Dear Bob, OK, When I talked to Mike W at York last week, he asked about why we made our 2 bay open top hoppers using flat tooling needing to be assembled as kits instead of the usual 4 slide tooling that EVERY OTHER SHS PRODUCT USED. It costs more to assemble these than any of the other items. I explained there were two reasons for my decision to tool this series of cars this way. The first was for prototype fidelity. Most of their life, open top hopper are not full, but empty. Inside a hopper there are details missing in most RTR plastic models in every scale. Rivets, ribs, wood grain, splice plates, inside of panels, cross braces, gussets, etc. that would be lost for us if not for the way we did the tooling. The other is a tooling cost factor. The series as proposed included 8 versions of hoppers. We got to make 5, and tool a 6th that we never produced. The 7th & 8th were in the design phase. Once the first tool was made (1942 LV composite hopper), each successive car we only had to pay for the two slides for each side (the sides are different as the main brake pipe hangers needed opening only on one side). Did these cost more to assemble, yes, but look at the inside detail. For me it was well worth the few extra $$$... So in the video, Mike W was only referring to our hoppers, which will be the first cars they make (not my decision or advice...). Don
On Oct 25, 2012, at 6:06 PM, Bob Werre wrote: > Dave, They talked about the SHS as being similar to a kit.....
