scollins

Who said the "old-timers" are gone??? As a 35 year old "old-timer" playing with RC "toys" lol on TC (I guess an old timer on this site would be anyone that built an original Grasshopper kit in 1984 or any other Tamiya kit before that year)........... well maybe some of us are too busy lately to leave anything in the forums lately. Heck- I have been a TC member for over three years and barely have time to post up projects in my showroom, forget about having enough time to properly keep up with the forums to respond on hot topics of discussion. Plus I suck at typing so by the time I finish typing a response or adding my .02 -- things have moved on already. Anyway, I think it is OK to have new blood on the forums and on TC in general. Its what the hobby in general needs so badly all the time, new enthusiastic dudes. Not all of us can commit as much time to the forums with honey-do lists, kids, work schedules, etc. Its O.K., things will work out. Old guys will teach young guys new RC tricks and tips and even the new guys can show up the old farts too. Never underestimate a newcomer in this hobby! I know in terms of spending I have cut back considerably as the economy in Michigan is horrible and my wife has gotten cut back on hours at her job. The company I work for as a designer is going thru tough times so I recently interviewed with General Motors several weeks ago for a design position. I am hopeful I will get a job offer! Things are feeling good on that right now, but no guarantees of course. As for the RC collecting trend, things are getting a bit nuts on vintage Tamiya kits...I mean 2800USD for a NIB Sand Scorcher??? hmmmmm..... I dunno but that is like what is happening at Barret Jackson Auto Auction here in the USA where some vintage musclecars are going for over half a million dollars or more. Some a lot more than that. At that point it starts coming down to who has more money in their account --- vintage RC kits or vintage full size rides----, not necessarily what they are worth in every single case. Its always going to be a subjective call when it comes down to what something is truly worth. Hopefully we can all agree on that! ;-) I would love more NIB tamiya kits (or two of each) but I cannot afford to- so I prefer to kit bash and tweak things in a way that are enjoyable to build and drive while looking good. Plus re-releases are there to help beef up our NIB collection on a more affordable level, I mean the Subaru Brat, Frog and the Hotshot have been the only exciting re-releases from Tamiya so far. Hopefully they will choose some other significant models. (Instead of stuff like the Fire Dragon?) How about a Wild One instead! Hey at least Tamiya is trying, right? I was hoping the TC community car contribution may send them in a frenzy to excite them to re-release the Sand Scorcher but I am sure their marketing department has other plans based on their own studies, unfortunatley not what we (the old timers of course) remember from the glorious RC time warp of the 1970s and 1980s. my ramblings of the night, lol scollins

Well guys.........I have to add my two cents here on this thread. Cant help it on this topic, ;-) As many of you probably have figured out by now, I dont spend much time logged into the forums on TC as my spare time is extremely slim lately. Plus I really suck at typing and it will most likely take me a full hour to type out my thoughts on this,lol.... I think I have less than 10 posts on the forums total in the whole 3 years I have been a TC member, :-) Anyway, my day job keeps me pretty chained down as a full-size car designer. Not as glamourous as it sounds either. Trust me, in production car design to meet all of todays saftey, manufacturing and engineering criteria is mentally exhausting. I wont say any more or i will bore you to death.. My RC passion gets crimped pretty tight when the day job projects consume all of my energy. But, on the topic of this interior discussion..... I have been in the RC car hobby a long time. Much of the joy of having Tamiya stuff over the years has been the scale details they have put into their RC kits, especially the ones we all love so much with hard shells and obviously the nicely detailed lexan beauties. (Mostly vintage stuff I am speaking of- and the TA01 touring cars of the early 1990s) Of course, with the newer buggy, truck, and touring car kits over the last 12-15 years we have seen interiors pretty much disappear from tamiya kits. Which I have been bummed out about for a long time. Mostly due to my roots as a static kit builder(pre-teenage years) So, with the exception of the classic driver head and torso(s) in the buggies and re-releases which of course dont really count as interiors thats about all we get anymore,lol Reason? or more correctly, Reasons for interiors leaving the scene? IMHO..........(no particular order,as I cant decide yet on the number one reason) 1. Tamiya having more interest in RTR kits that put more focus on running within 5 minutes instead of "building" something. that means a pre-painted body that costs money to paint and decal at the factory, negating the whole idea of an interior from a manufacturing/ cost perspective. Dang, they want to make money! Which leads right into reason number 2.......... 2. Cost driven. Well, we all know that blister packs were a great "display" upon opening a kit back in the 1980's. So were the extras like printed inserts of cars on the inside partitions of kit boxes. But that costs money. Interiors were and are most likely seen as another cost burden. Remember, the market was different back when interiors started leaving the scene. Most of us on TamiyaClub that remember the old days of kits with interiors are old enough now to appreciate them and probably have the income to support wanting to pay for them in kits now and in the future. When the interiors started going away I feel we were leaving scale realism for a while, entering new battery-motor technology, and the RTR craze was being spearheaded by Traxxas, adding a new cash cow for other manufacturers to chase. Not to mention "kit building" of all types(static and R/C) becoming less popular for newer generations of youth. Hello.. Sega, Nintendo,Playstation, XBox.....sorry I am not into video games..my little rant is over on this.. 3. Types of kits being produced. Example-touring cars, TA-03, 04s, and 05s started putting more emphasis on the "race" factor in the core components of the kit out of the box, focus on the belt drives, motor placement ,suspension tunability,etc... where the TA01-02s were an early generation of touring cars that were that "blend" between scale realism and somewhat tuneable to become "race worthy" only after adding a ton of hop-ups. My point is , in this example the newer kits had less focus on the scale details in the bodysets (with a few exceptions of course). So,,,,,,,,,,,,all of my ramblings aside, That is why a year ago I was disappointed when Tamiya announced this great re-birth of the 3-speed and then decided to give it to the masses with a big tinted window!!! What??? All of that scale detail and no interior??? On such a significant kit - the re-birth of the 3 -speed?? I had enough....it sent my creative juices into overdrive. So I put my design and modeling skills to work and between October to December 2006 I busted out the molds and tooling for the Scollins Hi-Lift interior kits. Of course I never expected so much success with them 10 months later, but the popularity of them has given me the confidence to invest my time and skill into new interior kits for sale on TC . Now, if it wasnt for that pesky day job I could actually get my Sand Scorcher interior tooling refined and into production..........................stay tuned as I will update you on my showroom for more in the next month or two.................scollins

As TC member terry.sc pointed out, I used the TLT chassis with a Big Bear body last year and it worked out really well. I am sorry i sold it now, as it was a really neat little truck. the bodymounts I fabbed up from HPI parts, while for scale realism reasons of my personal taste....the front body mount was custom, using velcro in conjunction with a tab A- slot b feature to assure it stayed put. Cheers on your project, scollins

Respect to the DeeMiller, Happy b-day old fart!!

Hi all, Dont get much time to be active on the TC forums, but I would like to share my thoughts on this thread, and would like to go back to something TC member TamiyaMan said early on that I agree with some points on..... "The whole RTR craze has also done considerable damage to the hobby. I'm no fan of it at all - even deplore it, however I'm not even convinced our hobby and the progress of the hobby is to blame here. I see it as a broader change for the worse in simply how people are choosing to live their lives. Kids today are more interested in video games and cell phones and what they can do with their computer and TV's - it's a generation of instant gratification that fits more with the RTR crowd where they don't care how it works they just want to run it and when it breaks have someone else fix it. I live in a block where even the toddlers have battery operated ride on toys as they can't be bothered to even pedal! The days of the great Tamiya kits and numerous aftermarket company support fit better with the world when we actually made our meals from scratch and cooked them in an oven, went out to the theater instead of TVOing primetime shows, and read newspapers instead of logging on to cnn.com. The masses that insist on driving 90MPH thru rush hour traffic to be at work 5 minutes earlier are not the kind of people that will take the time to enjoy the art of kit building." At the age of 35, I have been goofin with RC cars for 23years or so here in the USA. Seeing the serious RTR thing really take off with Traxxas (originally) has been good for the hobby but has taken a few things away from it too. I am mixed on it, but overall feel the RC hobby has been "cheapened" by it for the die hard enthusiasts and "rejuvinated" to others that feared RC would be lost forever among PC's, PDAs, Xboxes, TvO, MySpace, laptops, bluetooths, MP3s, ipods, cellphones and texting, yada yada yada.... I think its not been so much 'damage to the hobby' that RTR's have brought... just a realization that more people (parents and kids alike) are looking to get into it quickly and "go fast" with the least amount of effort and time. This just points to our self-made overly busy culture. "Taking the time to enjoy the art of kit building" is something that thrives just fine on TamiyaClub and sites like RC10talk, as two examples. I think there was more room to take time with kit building. Play time was simpler. When I was 12 years old and was into RC cars, modeling as a hobby was a bigger chunk of the pie among other things male youngsters like myself were into such as BMX racing and freestyle stuff, skateboards, Car-Toons magazines, Dukes of Hazzard (ahh Daisy), and the Van Halen video, "Hot for Teacher". Remember when MTV played music videos? (Thats a snapshot of my 1980's BTW). Working with your hands to create things is something that was a core skillset of youngsters in the past because a lot of the toys were designed for tactile interaction - Think about it, The slinky, legos and the "mechanix series", Erector sets, Stompers, Hot Wheels cars, plastic model cars from Monogram, MPC, Revell, AMT, Tamiya, etc... All of this stuff required 3-D skills between the kid and the hobby or toy of choice. Or at least an intrest in bringing something to life with time and patience applied to it. There are many fellas today (with kids) who cant change a tire on the car they drive to work. Ummm, yea............ they may not be the kit builders or teaching their kids about the nuts and bolts of how things work. I was lucky, my Dad spent time with my brother and I on this stuff. We need to remember that not all youngsters get the opportunity, but are left with the XBOX to entertain them, not a model plane with 250 pieces and 3 missing in the carpet of the living room. With all of the digital toys available now, should we be so surprised that sales are thu the roof on RTR RC's? 2 cents for the tray, scollins

Dee, you deserved to win, that build of the Hummer was extremely well done and brought a whole new level of realism into the Club.

Hi guys, I have not posted in a long time, my apologies, Just a heads up that the US Post Office re-named their International Shipping services. Previously, they had Airmail for packages ranging in size. And Airmail letter for the smaller items obviously. Today, I shipped out an RC car to a TC member in the UK and I found out that now the US Post office calls the service - First Class International- smaller parcels or- Priority Mail International- larger parcels I think the time on shipments does not change , just the names they gave the services. Hope this helps anyone who cares, thanks, scollins

Thanks shodog,,, i guess a NIB one might go for 80-100USD -----so a used one - you are probably right about that figure of 40-60USD. Thanks buddy for the advice, I will try to become more "active" on the forums in the future. A lot of TC members have been buggin me to post some of my secrets on the Forums for discussion. I will try to get to that.....scollins

Hi fellas, I dont post really that much (too busy) but I wanted an experet on Tamiya Technigolds to answer this if possible. I stumbled onto a used RC car that is not too expensive and it comes with a nice looking Technigold with 3 NIB sets of brushes that come with the lot. I may buy the whole car and all the parts just to have this motor...So what are they worth in good running order? 80-90USD I was guessing. scollins

Hi guys, I have to admit, I have not spent much time on the forums to date on TC at all. I am not usually a forum guy....... But, as for the Mid West gathering I am in, I actually heard about it chatting thru an email with TC member Tamiya fever. Jay (imagesofmotorsport) and I briefly touched on this topic of getting some local members together in an email right after I first met him last year. I think it would be fantastic, and would be willing to help out.I think a few of us that are close in distance should get together in the flesh and try to work out a few ideas on a weekend as a start.A brainstorming session in person may really get the juices flowing. I live in utica, MI which is not too far from Detroit. Any thoughts?

I've sucessfully used HPI wheel adapters to get 2.1" HPI buggy rear wheels on the back of my Scorcher for bashing. Need to take off a small amount of the plastic on the face of the adapters so there is enough axle thread to bolt the wheels on. Fitted old-school Duratrax sand paddle tires to them and they are fantastic for playing around on the beach. Definitely not as true to scale as Tamiya "Grasshopper style" sand paddles though. scollins