Chebec, OH MAN!

Something's wrong here. This is the model that's been featured in a six-part series in Ships In Scale magazine. It's a masterpiece. That price just can't be right. That sort of model usually gets sold in prestigious model brokerage houses or auction houses for at least $25,000 - and even at that rate, after the dealer takes his cut, the builder won't make a profit.

The prices of several other models on that website seem equally ridiculous. I don't know what's going on here, but the site makes me nervous.

I think that the decimel point is off by about two places.
That would make it 24905.40, which is alot more realistic.
I think!
Jim

Oh Thanks, bust my bubble why don't you! ;)

There you go, now you sound like my wife!

If I'm not mistaken, European custom is to use periods instead of commas. Note hours worked is 5.000 instead of 5,000 (which I believe is the number cited in SIS). That would make the piece 200,000 Euros. Ouch, just a touch pricey for my blood.

Gfmorse's explanation makes sense. That figure $294.034 comes from the website of the DMA Company (that's the firm that's selling the model), but maybe there's a mixup there. Perhaps the individual handling the English language version isn't up to speed on the translating of numbers - or the American/British use of commas and periods.

I sent M. Bello an e-mail alerting him to the problem. (His e-mail address was published in Ships in Scale.) I suspect he'll conclude that I'm an idiot for not understanding the punctuation. He's probably correct on that point.

I have no idea what sort of commission the DMA Company takes. Some years ago I had an informal chat about my model of the Hancock with the guy who ran the ship model business at Mystic Seaport. He thought he could get $15,000 for the model. (This was about twenty years ago.) That sounded great till I found out that his standard commission was 40 percent. That would have left me with $9,000. Figuring in addition the chunk the IRS and the state of North Carolina would take, I decided to hang onto the model. My wife and I now look at is as a sort of insurance policy against financial disaster. ("Well, if things get really rough we can always send the Hancock off to Mystic.")

I'd spent something in the neighborhood of a thousand hours on the model. Even by 1984 standards, if I'd sold it for the amount Mystic was talking about I would have been making a little better than minimum wage. This is the sort of thing that keeps me from building models for money. There are too many easier ways to make it - and on those rare occasions when I have done modeling for dollars I haven't had much fun doing it. I'm happiest keeping my hobby and my income separate.

I think 200,000 Euros is, if anything, a rather low price for that Chebec - even if M. Bello gets to keep the whole amount, as I'm sure he won't. It's a masterpiece.