Kickstart

Trouble is that one of the differences between people is that some of them do not recognise the differences between people, so cannot adapt. As to stimming, interesting. Covers a lot of repetitive actions that can be calming to the individual (and being 47, I still twiddle my hair ) All the best Katy

If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by stimming? And I am lousy with dealing with distractions and concentrating unless very interested in something. All the best Katy

There are a lot of people I would put in this bucket, and there are people who I know who have been officially diagnosed who I would say are mild in these traits compared to plenty of people of my generation. With other things going on in my life I have had counsellors asking if I have been diagnosed with ASD, as apparantly it is very common with people with the issues I am going through (and strangely, quite a few surprising shared interests are - modelling, wargaming, motorcycles). All the best Katy

Hi As someone in my late 40s, while at school there was no hint of any checks for anything like this. Autism traits, short of Rainman levels, were ignored. Suspect that applies to most of us. I did that test and scored 46 (think I did it a few years ago and scored 43 from memory). However not sure how much good it could do to take it seriously and ask for a real diagnosis; not sure that whatever the result what could be done. All the best Katy

See MG3s quite often, and quite a few MG6s as well. The MG6 does appeal a bit from the press comments (suspect a major reason for limited sales is that they didn't fudge the cars to scrape a dodgy low CO2 figure). There is an MG dealer on the other side of Stafford from me, and also one half a mile from work in Telford. All the best Katy

Except most others already have merged in turn, before someone decided to overtake those who had already merged. It achieves the lack of a queue, as everyone can just proceed through the obstruction, and not suddenly have to brake to let in someone who can't be bothered to wait. All the best Katy

A lot of LED lights do flicker. Think it is done to try and increase their life expectancy. Very noticeable with the red man on pedestrian crossings All the best Katy

Many modern ones appear to be LED items, and a common problem with these seems to be very poor colour differentiation. Hence when they put the indicator in the middle of the brake light it is virtually impossible to see All the best Katy

Maybe S&DJR blue as well depending on who you believe. However the 1F and Jinty are quite similar; bit more difference than the A1 and A1X with a different wheelbase. With a bit of cleaver design it should be possible to share a fair bit of tooling between models of both. All the best Katy

I would suggest that a major part of designing an item to high production numbers is to design it to be fast to assemble. This has been a case for models for many decades (remember it being spoken of about Airfix / Mainline, hence far cheaper to make despite far higher levels of detail). Some parts can be bought in partially pre assembled (such as connectors on motors to enable than to be clipped on to the contacts on the chassis, etc). A kit for limited production will have been designed to be cheap to tool up and produce from components that can be produced by people willing to do very limited production runs. Which works out at around 90 seconds per part, which on a production line seems very slow. But even the costs of 8 hours labour is cheap compared to having to slash 40% off the price to sell them quick when your production planning turns out to have been badly done All the best Katy

I wonder how long it takes to assemble a model in a production environment. Suspect the costs of that time are not that high even at UK rates compared to the retail prices. To me it seems entirely possible that these higher costs could be offset against improved production flexibility. All the best Katy

Suspect that the Terrier was pretty much thrown away and started again from scratch, similarly for the 08 which would suggest a fairly quick development time. Be interesting to see what they do next. Think Ixion / Minerva have a good head start on industrial locos and not sure that Dapol would want to compete for that market directly. Maybe a Jinty would be a nice choice. All the best Katy

If I remember rightly, 81A Oldoak gave some details of the costs of actually assembling the models in China. If memory serves me OK these costs were very low. All the best Katy

There are remarkably few bits shared on the X type with the Mondeo. Ford never even got around to launching a 4wd version of that generation of Mondeo, and while the V6 engine was closely Ford based they did do some fairly major changes for the X Type. We had one and overall it was a pretty decent car. Down side was it wasn't designed to be a sporty or interesting car to drive, and being seriously over weight it was rather poor on fuel (28mpg on average, although did manage to get it to 40mpg on the trip meter on a long gentle motorway run). Ours was replaced with a BMW 3 series (E46) and I would say the X Type is a far better car than that and far better built. Katy

For analogue I doubt there are any real benefits. You could possibly argue for simpler rewiring if you want to take power off the connector / blanking plate for lights or the like, and maybe easier to wire in a new motor if you need to replace it, but that is pretty much scraping the barrel. But the extra cost is tiny. A blanking plate (and retail from Hattons they are £7.61 for 10) and realistically maybe 4 extra connections (and some of those might be easier done with crimped connections rather than soldering once there is a central connector, and that might save money). I doubt the total extra ex factory cost is anywhere near £1, even if paying UK wage costs. To go with this there are savings (in packaging for a start - let alone reduced chances of a mistake with boxing things with the wrong labels). The real cost is in design and tooling for this, with a large number of older models brought back in to sale, but on any new product (or even product that is being retooled for DCC) it would essentially be a free change. With Hornby it seemed bizarre that with the basic 0-6-0 chassis (used in the basic 08 and Jinty and the like) they appeared to have tooled up and continued to produce 2 slightly different chassis for DC and DCC. I would suspect it depends when they take their money. Designing and tooling up for a run of Kings probably results in sales that barely covers their costs. But in the future they can continue to produce runs of those models without those overheads and with a high profit. Problem is that they might land up with a large batch that don't sell and suddenly needing to sell them at near cost price. Possibly the solution is to do their production in 2 levels. Large scale batch production for the initial releases (and the constant selling Railroad / Thomas type models), but bring the tooling back to a far more flexible (possibly in house) production environment after that, able to product and deliver small batches quickly and flexibly on demand. As to the salary, for the size of company it does seem very high. Especially when several people at higher levels are being paid that much. Katy

True, but that is a minimal cost. Given just the extra cost of a few wires to a connector and a blanking plate. They would probably save more by not needing 3 logos on the boxes depending on whether the models were DCC fitted, DCC read or just DC. All the best Katy

I wonder if one reason that they have done this is the risk (or even just perceived risk) of loosing the means to produce those models in future (ie, loss of tooling). Or could just be a desperate need to make a big and fast return on investment (design, tooling, etc). I would suspect the cost of fitting a dcc socket as standard are minimal on a new model. Far less than £5. Similarly a DCC chip (Hattons retail price for a Hornby decoder is £14). But prices have more to do with marketing than with cost. All the best Katy

Depends if Hornby are selling things on their web site at or below the trade price, while expecting those who pay the trade price to take the costs of holding stock and the risks of that stock not selling an needing to be reduced in price, as well as supporting the final customers and providing a local presence for the brand.. Many years ago one of the bike importers started selling bikes directly to the public. A £3k bike (official retail price) could be bought from the importer for £2.4k. Predictably the dealers were very much unimpressed and certainly wouldn't want to pick up the costs of warranty work or holding stock when their supplier was doing that to them. That importer disappeared soon afterwards, while the brand of motorcycle is still on sale in the UK several decades later. Katy

Suspect that might be what they need to avoid, and possibly what has caused the issue. It is a business which requires a very long term plan, with long term investment and a long return on investment (and probably a very healthy return once the high initial design and tooling costs are finally paid off). Any ruthless cost cutting now might save them money now, but likely leave the business in a position where it will be destroyed in 5 years time. All the best Katy

Hi Suspect one point with model railways (and Airfix kits, Corgi models, etc) is that the investment has a very long time to return money. Hornby are selling a large number of models designed and tooled decades ago (whether originally by Hornby, Airfix, Mainline, etc). OK, in some cases with updates over the years. Tweaks with colour schemes, minor mods, etc, supply extra sales with minimal costs. Compare that to many other products these days where the life cycle in quite short. Any initial profits from a new release are probably not covering the development costs. Suspect the costs of gathering info, planning, design and tooling a major new product (say the King) are upwards of several hundred thousand pounds, and if they make (say) 2500 units in the initial batch those costs would probably barely be covered by turnover of sales (Hattons want ~£150, £25 of which is VAT so say £100 actual cash to Hornby, £250k turnover for the 2500 batch covering development costs if production was free) But partly stock has a long time on the shelf before selling. Part of the reason to have retailers is that they can pay early on (with a suitable discount and payment terms) and take the costs of stocking the items for months / years. Selling direct might mean that you get a bigger bite of the final sale price, but you loose the almost free long term stock holding. There is also the loss of the ability to quickly react to market conditions with long supply chains. In times passed if Hornby had an unforeseen extra demand for item X then they could adjust their on site production schedule to satisfy this demand. Now they are playing with production windows planned and bought a substantial time in advance with an external supplier. Combine the reduced flexibility with having to cover more of the stock costs themselves and getting planning slightly wrong can cost a disastrous amount of money. All the best Katy

Hi Our local Homebase was a Focus Do It All until 2008. But looks like it is now closing down. All the best Katy.

The other thing related to this is that LED red and yellow lights do not seem to be well defined when closely mounted. Not sure why, but the tail lights with an LED indicator in the centre of a circular LED brake light are just about invisible when the car is braking. All the best Katy

Hi Maybe. Led daytime running lights on cars are a pain, often more dazzling that headlights but the allowable brightness on those (in lumins) is far higher that it needs to be. Suspect that different peoples eyes are sensitive in different ways to different wavelengths, while Led lights are very intensive in some wavelengths while outputting next to nothing in other wavelengths. All the best Katy.

I find led lights to be unbelievably dazzling for the limited amount of illumination they manage. Worse, some result in a residual series of lights when I glance past them (likely mainly the ones that flicker on and off rapidly to improve their life expectancy that are the noticeable ones - such as the red man on pedestrian crossings). Led torches I have used have pretty much been universally useless to actually see anything with. All the best Katy

I agree. Even worse in a low car. H1 bulbs are very easy to put in place without seating them correctly. Part of the issue seems to be the way headlights are now designed. They now seem to have a very sharp cut off, which is understandable to maximise what can be seen. Trouble is that only a tiny misadjustment (or just coming the other way over the brow of a hill) results in the poor bod coming the other way getting fully dazzled rather than just being subjected to a bit brighter light than comfortable. I hate LED bulbs. All the best Katy