New Jersey scaledeck available??

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Ditto :thumbs_up_1:

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:41 pm 
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Hi John,


I´m just planning my next project, it will be the Missouri, with Flyhawk super deluxe and many other things. You plan to produce the wooden deck for it, will it be ready in 2911, will you produce it in the colour it had in 1945. Missouri will have the colour scheme at surrender day.

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Marc


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 3:48 am 
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hi John,

I only saw one request/remark about the 1/200 Yamato, but I guess there are more out there that will want it!
I for one am one of those....
so if you have your to-do list finished, please have a look at the 1/200 Yamato.
I would love to buy one of those sets instead of planking the entire deck myself :Mad_6:

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Ships waiting to be build:

1/200 Yamato
1/200 Arizona
1/350 USS Enterprise (almost done)
1/350 USS Rueben James
1/350 USS Hornet

and ofcourse some aircraft are also waiting for that special treatment.


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 7:49 am 
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Hi John,

Just wondering about an updated for the 1/200 Arizona and anyway for a pre-order?

Great stuff you have John.

Robin


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 4:56 pm 
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how much longer on the 1/350 missouri deck???


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PostPosted: Sat Jun 18, 2011 10:48 pm 
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I too am waiting impatiently for the scaledecks Tamiya Missouri decking. I've already started the build using Eduard photoetched and other additions including brass 16" gun barrels. I've probably already screwed up since when looking at the pictures of the pilot cut of the Missouri laser cut I see that the piece covers the entire second deck. I've already started adding superstructure... not much, but enough to cause me some cutting and fitting headaches. I'm going to stop my build now and wait for the decking. Here's a pic of where I'm at.

Attachment:
Superstructure 02.jpg
Superstructure 02.jpg [ 69.27 KiB | Viewed 2687 times ]


I'm also inlcuding a couple of pics of the new turrets with the brass guns superimposed on the old Missori I built 26 years ago. The slide areas of the barrels is aluminum foil tinted to look like lubricated steel. I keep the old ship nearby and used it as a guinea pig when I was cutting the plastic barrels off and drilling for the new barrels. I tried it on an old turret first to perfect my skills.

Attachment:
Turret Complete 1.jpg
Turret Complete 1.jpg [ 91.85 KiB | Viewed 2687 times ]


Attachment:
Turret Complete 2.jpg
Turret Complete 2.jpg [ 72.17 KiB | Viewed 2687 times ]


If anyone out there has some experience with the ScaleDecks products and how I can fit it to this already-assembled part, please let me know.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2011 2:08 am 
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johnd13,

Thanks for the products you have on the ways. We are really looking forward to getting our hands on some of your decks. Your Iowa-class decks, Arazona, etc decks are going to really help us with our builds.

Personally I look forwad to your modernized USS Iowa deck. It's going to help my projects quite a bit. We are all really looking forward to your upcoming products! Keep up the good work.

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 1:47 am 
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Any news about the Missouri decks? Or with any new releases whatsoever? It's been awfully quiet the last couple of months and the anticipation is getting bigger and bigger.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 16, 2011 1:03 am 
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The New Jersey is now available (with an alternate fore and aft decks) that allow you to model ANY of the modern Iowas, at any time in their history (their aft decking changed over time as more and more non-skid surface was applied to accomodate the helicopters.)

As for the WW2 Missouri... The wood is printed, the main deck is done, and we are just doing the tiniest of final adjustments to the small upper deck areas. We plan to cut wood on Wednesday, August 17th - and will ship decks shortly afterwards. If you'd like to reserve a specific material (Maple, Teak, Tinted or Paper) let me know via an e-mail to johnd@scaledecks.com, and I'll make sure to reserve one just for you, and even cut extra material to make sure we have enough for the first production run.

:thumbs_up_1:

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Last edited by johnd13 on Wed Aug 17, 2011 1:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 16, 2011 2:59 pm 
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Builder 2010 wrote:
If anyone out there has some experience with the ScaleDecks products and how I can fit it to this already-assembled part, please let me know.


I've just taken delivery of the decks for the New Jersey and I can tell that they are really designed to be added as part of the construction process, not afterwards as I'm doing. It's not impossible once construction is complete but it involves a fair bit of trimming to get the decks to fit perfectly. They do look very nice though once installed...

John


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 16, 2011 3:59 pm 
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johnd13 wrote:
Bill Clarke wrote:
Do you plan to do 1/700 decks ?

If we do it will most likely be in 2012 or beyond. The engineering doesn't take significantly less time, and the price of the kits is so inexpensive that I don't think we'll be able to make as much money off of selling less expensive decks that are in line with the price of the kits. So it just makes more sense for us to concentrate on the larger scales first, to produce a product that can generate more revenue for about the same amount of effort. Once the business is sufficiently launced, and we are running out of projects in the larger scales (which won't be until 2012 at the earliest) then we can delve into the 1/700 market.

Actually, I consider the 1/420 Arizona and 1/535 Missouri by Revell as a good test of that market. These two "been around forever and still selling" kits are low in price. If I can't sell a reasonable amount of decks for them at a margin to justify the engineering time, then it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to make decks for the hundreds of 1/700 kits that could use them.

Now, if the overwhelming chorus was "We would absolutely pay forty or fifty dollars for a 1/700 battleship wood deck" then that would make me start to rethink that strategy. But if the kits go on the street for twenty dollars or so, in my mind that makes a wood deck at forty, or even thirty, dollars a little excessive. If I had to market decks at a twenty dollar price point or less I would have to sell a heck of a lot of them to recoup the engineering for each specific kit that we released.


While the 1:420 Revell Arizona and 1:535 Revell Missouri are ubiquitous on the market, their deficiencies as serious models and idiosyncratic scales do not, imo, make them good candidates for a scale wooden deck at any price. There's no reason to dress up these kits with aftermarket parts.

While new 1:700 releases from the Asian WL manufacturers often seem to be accompanied by in-house wood deck releases when they come to market, I think there could be a market for an independent manufacturer such as yourself to produce wooden decks for some older WL kits that have not been re-released or upgraded. Two such kits that come to mind are the HMS Rodney and Nelson. These ships have expansive decks that are visual focal points, lots of molded-on deck detailing that is a challenge to mask for hull/superstructure painting, and perhaps would attract new interest from modelers if a wooden deck overlay was available. I would build both kits anew if wood decks were available for them.

Other kits that I would revisit with the possibility of a 1:700 wood deck:

Dragon's Pennsylvania and Arizona. Any of the Japan Pacific Line oceanliners and IJN conversions: Yawatamaru, Hien Maru (sub tender), Nippon Maru (liner), Hikawamaru (hospital ship), the half-decks of several seaplane tenders...

I'm curious if others can think of kits that might fit this category - what older models (as opposed to new or desired releases) on your shelf or kits in your stash would be revitalized by an aftermarket deck?


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 1:20 am 
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D-Boy wrote:

Other kits that I would revisit with the possibility of a 1:700 wood deck:

Dragon's Pennsylvania and Arizona. Any of the Japan Pacific Line oceanliners and IJN conversions: Yawatamaru, Hien Maru (sub tender), Nippon Maru (liner), Hikawamaru (hospital ship), the half-decks of several seaplane tenders...

I'm curious if others can think of kits that might fit this category - what older models (as opposed to new or desired releases) on your shelf or kits in your stash would be revitalized by an aftermarket deck?

Guess what? We have decided to start offering some 1/700 decks as an experiment. We're going to offer our own version of decks for the new Trumpeter kits as a starting point, along with a few others.

Also near the top of the list are the Dragon 1/700 Arizona 1941 and the Pennsylvania 1944. We're also looking at some of the old Waterline series kits from Tamiya, Fujimi and Hasegawa. We're engineering the Yamato and New Jersey as a starting point on the older kits.

If the 1/700 kits prove popular and profitable, we'll offer a full line!

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 5:00 am 
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Any chance of more decks around the 1/400 scale in the future John?
Heller's Richelieu is still arguably the best one, the Dunkerque is getting re-released. In a slightly different scale Hasegawa's 1/450 Vanguard is a kit that needs extra help (I'm being polite :big_grin: ).

Cheers
Dave


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 6:59 am 
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QUOTE D-BOY "While the 1:420 Revell Arizona and 1:535 Revell Missouri are ubiquitous on the market, their deficiencies as serious models and idiosyncratic scales do not, imo, make them good candidates for a scale wooden deck at any price. There's no reason to dress up these kits with aftermarket parts."

Exactly the point that I was trying to make, D-Boy, in my original response to the post that you quoted above. The suggestion that the old "box scale" 1/420 and 1/535's Revell's could be used as a test bed for the potential of the 1/700 market is, well, hard to fathom at best.

Now...fast forward to the present, unless I was dozing off during all that discussion of 1/350 (yawn :sleepy:) ...we have still not heard of anything tangible in 1/700. This, taken with some of the original comments made by the manufacturer, leads me to wonder if they take the scale and it's modelers seriously.

It now appears that if I will be spending any of this money burning a hole in my pocket on Scaledecks products at all, I will need to switch from my scale of choice to 1/350. Fortunately, I do have a few subjects in that scale waiting for a deck....however I will need an assurance from Scaledecks that their products will be resistant to shampoo and Mr. Bubble.


:woo_hoo:

edit.....BTW John...I just did see your post of a few hours ago. You can count one of those 1/700 Pennsy's as sold.

Why "old tool" kits to make patterns ? If you are in need of some new tool specimens I (and I am sure many others on this site) would volunteer them from our stashes.

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 9:15 am 
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Dave Rowe wrote:
Any chance of more decks around the 1/400 scale in the future John?
Heller's Richelieu is still arguably the best one, the Dunkerque is getting re-released. In a slightly different scale Hasegawa's 1/450 Vanguard is a kit that needs extra help (I'm being polite :big_grin: ).

Cheers
Dave

I have "a few" 1/400 kits to work. Let me see if I can think of them off the top of my head... I have the Airfix KGV (we're doing that as a test bed for the 1/400 scale already) and the Heller Panzerzchiffe (and the Lee variants of the Spee and Scheer, too), the Prinz Eugen, the Zerstorers, the Deutschland/Lutzow, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, the aforementioned Richelieu, the Italian Zara, the Imperial Russian Potemkin and Aurora... I know I am forgetting a bunch.

We have expanded our engineering team, and now that I am done with my Color Guard activities we are hitting these projects with a vengeance. I am moving into other scales and want to offer a full line of 1/350, 1/400, and 1/700 scales.

I am also starting to move into the custom work line as well. My first two custom projects are for the Combrig 1/700 Canopus for a group build, and a deck for a 1/96 USS Iowa for the Pacific Battleship Center. Both of those custom projects will become available as general kits for all, although I am not sure about the potential markets for 1/700 Canopuses or 1/96 Iowas. (Boy, are those opposite ends of the spectrum for two starter custom projects, or what?)

:smallsmile:

Not only am I looking at the 1/400 line, I have been intrigued by the 1/500 line of Japanese ships - Yamato/Musashi, Akagi, Shokaku.... Those seem to be popular, too. I already have a few ships in 1/450 scale on the shelf as well.

What it comes down to is that now that I have additional resources working on the engineering, we can move into additional scales in parallel. It's not a serial effort any more with only one ship at a time coming off the line.

Getting new engineers up to speed takes time, but you can expect to see additional scales introduced shortly. And just to set the stage, I use relatively obscure kits as training models; I don't want the first deck by new engineers to be something that I expect to be overly popular. So if you start seeing some of these new scales introduced they may be on "odd" first selections. So that should answer your questions in advance (I know they are going to be coming!) of "why on Earth did they start with THAT kit?"

:big_grin:

-- John D. --

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 9:56 am 
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pagodaphile wrote:
"While the 1:420 Revell Arizona and 1:535 Revell Missouri are ubiquitous on the market, their deficiencies as serious models and idiosyncratic scales do not, imo, make them good candidates for a scale wooden deck at any price. There's no reason to dress up these kits with aftermarket parts."

... and ...

Why "old tool" kits to make patterns ? If you are in need of some new tool specimens I (and I am sure many others on this site) would volunteer them from our stashes.

Hey, I understand that the 1/420 Arizona and the 1/535 are crap. But a ton of them are always for sale on eBay, and in the neighborhood arts and craft stores and discount stores. They certainly continue to sell well, even as crap. No question of that.

The reason that we would offer decks for these kits - at very low prices are threefold.

1. Since the bulk of my cost is in engineering, not materials, the more of any deck that I can sell the lower the price I can charge for it and the more money that I can make off of it. I am never going to sell a wood deck until first somebody buys the base model that it fits - so if there is a kit with a ton of sales, my potential audience there is huge. (I now have the money-grubbing, capitalistic reason out of the way!)

2. These kits serve as "gateways" into ship model building. When I was a kid I took all the money that I could scrape up from my paper route and rushed down to the local hobby shop to pick whatever caught my eye. Now, nearly 40 years later, both paper routes and model kit building are on the definite downslope. Kids today rush out to buy the latest video game at their electronic superstore (we didn't even HAVE those when I was a kid!) But SOME kids do still buy models, or recieve them as gifts from grandpa, and a lot of those are likely to be the old Arizona and Missouri (at least in the United States). If they use those kits as a gateway to get them into the hobby then having wood decks available for them gets them started in the hobby on the right foot. They'll want to do wood decks every time (Okay, that's money-grubbing and capatalistic, too.)

3. Finally, I know there are those sick-o people out there "who love a challenge." I have read with fascination the thread about the also-crappy 1/350 Arizona kit, and observed with amazement how modelers can take that kit and make it into something truly spectacular. Sure, the starting form is rough - but that makes a beautiful end result all the more impressive. Surely the same can be done to the old Revell kits as well. I'd love to see spectacular builds of these old classics to show "THIS uncommon result is what can be done even with the most common of kits as a starting point."

3a. Do I get any street cred if, even though I do offer decks for the 426 Arizona and 535 Missouri, I absolutely refuse to do the Lindberg Bismarck and Hood out of sheer pride? (Although I do have to admit that all four of these kits served as my gateways into the model ship building hobby way back in the 1970s. I did eventually move up to the 1/350 Tamiya Yamato - as they say, "I got better...")

So maybe it's sentimentality that leads me to want to do those two dinosaurs. Or maybe it's just a desire to see those old kits dressed up to look nice. In any case, they could serve as good "training platforms" for new engineers to work from, and if the result is at the level of "not bad for your first time" then they can serve as gateways for new wood deck engineering, too. In any case, you don't have to worry about me rushing those to the front of the production line ahead of other higher quality more recent offerings. As I have stated, I already have a number of the new 1/700 kits entering development.

:smallsmile:


And, as for the volunteering of kits, I do appreciate that offer, but I like to own one base kit of every deck that we release. That allows me to go back and investigate issues that modelers report and make adjustments and corrections over time based on feedback from the field. If I engineer off of "loaners" then I lose the ability to do that. So for now I am going to just go out and acquire the base models myself whenever I can (with the possible exception of a 1/96 Iowa - at least until I get a 3-car garage!)

And, let me make the generic statement of, "Do please keep the comments and suggestions coming!" I enjoy hearing from the model-building community, and I find a lot of the humor that you guys introduce here delightful.

"Mr. Bubble."

You guys crack me up.

:big_grin:

-- John D. --

:thumbs_up_1:

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:58 am 
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Re. wood decks for Revell box-scale kits:

You might have done a study or thought of this already, but I am under the impression that while these kits get a lot of buyers among the new initiates, how many of those newbies actually know about wood decks for their models? How many of them would care? To me, wood decks are up there with PE - by the time you're thinking of using them, your knowledge of kits would make you look towards buying much better kits. Asides from the occasional conversion, wreck, or test model, how many modelers at the wood deck & PE stage actually buy Revell box-scales?

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 12:04 pm 
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johnd13 wrote:
D-Boy wrote:

Other kits that I would revisit with the possibility of a 1:700 wood deck:

Dragon's Pennsylvania and Arizona. Any of the Japan Pacific Line oceanliners and IJN conversions: Yawatamaru, Hien Maru (sub tender), Nippon Maru (liner), Hikawamaru (hospital ship), the half-decks of several seaplane tenders...

I'm curious if others can think of kits that might fit this category - what older models (as opposed to new or desired releases) on your shelf or kits in your stash would be revitalized by an aftermarket deck?


Guess what? We have decided to start offering some 1/700 decks as an experiment. We're going to offer our own version of decks for the new Trumpeter kits as a starting point, along with a few others.

Also near the top of the list are the Dragon 1/700 Arizona 1941 and the Pennsylvania 1944. We're also looking at some of the old Waterline series kits from Tamiya, Fujimi and Hasegawa. We're engineering the Yamato and New Jersey as a starting point on the older kits.

If the 1/700 kits prove popular and profitable, we'll offer a full line!

-- John D. --


Great news, John. Thanks for considering this. I'm glad you referenced the older mold of the Yamato - that will likely attract some interest. The KA wood deck for the 1:700 Musashi does not fit the older mold of the kit, much to my initial disappointment.

You can put me down for your first USS Arizona and Pennsylvania decks. Might be interesting to poll users in the Main Forum as to what older kits they'd like decks for...


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