By looking at the box art it shows the wheel assembly and tires as 2 pieces, the instructions show them as a complete one piece and reality is one piece with hollow backs like a toy. This is quite deceiving when purchasing this kit thinking you're getting 2 piece assemblies and then they are not. With a retail of around $24, you should be getting 2 in the box like the Horch kits. I bought this kit as a next project, but I just can not get past the wheels. Not sure how to fix them as making circular plugs is just not something in my realm. If I just had to cut straight lines for square type shapes, not an issue, just can not make circles of different sizes and layers to get the wheel and tire shapes and edges where the 2 join. Maybe someone will do them aftermarket. This was going to be my precurser to the 1/35 Tamiya version. Any ideas out there guys? Vic.

Hi Vic,

I find what you are saying amazing, at first I thought it was a retrograde step to the cheap kits of the 60's and 70's which had similar tyres. I then thought that it may be due to the increasing price of the raw material and an effort to cut costs and optimise profits. Whichever it is it is a bit of a blow and if all the future kits are going to be similarly treated with regard to wheels, or other 'solid' items, then it is going to make our modelling experience a little less enjoyable. I have no doubt there will be some after-market resin wheels produced, but then that jacks the cost of a small kit up to a prohibitive level in these days of limited funds. Perhaps someone from Dragon could explain the reasoning and if it is a trend that will be continued.

Good luck with your build, I hope you post your progress for us all to see.

All the best,

Paul

It doesn't seem to be an improvement over the old Matchbox kit, and it has some similar features like the shackles moulded on the bumper.

I would have hoped for different weapons mixes and some stowage; probably one of the most striking features of the LRDG Chevs.

The Lewis gun looks OK though.

Cheers

David

Have all gone stark staring mad with their pricing.....But let's be honest, Dragon started it!

The new Dragon 1/72 SdKfz 260 (Not the first of its kind despite what certain reviewers would have you believe! ) costs the same as their SdKfz.222s but again you now only get one in a box.

The current prices are nothing short of ridiculous, which is why I don't pay them.....Almost every kit I've bought this year (and last) has come from eBay or through private transactions/swaps, but I'm still managing to keep reasonably up to date with the new releases.

It's about time we ALL started talking with our wallets if you ask me.....Perhaps we should all just build what's in our stashes for twelve months and see what Dragon's pricing looks like after a year with NO SALES!

Andrew

Be careful what you wish for. Dragon would likely respond to a year without sales by leaving the 1/72 scale AFV business & concentrating on other scales, aircraft etc. I agree that prices are very high when compared to years gone by, but we can still have 20+ hours enjoyment (is modelling always enjoyable..?) from a £20.00 kit - in terms of £ per hour, this is still cheaper than a round of golf, a trip to the cinema etc.

Andy Lang
(who has already spent considerably more than 20 hours on building & painting the 1/72 Dragon Neubaufahrzeug, with a lot of work still to do.)

Hi Andy,

I agree that a boycott of a manufacturers goods is going to be 'cutting your nose of to spite your face', but if this is to be a trend now, where the manufacturer tries to save on costs by thinking it will be ok to leave wheels hollow, or details only on the face you see, isn't a good development. I think a concerted effort by modellers to lobby manufacturers would be a better idea. I also do the 'cinema ticket' analogy for seeing if a kit is value for money, inevitably it is as tickets now appear to have crept up to the £6 region and no matter the kit, it is going to take longer than five hours to build which is two films - £12 - so they really are value for money still. I have some old copies of Scale Modeller, Airfix Magazine, Military Modelling going back to 1960's and when I see kits for 1/6d old money (7.5p) or from the 70's and the kits are 35p and £1.50 for a Tamyia 1/35th it does make you wince at today's prices. However everything is relative, a pint of beer was only 10p....you do the math.

All the best,

Paul

Paul

Yes, absolutely - I was commenting on the desirability (or otherwise) of boycotting Dragon kits, not the acceptability of leaving the wheels hollow: this is just plain wrong in any era.

I also started making Airfix AFV models in the late 1960s & the bagged Series 1 kits cost 10p (2/-). If a pint then cost the same amount (I don't know: I was only eight in 1969), even Airfix kits have doubled or more. However, I do spend longer building them nowadays...

I love the old Airfix Magazine AFV articles from the time & still treasure my copies of these magazines: I'd never part with them.

Andy Lang

I'm not boycotting the kits, just the insane prices.....I can always get them cheaper after a month or two, so I just bide my time. I suspect a lot of people are doing this and it's crippling the high street model shops.....My last local model shop closed down a fortnight ago, but I'd pretty much stopped going there as I could almost always get the same stuff posted direct to my door for less money.

As for worrying that Dragon might stop releasing kits, why should I? Nothing about their most recent releases encourages me to rush out and buy them and were I to do so, I would be tacitly accepting that their current prices are fair and reasonable, which they most certainly are not! Even if Dragon were to stop making 1/72 kits for the next twenty years I could easily get by with what's already in my stash and there are plenty of other manufacturers out there to fill any gap they might leave!

Hi Andrew,

I hope you don't think I was getting at you, I wasn't. I just think that when you look at what was available in the 60's, as Andy and myself have been obviously indulging in a bout of nostalgia, we are spoilt rotten nowadays. The Airfix magazine articles are treasured because you couldn't get many kits and all the conversions, especially the excellent articles on the T34, were all we had to fill the gaping holes (not gaps) in our collections. It is true the prices of kits have crept up and up over the last few years, but if you look at the cost of a 1/35 model now - some priced at around £60 - I think we are doing ok, I feel for the larger scale modellers (well only a bit, they still get more stuff than we do). Perhaps if a lobby group was formed and we constructively approached the manufacturers, with thousands of fellow modellers involved, we might get somewhere, but I doubt if that would ever happen as most modellers are happy to pay the money and just get on with their hobby.

Just a few more thoughts on an interesting discussion.

All the best,

Paul

"Have all gone stark staring mad with their pricing.....But let's be honest, Dragon started it!"

It was started by MRC with the Fujimi kits.
We were all used to paying $4 - $5 per kit,
and they jumped the prices up to $12 ea.
Remember when this happened 10-12 years ago.

And please guys post some pic's let us "see" what your talking about
with these tires.

(n/t)

......not only have they mis-lead us with the box art and advertising but they have stooped to a low similar to an Italeri quick build kit!!!!??????
I wonder in how much in $s they have actually saved?

I think I will construct the truck and then see how bad the wheels show up when assembled, before doing a lot of plastic or putty additions!

Hi
This isn't aimed specifically at anyone, and they are just unstructured musings. The discussion just got me thinking...

Turning the conversation around a little, how much would you say your completed models are worth? I'd guess most of the modellers on the site spend upward of forty hours building a vehicle and painting it. That's after years of research and study of the craft. Realistically this end of the hobby is not far off degree standard when you take into account the depth of knowledge required. If you charge your time as a professional, most of the artistic creations on your shelves would be worth £500 - £1,000 (800 - 1,600 Euros or Dollars), and in some cases more. The price of the kit starts to diminish in that light.

Certainly, in terms of satisfaction, there's little gets close to those odd moments where a model forms itself into the image you had in your head before you started. And as Kevin Dennigan used to enjoy saying, "if you're enjoying yourself, you're doing it wrong."

Do you view yourself as a kit builder or a modelmaker? I have loads of kits in my loft from which I've pinched wheels or a gun barrel and built the rest from scratch. If you object to manufacturer's prices or their moulding shortcuts, get out a protractor, a ruler, a sheet of plastic and a scalpel. Start to carve. I guess I'm lucky building in 1/76 as there is a limited amount of stuff going to be produced for me. The best models are always those where you've had to measure an old wreck of a vehicle and nine months later you've created a miniature that's as close as you can make to perfection. (All too often a little short of that mark.) Even then, I can feel slight whispers of that boyish excitement of building a kit on my parent's kitchen table.

The manufacturers are doing their best, I guess, and they have all manner of marketing execs and accountants telling them to cut corners. If you like a kit buy it and put your stamp on it. If you do a good job you'll forget what you paid for it.

Thanks for all the fabulous inspiration that's served up on ML daily.

Regards
Dan

www.dantaylormodelworks.com

Hello

are there any links to sites with the sprues, or can anyone post some pictures ?

I think the most disappointing issue with this, from the information in this thread is that the wheels don't match the instructions (and side of box illustration ?)

Though the more detail the better, if the inside of the wheels isn't seen in usual viewing position, perhaps the issue may not bother every modeller ? Many kits have simplified and/or missing underside details, though we are used to this not being the case with Dragon's wheeled vehicles, so it does seem a step in the wrong direction.

I agree with Victor, that scratching circular parts with varying depths, such as wheel rims is very difficult to do. If anyone has any techniques, please share them.

The other issue with braille scale aftermarket parts is they are never sold at retaillers locally (in my experience), which means ordering online from overseas and a wait of weeks for the parts.

cheers
Neil

Not of complaints about what we're being sold, because it is disappointing that the tyres are hollow, but of constant bleating about prices.

Unlike most of you I live in Australia, where the price of a Dragon 1:72 kit was around the A$25 mark when I first started buying them, but is now closer to the A$20 mark. Dragon didn't drop their prices, the Australian dollar went up

And the US$ went down. Yeah, I know it's not enough alone to cause a big drop, but it's one of those things that snowball, a little bit here for transport, a little bit there for the kit, a little bit more for distributors oncosts while they struggle to survive, and in the end the cost at the point of sale is higher

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you guys have had it easy for so long that this seems like the end of the world to you. The rest of us outside the USA may or may not also be hurting due to the current economic climate (I just took a $35k pay cut and our economy is *great*), but mostly those who have suffered from occasional bouts of unaffordability know it's not permanent and don't bleat so much.

By the by, there are actually good reasons for moulding wheels hollow on the rear, to do with reducing shrinkage and sink marks, but I am sure that Dragon could have fixed it by moulding a ring shaped insert for the rear. No, I don't whether that's why the wheels are moulded hollow, and I don't know why thay didn't provide inserts. A lot easier to fix than bloody moulded on sand channels though!

Shane

Hi Shane,

Sorry to hear about the pay cut, but to put things in perspective $35,000 Australian is equivalent to approximately £23,000 here and that is the average wage (apparently), however many people are on a lot less. So you see that people who are devotees to the hobby have to work within a limited budget and usually the funds for hobbies come way down on the scale of what is apportioned for what. This would perhaps explain why we go on about it so much. They keep saying this is the sixth richest country in the world (I always thought we were the fourth, must have slipped down a bit), but at the moment to the average person in the street it doesn't feel like it, so we moan, which is a good old British tradition. It is very cathartic and does us good to get these things off our chest every once in a while.

All the best,

Paul

Hi Paul

Many traditions from Britain live on here, & the right to air one's grievances is amongst them, particularly when you think someone has their hand in your wallet, or is "taking the mickey" and thats the twin grievances here with a less than expected standard of product & pricing. Pricing issues are complex, its hard to precisely allocate reasons for prices, its really a matter of buy it - or don't. I agree its good to let out a grumble now and then.

Fortunately this is one kit that doesn't interest me much, though I can understand how those who were hoping for this kit might feel.

On a different tack, and wheel issue not withstanding, is there a conversion potential to another vehicle type, such as a standard chev truck, or other chev vehicle with this kit ?

cheers
Neil

Hi Shane

sorry to hear your bad news,

I hope things will improve soon

cheers
Neil

Neil says

> sorry to hear your bad news,

>I hope things will improve soon

Yes, well I'm praying that my wife does recover from the surgery and chemotherapy to the stage where she can live I can do without the lost income (as others have pointed out), but I can't do without her.

Shane

You are surely doing a hell of a lot better than me (and probably most of the rest of us too, I'd think)!

Like Dan, I mainly build 1/76 and my interest in the Dragon LRDG is mostly about what bits I could scavenge for my Matchbox LRDGs.

I'm in Australia too and I appreciate the cheaper prices with the currently high Aussie dollar. However, when you mainly buy Airfix kits for less than $10, price isn't much of an issue. I am glad that I'm not building aircraft kits at the moment; the prices are astronomical!

I do feel for those who must have the latest 1/72 kit and who are faced with the twin disappointments of high price and simplified models.

By the way, has anyone checked the scale of the Dragon LRDG?

Cheers

David