djparkins

I agree totally. Interest rates are still quite low - if he believes in the project that much, maybe he should take out a small second mortage on his house to get started as a 7mm manufacturer. That is what I did in 1979. IMHO you should all stick to buying models that are presented to you as ready to purchase. A product that someone has had the 'b*!lls' and the faith in to finance and bring to market for themselves. There is some of this crowd-funding creeping into the model aircraft business as well. One such project is for a kit of an RAF glider. Now I would very much like one of these models, but I wouldn't go near the project as I know the person behind it to be something of a 'dreamer'. How do I know this? I ended up buying his first failed kit range! DJP/MMP

I do sympathise - £10.00 an hour is not a worthwhile remuneration! I'm sitting here thinking of something I would do for £10.00 per hour and I've come up with one thing only - eating king prawns and smoked salmon! DJP/MMP

Well the answer to No.1 is really just experience and you will never get it right all of the time. The trick is to be right enough of the time. Always err on the side of caution though! The answer to No.2 would be - not as highly as my accountant seems to rate his time - If he could, he'd pass on the cost of the very air he breathes! think you have to be realistic and take your returns over time. You have to be in it for the long haul. The more of each kit you can sell, the greater the return you are going to get on the initial time spent on pattern-making etc. I'll be no more specific than that, but you have to take the long view and have enough products in the range to see these collective returns accruing over time, and these, together with your percentage mark-up on each kit sold is where your living comes from. Many manufacturers these days seem happy to run their businesses as an adjunct to their main job. I've always been far too lazy to do that and have only ever been interested it it being my full living. Too old to change course now! Regards DJP

I agree. As a manufacturer I always try to put myself in the position of the customer. I get sick and tired of ordering items [not just models] only to be told that the item is not actually in stock. Surely if it is out of stock, it is a simple matter to disable the online ordering for the item until it is back in stock. We link our web site to our stock levels so that if you can order it online, then we have physically got it! That way, we never have the bother of back-orders or of customers chasing us if our suppliers let us down - and everyone is happy [we hope!!!]. Also, it seems to me that a lot of suppliers continue in blissful ignorance of the UK Distance Selling Regulations and the obligations these place upon them! I want that same level of protection when I order goods, so can hardly complain if, in turn, my own customers demand it. I think that if you know you are 'in trouble' the best solution might be to stop digging and set all your stock quantities to zero. Regards David Parkins Modern Motive Power www.djparkins.com

Yeah, I've got gold bath taps too. Only problem is that the paint keeps coming off on the hot one! David Parkins MMP

F Unit - This is all true - but as I alluded to in my previous post - there just aren't enough 7mm modellers out there, period. OK you may sell more units at a lower price - but it still wouldn't be enough and you would lose even more money into the bargain! You might not want to consider this - and it is possible that visions of soldering irons, rivetting tools and folding bars may give many of you nightmares and cold sweats - but you may find out that in the end it is only those more traditional kits that are sustainable, given their relatively low tooling costs in relation to the thin covering of 7mm modellers on the hillside. Is it possibly time for a reality check?! Regards, DJP/MMP

Just to clarify - what I mean't was that possibly the price of each kit may not have been profitable when you also factor in the development costs, spread over the total likely to be sold of that particular subject. I don't doubt that the purchase price more than covered the cost of the materials in the box, but as I outlined above, the trick to survival is to get your development/tooling costs back as well - and to make a profit on top. That is the only way you can sustain things long-term. Regards DJP/MMP

Andy - Thank you for a very thoughtful contribution to this thread. If I may, I'd like to take a little time to try and pull together some of the points raised in previous posts from the point of view of both a modeller, and of a 7mm kit manufacturer. Firstly, to develop Andy's point about gaining skills over the years, as your modelling progresses. I fully agree. I took the decision to model in 7mm back in 1974/5 after buying a 3H wagon kit. This I made in an evening and fitted Jackson wheels to it. I was hooked. Then the first Slaters MR wagons came out. No more 3H after that! Then I started to build Westdale coaches and get into etched kits, as the first Metalmodels, Mallard Models and Colin Waite kits appeared, and that was it. Once I had built etched kits I no longer wanted to build anything else. There were many 'pain-barriers' to go through but these were as nothing to the satisfaction gained. My models were my own, and everyone else's were different and that was what mattered - I had stamped my individuality upon them. That is one hobby and I'd call that modelling. Buying and running RTR is another hobby in some ways - although some posts on here allude to a happy marriage of the two. Whether just buying and running RTR is modelling is something I'll let others decide, but that it does not allow for, nor encourage, any personal development and growth as a modeller is surely undeniable. As my own skills improved I got commisions and built up a business making models for others, but that was like hard work to me! - and so I got into kit production in 1979, and have made a living at it ever since, but expanding into other areas such as military kits [which interested me every bit as much as railways] was an essential part of surviving as purely a manufacturer. So - moving onto that side of things, I would like to make the following observations based on the thirty nine years that have since elapsed. Now it may be that the ethos behind JLTRT was that if you could release kits that were easier to build than etched kits then you would dramatically increase your market. I see that - and no doubt it did, but obviously not by enough. I would think it might have added an extra 40% to the number of kits you might sell - but even if it was 100%, it would not have been enough, given the development costs that have been cited for some of these kits elsewhere. And this is the critical issue. The way I have always approached this problem is as follows. I decide on the subject and then assess the total number of sales I think I'll acheive over a five year period [anything more is a bonus] - and I always take a pessimistic rather than an optimistic view on this. So if I decide that I'll sell 100 kits tops, then the development costs have to be in proportion to the sales and the cost of boxing each kit and of all the other costs [including allowing for VAT]. The setting of a price for the kit will also determine the likelihood of reaching that projected sales figure, and once this balancing act has been calculated, you have your budget. This budget will tell you how much you can spend on deveopment costs for a kit and how much the components of the kit must cost [and NOT exceed] because there has to be a good proportion of meat left on the bone for the manufacturer at the end of it all. That mark-up is sacrosanct if you have a wife, family and hungry border collies. I have NEVER spent more that £1500.00 on developing any kit, and that is how I've survived. To keep within a figure like this you must do all the work yourself [or have decent slaves!]. And if all this means that you can only produce metal kits - then so be it. We all have to operate in a free market economy [other than the North Korean arm of my company!]. On this basis the likes of Slaters, myself, DJH and PRMRP could hardly complain when JLTRT came into the market and had the inevitable knock-on effect upon our sales. It didn't impact on me so much, as only 10-15% of my income was from railway kits anyway, and even those sales held up pretty well. By the same token however, JLTRT cannot complain when, in turn, they see their products duplicated by Heljan and Dapol etc. What goes around comes around. Competitive geese for the competitive gander! It has been mentioned that if JLTRT had sold more kits they might have survived. Not necessarily. If you are losing money with each kit you sell then it is better to sell none. It has been mentioned in a previous posting that what O Gauge needs are entry-level Airfix-like kits [and presumably at much lower prices than JLTRT!]. Well I'd say great, but you will need to find 10-20,000 'O-gaugers' all wanting the same loco in order to make it pay - dream on! I wish anyone good luck in finding those 10-20,000 7mm modellers. You'd have more chance of flying to the moon on a helium-filled party balloon. David Parkins Modern Motive Power www.djparkins.com

I think the RAF are phasing out Tornadoes over the next two years.

I totally agree with Chris's reply to you in his post #168. As a teenager I caught the last two and a half years of steam on the Bournemouth line. Unlike my father, who kind of lost interest in 1964, I knew it was important somehow to get out on the trains every weekend that I could manage, and throughout the school holidays, in order to experience as much of it as I possibly could. I would now hate to be without those, still very vivid, memories. I watched as every service was steam-hauled and all the Bulleid pacifics had their nameplates intact, through to there being less and less steam and things becoming much more akin to the photos in this thread - although I don't think they were ever quite as bad on the SR as some of the locos I have seen in photos of the very end of steam in the north-west. There were. after all, several 100mph+ performances turned in on the racing stretch around Fleet and Farnborough in the final weeks. After it was over I lost most of my interest in railways [other than models] until something pivotal happened. I was on Oxford station in 1980 when a Class 56 came through with a Southampton-bound 25 vehicle Freightliner train. It really stirred me and I realised I was just as impressed with this as I ever had been with steam. My interest instantly clicked back into place. Since then I've been equally interested in all forms of railway traction and, for me at least, I realised that it was a kind of false delineation - just as a lot of aviation enthusiasts don't over-differentiate between prop and jet. I watched a Class 60 with the up 'logs' on the Ribblehead Railcam today. Still a stirring site! As the great US Railroader Don Ball Jnr. said, if we are talking steel flanges on steel rails, its interesting! David Parkins

http://www.djhmodelloco.co.uk/prodpage.asp?productid=3397

<<my concern is that future 7mm enthusiasts might be tempted by the low price and find the construction beyond their capabilities>> Agreed - but I have explained how all this has come about in my previous post. My point is though, that the prices are not low for what you get. As a comparison, our own MMP Class 47 was only £199.90 when it was last available, two or three years ago - and that included VAT!

Hi Pete - I could only help with regard to the Class 56 as we had some roof castings available from our own Modern Motive Power Class 56 kit [soon to to be re-released in two versions]. This is a very different kit [with no common parts, obviously] to the one you have shown above which was an ex-Post-War Prototypes kit first released in 1982. But the existence of an MMP kit was the ONLY reason we were able to help with the cab roofs. To broaden things out - In the case of the Class 50, MMP have never done one, or intend to, and so we have no parts that would help in this case. Just a word of background to get things in context. The Post-War Prototypes Class 50 was first released in September 1982 at a price of £52.50. No cab interior - as back then most people used Bond's or Pittman motors that intruded in the cab, and I recall seeing several models with the cab windows painted gloss black on the inside, and with coarse scale wheels. These were still very different times! In the early 1980s my father ran a model shop and he used to carry the Jackson 7mm coach wheels. The CS wheels outsold the FS by at least two-to-one, even then. When I sold Post-War Prototytpes in 1988 to RJH the first thing they did was to increase the prices by approx. 250%. They couldn't form the bodies - either of the locomotives or the coaches. I had modellers coming to me and asking if I could 'save' their Mk.2 coaches for them - so badly formed were they. I had some pretty fancy and heavy forming gear and it still took me over forty minutes to form a Class 50 body correctly. I don't think these kits have ever been sold with correctly formed bodies since 1988. The major problem though was in connection with the castings. When RJH took over, the original brass masters, made with the correct shrinkage allowance 'vanished'. Who was involved with that I do not know, but the end result is that they had to make new moulds from either second or third-generation castings, which, by that time were of course all well undersize, so nothing fitted. In addition, the white metal sub-master roof units in particular could not survive the forces present during the vulcanisation process and 'flattened' into the condition you can see in one of the photos in this thread - the condition in which they were cynically put into £200 kits. All the above things, and the huge price-hike [even allowing for the passing of the years] effectively 'did for' the range. Each subsequent owner has made no effort whatsoever to get the kits back to what they were, let alone do any upgrading or re-tooling. Neither have they reduced the prices! But I feel it important to point out the original ethos behind these kits, which at their original price and correctly formed and cast, sold in their hundreds, and at the time, provided a valuable resource to 7mm modellers. Regards, David ParkinS Modern Motive Power www.djparkins.com

Andries - One other quick one - and again in constructive mode! - the periscopes on the brake vehicles face outwards along the coach, so the one at the luggage-end of the coach needs turning through 180 degrees to be accurate. Didn't notice it at first but now it really stands out. Regards David Parkins

Rob, Did you ever finish the Kemilway coach kit you were working on? Forgive the slight thread hijack, but I was really interested to see the outcome. If I've got it wrong and it wasn't you, then my apologies - senility and all that! David Parkins

Hello Andries It is good to know that you are changing the BSK sides. It will be both welcome and helpful to the RTR modellers on this forum, I’m sure. As regards listing all the faults, I’m not sure how helpful this would be as you really can, I’m sure, see them all in the Keith Parkin book on Mk.1 stock published by HMRS, which you would surely have. Mik.1 coaches are a bit of a minefield, and what is accurate or not is so dependent on which period of the long life of any coach you are modelling, but some fundamental features regarding the ends might be – All the slatted/ridged end steps fitted on B/C liveried stock, whilst only the lower ones on blue/grey vehicles. The other glaring fault is in the gangways. They were not open at the bottom, but have chequer plate floors – don’t want your passengers falling straight through onto the track! This might not matter between coaches but it will be very apparent on the end vehicles in a rake. There appears far too large a gap at the top of the gangway, between it, and the longer top step, which again, were removed along with the upper slatted steps, C. 1965. Underframe-wise, you really need at least two different versions for the types of 64’ 6” stock you have announced, as the vac/cylinder positioning, V hanger shape and brake linkage was different on the later-built types such as BCK/BFK/FO and others + several catering vehicles and the sleeping cars. Also, on the BSK [and BG], the battery boxes are in-line and in the photo on page two of this thread, the BB on the BSK needs to be moved one bay to the left, so as the clear the large hanger step, which is also absent on your model. As a consequence, the lighting regulator/switchbox is on the other side in the same space – i.e. not a mirror-image. The dynamo should also be on this side of the coach at the RH end on the UF. The arrangement of the end hanger steps varied according to type and were handed if fitted to both ends of the buffer beam. Don’t forget the saddles for the buffers. They may be there - it is hard to see from the photos. On the roof, the lav. Fillers look too tall and the rain strips need top flanges to turn them into gutters. The ends of the roofs appear way too thick as they are only sheet metal. As I say, I list these things ONLY because you have asked me to and in a constructive spirit. There are other things too but you just have to read the Keith Parkin book. It is all in there. And I fully accept that some of the things are the unavoidable compromises of batch production and would not matter anyway to most customers. Obviously we didn’t have to make those compromises in our own range of MMP Mk.1 coach kits but that is because each kit could be planned from the start on a type-by-type basis. Best of luck with your venture. David Parkins

Alan, Thanks for your reply. I've got into enough trouble mentioning the fundamental body fault with the BSK, as it is! OK - well I'll put them into the main category/number of faults - but as I have said, they are probably not that important if you simply want a rake to run round the garden. If you just want two or three coaches to be the centrepiece of your layout's passenger operation, then they might be. Ends - four Gangways - three Brake cyl./underframe equipment arrangement - five Doors - two Windows - five Roof - two Bogies - three dragbeams - three And counting! - as you cannot see the undersides of the chassis/bogies - and you would also need to see the coach end layouts for each individual type of coach as well. But I repeat, these things might not matter to everybody, and I fully accept that. Anyway you asked me to list them, so I have. But don't believe me, as I know next to nothing about Mk.1 coaches! - instead, just take a look at the Keith Parkin book on Mk.1 Stock. All the information you need to make an informed decision as to whether these coaches will meet your needs is in that truly excellent reference book. DJP/MMP

Jim - But that is precisely my point - it isn't a good representaion of a BR Mk.1 Brake [be it a second, composite or first]. As I said, I can accept the other innacuracies might be liveable with for some, but how it can be so totally wrong and still be a "good representation" escapes me entirely. Perhaps you mean a caricature? DJP/MMP

The photo in post No.28 is of what purports to be a Brake Second [bSK] - not a Brake Third!, or a Brake Composite. And even if it were, the sides on a BCK are also NOT mirror images of each other. The BSK in the photo is of a coach that doesn't and hasn't existed. You are looking at what should be the corridor side and hence no lav. window present. That should be on the other side, but if the sides are indeed a mirror-image, then quite how that would work internally on a BSK I cannot imagine, unless the passengers are sharing a toilet! It is the most obvious of many glaring faults, but I won't list the twenty seven I've so far identified, as I know what happens to those who criticise RTR stuff. Whilst I fully appreciate that many of the smaller inaccuracies won't matter too much if you just want a rake of coaches to run round the garden, I think it would be safe to assume that everyone reading this thread would 'draw the line' at buying a coach that is just wrong, to the point of being fictitous. David Parkins Modern Motive Power

Hey Man! That's me, second from the left!

Yeah - Far Out! - as we used to say in the late sixties.

No - sometimes black holes are just harder to see than you expect them to be - especially when viewed from an oblique angle, when they sometimes, it seems, don't appear black at all, but can even be brass coloured!

My humble apologies Richard. I was looking for a small 'black hole'!

They were never slipped in service - but there was a plan to do so at the point of building. On that subject - it looks as if you have forgotten to drill through the small 'spyhole' marked on the inside for this purpose. All the BS vehicles originally allocated to the WR had them, I believe. The hole is marked out on the inside of the outer brake end, and so you can still do it at this stage of the assembly. I think I've mentioned this to you once or twice before! Regards DJP/MMP

Thanks. Yeah, gotta get back on it. We've still got patterns for lots of kits we haven't ever produced as well. Just having too much fun doing other stuff at present. I will do though, I promise! Death notwithstanding! Meanwhile, you've all got RTR! DJP/MMP