Wait… What? The price of the kit at Amazon it $65.00! :eek: The Guillow’s website says it’s $72! :eek: :eek: The best-flying Guillow’s kit I built was the Arrow. Suggested retail price is $45. Amazon has it for $36. I think it was $8 when I got it in the late-'70s/early-'80s.
Not that I have the time or room to build these things, and anyway, I have boxes of unbuilt Guillow’s models, when did these kits get so expensive?
one of the downsides of getting old is you remember when things were much cheaper. I remember comics were either 10 or 25 cents. My father talked about 5 cent candy bars.
I used to build models and I can remember there was a big price jump back around 1990. It was supposed to be because a spike in oil prices was driving up the price of plastics. But it seemed that once the prices went up, they never came back down.
I thought this thread was going to be about people models, then software models. I was a little surprised to read about airplane models…
Honestly, those prices don’t seem all that out-of-line to me. Guess I’m approaching it from the viewpoint of someone who has considered $400 scale models of railway locomotives.
The thing is, these aren’t detailed recreations. They’re basically a printed sheet, some balsa wood with the parts cut into them (in a manner of speaking, ‘printed sheets’), a little wire, and a little plastic. They probably cost under a dollar to produce. Guillow’s kits are designed and intended for kids and teens, and to be played with. Anything more than about $15 for a biplane kit seems excessive.
Ouch. If I were going to do very many of those I would invest in a laser CNC platform and do my own. Thousands of plans available online that could be converted to CAD with a little effort.
Back when I was in grade school, a 24" wingspan balsa/tissue model was $0.25, and a 15" wingspan one was $0.15. That was some time ago. If memory serves, these were made by Comet, but I could be wrong there.
Yeah, Comet were the cheaper ones, in an orange box… Strombeckers were more. Complete with sniffable glue. Comets I think came with a casein glue powder you had to mix yourself.
Model railroading isn’t the same, either. And slot cars. My childhood next-door, with the iron-lunged polio daughter and swimming pool, quit his engineering job at the missile plant to run a slot-car parlor. It must have paid because he bought a new Lincoln. But I digress. I forget the brands but circa 1960 cheap airplane kits were 49 cents, mid-range were $1.49, fancy ones were $2.49. That kit of the nuke submarine Nautilus I got for Xmas must have cost the folks $9.95 with another dime for a tube of Testors glue. The Gilbert chemistry set cost more. Too bad it wasn’t the nuclear science set.
Wiki says the Paul K. Guillow, Inc. makes $5-$6 million a year. They probably sell the little gliders and rubber-band prop planes by the ton but have much lower volume for the real models and to price them at considerable cost over materials. The number of models their website shows out of stock indicates they don’t rush to replenish stock, it may take them years to sell off the kits after each production run.
The gliders and rubber band planes aren’t incredibly inexpensive, I don’t remember how much they were when I was a kid, but well under a dollar. They’re running from around $2.50 and up individually on the website, but get pretty cheap in volume, and I think they still have a box of them at the local hardware store going for just a dollar and change.
I build a couple of balsa kits when I was a kid. I had no luck with those little engines in planes or cars so the planes just glided a few times. In the 70s a lot more inexpensive ready to fly planes were available. The Cox tether line plane was around for a while but now there were plastic planes ready to fly, then electrics emerged, and lots of inexpensive toy versions like Air Hogs that didn’t need batteries and motors. Building those balsa models is for someone who really like building models, if you just want to fly something there are so many easier ways to get in the air now.
One time, I bought a 1/72 Japanese Zero kit from 7-11 for 39¢. It was very cheap, and lacked details like landing gear (they were moulded in the up position). Once it was built and painted, it looked almost as good as a Tamiya or Airfix kit.
Back to balsa… When I was building these kits, I lived in the desert. Plenty of room to fly. I built a Midwest ‘Sniffer’ with a Cox .020 engine and a dethermaliser on the stab. I had to chase it down on my motorcycle. Up here, there are trees everywhere. The only open space is the bay (which is a wide mud flat at low tide). Not really ideal for free flight models.
With prices the way they are, I really should sell off my vintage kits. But I’ll keep the Sniffer kit (or kits), and the Arrow(s).
I remember comics were either 10 or 25 cents. My father talked about 5 cent candy bars.
