Vac form kits

Vacuform kits normally required a donor kit or scratchbuilding to create items necessary to complete the kits. Sometimes they are wings to add to a fuselage, other times they are a new fuselage to change the mark from one plane to another. It was an old school method of building subjects not available in kit form by mainstream manufacturers.

I think the last vacuform kit I have is a 1/76 scale German Hetzer tank destroyer.

I'm assuming the price to make resin and limited run injection mold kits has come down, I haven't seen more than a handful of vacuform kits since the '80s.

They despite their primitive appearance in the bag can be build with skill and experience into models just as good as a mass market injection molded kit though as Rob noted they do need a donor kit for stuff like props, wheels etc.

For some subjects, a vacuform kit was the only kit available.  There were a number of makers, like Rare Planes, who made things like 1/72 P-35s and F3Fs, that were not available in injection-molded styrene.  I can't remember the other makers, but I'm remembering a fellow who passed away a couple of years ago, who offered 1/48 aircraft, like the Curtiss SOC, that were not available in that scale.

Many old-timers will recommend building a vacuform kit just as an exercise, to stretch and enhance your modeling skills.

An older firm was Contrail.

I almost picked up a vacuform XP-67 Moonbat a few years back at a show, no idea how old the kit was- the bag was kinda dusty though! I've never build a vacuform kit and the pancake like plan of the aircraft seemed like an easy thing to start with but ultimately I passed on it.

Baron, I think you may mean Don, the owner of Eagle's Talon.

www.donsmodelworks.com/index.htm

I love vacs, there are some kits that you still can't get in your scale in resin or injected plastic. Or, some kits that you an get, but, you don't have to pay $50+ for if you have the RarePlanes vac from the past. Rareplanes in some instances are still useful kits because you can use fuselages for them to do versions that injection companies still haven't released, or released without making the correct changes to the fuselage, etc.

Also, some vacs came with white metal parts and decals, and some nice crystal clear vac canopies.

One example,,,I am going to keep my Rareplanes Grumman F3F, it is a good kit, and it will cost far less than the Special Hobby kit. I'll just use different techniques than the guy that spends the money on the SH kit.

Rex

Well, this hobby shop has quite a few of them in stock. :))

cool, look them over and see if the details are on the outside (cavity formed) with the shiny, rounded surface on the inside.

Those build up into nice models easier than the ones formed over the pattern (those wind up with the detail on the inside)

That said, I am in the market for the RarePlanes FJ-4 Fury, the F3H Demon and the A3D Skywarrior, to update some Emhar and Hasegawa models with.

Rex

Archer Models, who was out of Fountain Valley here, used to have an extensive line of stuff. At least until I left for the Army in '83. They had the only 1/72 soviet bombers at the time, and I did build their KC-135 kit long before the AMT kit came along. It was fairly complete, with white metal landing gear struts, and everything you needed in the package, including decals. Unfortunately when I returned home 4 years later the shop was closed and the line OOP. But man did they offer some great stuff at that time... try one out and then you will see just how you can develop your model building skills.

Old school! One of these days, I'm going to get around making a vacuform machine.....yeah....

Looks like I'm gonna pick up a couple of them soon. He's selling them really cheap too!

Lol, if you see a 1/48th Moonbat as long as it's less than thirty bucks grab me one, I'm good for it!

Gamera

Lol, if you see a 1/48th Moonbat as long as it's less than thirty bucks grab me one, I'm good for it!

Let me know if you find two!

TarnShip

Baron, I think you may mean Don, the owner of Eagle's Talon.

www.donsmodelworks.com/index.htm

Ah, yes, thanks, that's the gentleman.  I'm glad his son is keeping it going.

I dug out my old Hetzer Armtec kit. It is fairly crude, but includes a handful of injection molded parts like a gun tube, tow cable, road wheels, sprockets and other tools.

This thread triggered my memory of an even older type of kit.  In the pre-plastic days solid scale (non-flying) kits used solid balsa, and you carved the fuselage and wings from balsa blocks.  But during WW2 balsa became an important war material, because it was used in life jackets and life rafts.  So various kit mfgs came up with substitute materials.

Some kits had molded composition material. It was sort of like particle board, but in a molded form.  Anyone else remember those?  These were not the recognition models that were molded from a hard rubber.  The surface of these composition material kits were very rough and porous, and it took a LOT of effort to fill the surface and get a decent paint job.

Monogram started out with wooden kits like those you describe, Don, both aircraft and some ships.

I don't know about kits that had composition bodies, though there were some American toy soldier makers who use composition during the war, when they couldn't get lead and tin.  Some recipes used just sawdust and glue, others used the same kind of recipe as Elastolin (Hausser) and Lineol in Germany, sawdust, glue and kaolin.

I just remembered another type of old kit using non-strategic resources.  A couple of companies put out kits that used laminated fuselage and wings.  Laminations were thick die cut cardboard.  You glued the laminations together to form the 3-D fuselage and wings.  Of course, that left steps, sort of like the lower resolution 3D printers we are starting to see. After gluing the laminations together you painted the assembly with several coats of thinned varnish to harden the cardboard.  You then sanded and filled to smooth off the steps.  I was never very successful with those kits!

Hey Don !

  You are aging yourself ! I too , remember those things ! The ones I remember fondly were Arrow Models .They had a piece of White Pine and some small slabs of it .Then the engine nacelles , props and landing gear were I think , The same stuff they made heat resistant cookware handles out of .

   They were not the easiest thing to work with , but you could build a usable , recogniseable model from them  . You just had to use aluminum radiator paint on them . Yikes , do these kids today have it easy !    DOC -  T.B.