Thunderbirds Fireflash

[richellis]

Hi,

Ive been looking on e-bay at Thunderbirds kits, esp the Fireflash airliner, but the only one thats come up is an Aoshima one at £65, is any thing else available and how rare are kits of this airliner?

Thanks

[TheModeller]

Hi,

Ive been looking on e-bay at Thunderbirds kits, esp the Fireflash airliner, but the only one thats come up is an Aoshima one at £65, is any thing else available and how rare are kits of this airliner?

Thanks

AFAIK the kits been out of production for some time, presumably the tooling still exists, some of the other Aoshima stuff has re-surfaced as re-releases, theres a large scale Thunderbird 2 that was in pics on the HLJ site a couple of years back.

I'm sure, many moons ago I saw a 1/144th resin (fibre-glass?) Fireflash advertised by Comet Minatures in a magazine, as to availabilty I've no idea but I've never seen any other injection kit apart from the Aoshima one.

You could try asking over on starshipmodeler.com, wealth of knowledgable guys over there, if there is another kit they'd know...

[richellis]

thanks, put a stop on my what if build! i did want two!

Ill have to hold on for a re-run!

[smyfe]

I don't know if it will be any use to you, but as plastic kits are about as rare as me finishing a model , Gary Pilsworth has designed a free paper model of fireflash at papermodellers.com

http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/downloa...ile&id=1006

Mick

[marty_hopkirk]

Aoshima have at least two separate production runs of Fireflash. It's just that it is custom and practice for the Japanese companies to only produce quantities they *know* they can sell, so they effectively go out of production straight away. So one has to purchase very quickly after they are released. In fact there is a surfeit of Anderson models at the moment, a bit back the Japanese companies were seemingly re-popping and issuing new kits for fun. I'm sure Fireflash will appear again, it's a case of when

£65 is not as bad as it sounds, the original import price was circa £55 (35ish if one self imported and didn't get hit by customs) if memory serves. It's also a very good kit and comes with the elevator cars and base. But sans the internal 'lounge' detail which would be very visible. It also correctly captures the fuselage "double decker" figure of eight cross section.

I see it's not showing in stock at HLJ, but one can get it new from here:

http://fabgearusa.com/fireflash_model_by_aoshima.html

To put this further in perspective the smaller and not so good in my opinion Warp resin kit was circa £50, the resin seems very brittle as well. The Australian outfit Brsfx did a large "studio scale". I wasn't entirely sure about the profile so I eventually sold my copy on a couple of years ago.

One day I'll get around to having a go at the Aoshima kits I have in the pending pile.

Marty...

Edited September 25, 2011 by marty_hopkirk