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gorby
That doesn't sound like someone you can trust. I'd steer clear if I was you.

Tony May Autor
Thanks for the advice Gorby, I believe that it's quite solid & I will be following it. Besides, my wife has expressly forbidden any future transactions with this individual, so even if I wanted to change my mind, it wouldn't be in my best interests. She was "apocalyptically" furious with the situation & I have no desire to cross her when she gets this angry over something because it's quite rare!

Incidentally, I had one other transaction with this individual, last month & it didn't go very smoothly either. They'd raised the price on one of their kits after we'd agreed upon a different amount. I bit my tongue though & paid the new amount. The kit in question is pretty hard to come by & I'd actually seen it go for considerably more than that new asking price. Poor form to be sure & far from an honest business practice, but I thought it was just a one off thing for a highly sought out model kit.

One further issue with the prior order is that I received a "VERY incomplete" Italeri kit, in a box that looked like someone had played rugby with, which was not even the kit I'd specifically requested to purchase. The individual shirked a refund for that model kit as they'd included the poorly assembled fuselage with the aforementioned rare model kit for a diorama they had planned to build. (Something that didn't really interest me as it was just a ground based test bed for an experimental weapon system that didn't see service.) I could not build it as a stand alone kit either because it was just far too incomplete.

The missus was upset with that transaction as it was & I can't say I was terribly thrilled with it either. Still, I really wanted that Italeri kit. I knew this person had it, I'd seen the photos of the stash they were liquidating. As it was an international transaction I planned to tack on additional model kits & accessories packs to the order to justify the cost of shipping. All of which was conditional on my ability to examine the contents of each item I'd planned to purchase & that what we agreed on as the cost of each item would remain so.

This would have been a decadently large purchase, probably THE largest in 30 years of online model purchases, which would be paid for in 3 installments over the course of June, July & August before I received so much as one piece of Polystyrene. Well, as described, the individual could not leave the price fixed on one item before receiving a single cent from me. The reality is that at any point between this month to August, they could have decided that any one or all of the items were suddenly more valuable.

In the end I pointed out the 3 most recently sold examples of that kit on eBay, all of which went for considerably less than the new asking price, pointed out that the 2 others still up for sale were within the ballpark of the new price range; Though we had no way of knowing how long they had been waiting to be purchased. From there I explained that if this individual wanted to get the best "bang for the buck" from liquidating their stash that they would be better off learning to navigate eBay & attempting to sell their stash there. I said that I was disappointed but that I would be relinquishing the reservations for the items I had planned to purchase. They attempted to retract their reach for more cash, stating that they would honor the original price, but by then the missus had already heard & she wasn't having any of it.

Once again, thanks Gorby! Have you EVER encountered something similar?

gorby
A few years ago I agreed to sell a kit to someone in Canada. When I got to the post office the price of postage was significantly more than I thought it was going to be, which would mean I would end up making nothing from the sale. I went ahead with it because I thought it was the right thing to do.

Tony May Autor
That was the right thing to do. You'd already agreed upon a figure. I would've done the same & I'd assumed that was so for most anyone. I just wanted to check to see if I was missing the bigger picture.

We hadn't even discussed the price of shipping. I'd planned to pay a moderate sum in the 3rd payment plus whatever shipping was. (I expected that it would be in the neighborhood of $80~$100 USD.) Therefore this person wouldn't have lost anything on shipping.

Incidentally this person is in Canada as well. I see they have an account here on scalemates but it's either been wiped clean or it was never utilized. It's marked as inactive either way.

Dora-13
Yes.

Tony May Autor
Thanks, Dora-13. I kinda figured it was but I didn't want to assume. I was going to convert an Academy kit using an AML conversion set with some decals for one of these I just happened to come into the possession of but I've been trying to cut down on the sheer number of planned builds to something a little more manageable. That was one that wound up on the chopping block.

Tony May Autor
Thanks Neal & a happy new year to you. Ah, the great seat belt revolution, I remember a time when we didn't care if a plane had seat belts. Then again we didn't care about a lot of things in those days. A stick for a gun? No problem! A rough doughnut shaped object for a wheel, just fine & dandy! 😉 Raised panel lines? Use charcoal & chalk shavings to provide the illusion of depth!

Naturally, I've been taken in by the whole thing as well. A lot of mine are just Tamiya masking tape affairs with some fine foil work for some buckles, but it's better than nothing. Honestly, I think I'm going to turn that route more often than not moving forward. I discovered that I positively detest photo-etch seat belts. Especially when the buckle is separate & is supposed to be threaded onto the belt. I think I rediscovered curse words from past lifetimes the first time I tried those! lol

I'm curious about 3D printed seat belt decals but they're darned expensive & not always easy to come by here in the states now. I well & truly miss the days of de minimus exemptions & before we went back to the early 20th century with tariffs. I was making orders from Europe very nearly on a monthly basis. Most of my business went to Super-Hobby in Poland (Moje-Hobby.)

Some of the items I could get affordably from the international market, before August of 2025, I'm looking at getting positively scalped here in the states, by buying them. Otherwise it's hit & miss everywhere I look as to what they have stock of. Some shops are either still or have just gotten their European distributor lined up. It's crazy stuff.

Something incredibly common that I hear is that shop owners don't even know what to expect their distributor to send them until it arrives. What kind of business model is that?! Furthermore, given what domestic shipping is like in the United States, you don't want to be making orders from a half dozen different shops just so you can get one project underway. Oftentimes it was literally cheaper to pay for shipping from the Czech Republic, Poland & Ukraine than to ship anything to yourself here at home. Furthermore you were were more likely to be able to access the full range of items you wanted in that one order.

Even before the recent developments though, I'd never made an order from HLJ due to the excessive shipping expenses. A lot of other modelers get together to make one collective order to make it worth their while. While I have 3 modelers in my household the other two aren't actively seeking new kits as I am at the moment. (My son is saving for a gaming PC & my wife is more inclined to continue to build our personal library.) Furthermore all of the hobby shops that carried any real assortment of model kits have closed down over the past 30 years, owing to both the small population of model builders in the region & the proliferation of eCommerce.

Tony May Autor
* All the regional hobby shops where I am, rather. I somehow omitted that in my initial message.

Rando
Robert, the answer then has to be "why not both?" 😄

Robert Podkoński
@Rando - She Who Must be Obeyed is already considering my 400+ kits stash too big 😉... but if only two kits will fit into one box... who knows 😄 😄 😄

Doug Craven
Wow Tony. 4000 kits. That's wild. Thanks for relaying that detailed story. Very interesting.

Ben M
I prefer doing trainers and stuff like that with more colorful color schemes. I've gotten a bit tired of green and NMF, but I still do some of that.

Paul James
My friend you can just get G10 Royal class - they have all WNF/ERLA/U4 etc

Tony May Autor
That's what I wound up doing, actually! Thanks for the suggestion, it was a good one. 🙂

Alexey Antipin
Not much is known.
All that I could find is that by September 1940 remaining airworthy aircraft were assigned to 5th long range bomber wing in Soviet Far East as auxiliary planes, not as bombers with most of armament stripped

Tony May Autor
Thank you very much for the information! I would imagine that if they were stripped of armament then they were likely used either as personnel transports or to transport supplies to the remote locations of the LR Bomber Wing?

What became of the 5th LR Bomber Wing after the Soviet Union was invaded? Were they reassigned to combat Germany or were they left there as a preventative measure against the Japanese? It is aircraft like this one & the Shcherbakov Shche-2 that fascinate me. I am hopeful that one day a company like ABM will release a kit of this aircraft as well. I very briefly planned a purchase with Croco Models but it didn't go well.

Well, provided that some way of doing business between the United States & the rest of the world comes up again. I'm very unhappy with the removal of de minimus exemptions & the tariffs on countries we have long had good trade terms with. I could understand paying taxes at the originating point of sale & US taxes for the value of the goods to the postal carrier. Everything else makes no sense to my mind.

If it was still 1995 we would have the infrastructure in place for new businesses to emerge. Testors could still rebox items from different brands. Aviation USK was famous as an importer of limited run kits & accessories. While MPC had ceased carrying Airfix's line by then they still had the capacity to do so. (Technically Round2 Models still does have that capacity.)

However it is 30 years too late because the vast majority of that infrastructure is gone or a derelict husk of rust. Furthermore nobody is going to start a new business venture if there is a chance that the next administration might turn everything back to the way it was. All that is going to happen is that this is going to hurt small businesses all around the world.

Alexey Antipin
Being mostly equipped with outdated TB-3s it has most likely remained at the Far East.
What is wrong with Croco? A nice kit IMO

gorby
No one wins in a trade war, no one benefits, least of all the general public. This is an interesting read: skeptoid.com/episodes/970

Preventing fentanyl was just used as an excuse for doing something most economists think is economic suicide.

Tony May Autor
I figured as much; Thanks for sharing that article. I wonder if Britain would seriously consider rejoining the EU?

The excuses I've heard for the US's side of things was fentanyl & counterfeit goods. It was all supposedly targeting East Asia but then we get all this other BS. What is this administration even asking for to eliminate the tariffs or to reestablish de minimus exemptions?

Yesterday evening I received a routine email from Kitlinx to provide updates. They're an American shop with an extremely vast product line, probably the largest in the US. An eBay based shop called Dauntless Hobbies was a distant second. Due to the inability to restock European supplies though KitLinx has temporarily removed all European products, which they cannot receive from their suppliers, from their website so that people can no longer order & then have to wait extended periods of time for items that might not even be available when international commerce returns to normal. In the process their catalog was reduced from 97,000 items to 48,000 items.

I seriously question whether this was even enough because a couple of weeks ago I received notice from another shop that suppliers from Japan are cutting off the tap. They might have different suppliers though, who knows?

Still, I won't likely run out of kits to build in this period, but I may well run out of good quality supplies to finish them; Unless we wind up in WW3 in which case I won't have time or money for either.

I have heard that Australia & the UK are still engaging in normal international commerce, according to notes from Red Roo?

Tony May Autor
Wow, for the price, I expected this to be a much bigger set. Still it's a much needed bit of detail for the Sword G4M1.