thierry laurent

This is even simpler as I think the decals had already been released by ZM as a separate aftermarket set. So, except the very nice box art I'm not sure there is anything new...

By far the most complex set was the corrected variramp and accurately sized air intakes! That was a nightmare that took me two months of evenings to get correct and symetrical parts! Never again!!!

Thanks! Harold did the nose. I made the rest!

The wiper was part of the conversion. I did it to help Harold.

Indeed. I made the masters of close to all the AMS Phantom sets as well as the CBU bombs and A-4C wiper and wheels.

Your options are Tamiya (F-4E), Tamiya (F-4C/D) or Tamiya (F-4J)! The OOP Revell F-4E may depict one of the rare slat wings planes used very late in the war and the RF-4C one Recce bird. However you will have to find AM decals and both kits ask for far more work than the Japanese options. The Academy re-release of the Revell F-4E has SEA schemes AND the hard wings with TISEO. However, it has the same issues than the original kit.

Airscale? I guess you meant Aerocraft?

Happy birthday from the land of beers! ;-)

Happy birthday John!

The problem is simple. You cannot obtain a product break even status without selling a minimum of some thousands of boxes if you are releasing an injected plastic model. Finding 500 customers is easy and even 1000 stays rather easy. This is the LSP market hard core. You can possibly reach 2000 but this will ask for some additional months and is already conditioned by some attractiveness factors. Further, you are entering into the danger zone! According to the topic kits may sell like hot cakes... or not! This is the critical issue as this market segment is very unstable but required to reach the initial profitability. A company like WnW understood it and developed a clever marketing policy that was offer rather than demand driven. This was efficient up to some level. However, even that approach could not result in miracles! For instance, think of the early Gotha seaplane prototype. So, marketing gods have quite often strange ideas when you look at them from the hard core perspective! This explains why a company like Jetmads using a far cheaper production model only does short run releases and for two to three times the price of an equivalent injected model. We may finally get an injected F-84F because companies cannot only produce Spitfires, Mustangs, Me109s and Fw-190s forever but when is a big question! The lowest is the perceived probability of profitability of some releases, the lowest will be the frequency of such releases between best sellers. This is a pity but is an economical fact...

Possible but they are directly sold by Amazon in their Starrett range. So this is weird. I just checked and it looks he was not the only one who had been burnt! https://www.amazon.com.be/Starrett-S166Z-Octagonal-Insulated-Handles/dp/B000KYOF6G

Well this used to be true. Alas it looks the quality went down drastically. A friend of mine purchased last year a set from Amazon for more than 100€ and he send it back as the quality of parts machining was clearly worse than the one of far cheaper Chinese tools! Too bad as Starrett was known as a quality tooling brand.

I love such projects! I don't know if you know it but there is one error in the instructions and parts of the stabs of all AIMS sets for late Ju88 & 188. John posted a correction on his Facebook page.

Actually it had not been correctly packaged to avoid the risk of being crushed (too souple box). The guy who printed them will send me a new one with another order I made. I just wanted to know if this extreme case was still repairable!

Hi, I had the same problem. The only solution was to fold very progressively to avoid breakage. When plastic color becomes whitish you are entering into the danger zone. If the angle is too small, I would try that: do cautiously a series of very thin cuts with a razor saw on the internal side of the belt (where you want to fold). This should help. However, globally, it is better avoiding such plastic belts in such cases... Thierry