| Any pictures of this painted pak 40? If you read the previous threads, you'll see it wasn't as much plastic as it was the retail price at close to or over $40 on future releases. The general consensus seemed to be the price was too high and plastic didn't matter that much to the vast majority.
Coincidentally Forces of Valor will be releasing a 1/72 pak 40 that comes with a halftrack in 2008, the price... less than $20! |
Legio,
Thank you for the reply.
The reason for the high price was the form of manufacturing. Each model is hand casted and individually painted and put together by hand. But you may say, "but, Jason, plastic models usually are priced cheaper." Correct, but this is using injection in a tooled mold, not hand casting.
Why not tool a mold for plastic and get a cheaper model out?
Because, tooling is the single most expensive part of manufacturing. Depending on the model, 1:72 scale models will cost anywhere between $20,000 to $30,000 dollars to tool. This means if you produce 20,000 or 30,000 models, you already have $1 per model in production cost. Now add, the prototype cost, injection, paint, assembly, packaging, insurance, shipping on and on, and you keep adding $$ to our cost. Then the retailers understandably want a markup and you have a model that cost X amount of dollars. And this is if you produce the 20 to 30 thousand models. It is our experience that you cannot sell 20 to 30 thousand models in the time needed to keep production on new products funded.
By hand casting in a special plastic, not the ABS used in usual injection, we are not constrained by the numbers we have to produce. For example, using injection with molds, not casting, and you only want 3 paint schemes of the Panzer III H, and you don't want us to produce more then 2,000 models of each, that is 6,000 models. In the above paragraph, if you do the math, we are at a $3+ to $5 per model before all other production cost, just in tooling. So it is a fine line you walk in this business:
Make a model, hope it sells. If we are wrong, and you all do not like it, we are stuck trying to sell thousands of models. However, with a high price tag and a different form of production (casting) we need to produce only 100 models. Trust me, we can sell 100 models.
In essence it is a one-off production. Who knows, we may take orders for a particular marking or division in the casting form of production. Imagine being able to customize your own model. You would truly have a one of a kind collectible straight from the factory!
About the $20.00 price tag on FOV... that is great! I am going to have to pick myself up a couple. Imagine how many of those they have to manufacture and sell to get it to that price! I am not surprised... I have seen FOV in every store that would carry such product on every continent I have traveled. When you can sell your military toys at Circuit City... you know you have a good distribution! It would be great to be as large as FOV. Truly the biggest player in this military game.
Regards,
Jason