[Bill Murray]

I was visited at the store by the National Marketing and Customer Relations Manager and the Executive Liason Officer from Japan of Tamiya Models.

After all of the normal nicities and store tour etc., we repaired to my office to talk about possible future product from Tamiya.

Given the chance, I pulled up this thread on my office PC, along with a number of other similar threads on other sites, and we had a nice long discussion about a 1/35 Scale Chev C60L and a few other variants.

Basically, it is a volume question as moulds for a plastic model run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for high volume kit manufacture. We did also discuss the newer mould technology whereby it is a lot cheaper to do a mould that does not have to make 200,000 of something or whatever and could be made at a much lower cost. One problem with Tamiya is they do not use mainland China for their manufacturing so their labour costs are relatively high.

Anyway, both said if I could provide a very short list of what new products we would like in this area as well as a source for engineering drawings that they would do their very best to get it presented at the Tamiya Product Selection Group meetings.

We also broke open an FGT and a LRDG kit that I had in the store and determined they could possibly do a little "mould bashing" to reduce the total costs. Sort of use some of the FGT, some of the LRDG and then new moulds for the rest.

I would appreciate any input and for the modellers I know on here especially, get the word out to other sites without naming names at this point. I would also need to get some sourece for blueprints or engineering drawings or copies thereof. Cliff, I am thinking of you here and possibly David and Dave and some I know I have missed.
Bill