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.
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.
-- John D. --