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Hello,
I read this thread in an other Forum:
http://www.kampfgruppe144.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8617
Can anybody confirm this?
Thanks in advance!
Marco
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If true, that would be a shame and another loss for the hobby.
Although the quality and accuracy of their kits aren’t the best, that’s reflected in the pricing and they probably serve to some extent as an entry-level route for beginners, especially kids.
If every kit manufacturer targeted only expert modellers as their demographic there would be much less incentive for newbies to enter the hobby.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone …
I saw the same thing on the Aviation Megastore website:
“According to our distributor MINICRAFT has ended her activities per 1st of November 2022 and no stocks will be coming in anymore. We still have some stocks of their kits but when gone it is finished.
Get them while you can”
Mike
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It’s sad if it’s true, especially since it was Minicraft in the mid-1990s that did so much to bring us new-tool 1:144 airliners, and subjects we hadn’t seen before. Some of them were better than others (and some of them were downright awful), some of them have been surpassed by other kits, and some of them are amazing, but they all made a difference, got people building airliners who might not have otherwise, and got us where we are now.
Be that as it may, given that Minicraft issued and reissued these kits in so many boxings (with the exception of the DC-8-63, perhaps), and given how plentiful they have been in the stores, I have a feeling they won’t be hard to find on sale tables at swap meets and through secondhand dealers for years to come.
Jodie Peeler
"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." - Sayre's Law
Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Their website says the company has been around for 40 years. Al Trendle sold it to David Huff. Huff sadly passed from cancer and his wife became president. Then another person took over. We’ve heard rumors over the past few years that things weren’t great with the company. If the company shuts down one wonders what the future holds. Both Airfix and Revell were able to “return from the dead”. As to Minicraft is it the one US company making new mold kits? Atlantis and on a smaller scale Glencoe have been doing re-pops. When was the last time Testors released a kit? I suspect with RPM dropping Testors paints that there won’t be any more Testors kits either.
Ken
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Don’t completely despair. Where there is a demand, there is a way. Somewhere at the turn of the century AMT/Ertl & Revell/Monogram could not make a profit from any Star Trek (yeah, niche/fetish/small market) kits. Then a company called Round 2 bought up the AMT molds, then using new mold making technology, started creating new pop culture kits. And for maximum confusion, using the all but defunct AMT & MPC brands. This even started market competition with a new company called Moebius (resurrecting the Aurora brand. Aurora!) creating new injected plastic kits of subjects that I thought were going to be forever produced from garage kit manufacturers. It may be several years, and the airline industry (looking at you SouthWest) need to ameliorate their public images, but airliner modelers could experience the same renaissance as the sci-fi geeks have experienced.
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