I’ve heard that Mr Tamiya was very hands-on in choosing their topics for kits so it will be interesting to see how things change. But what a company he built!
Edit: here is the official Tamiya announcement https://www.tamiya.com/english/pressrelease/20250722/index.h...
Their assembly manuals have always been top notch. Giving me hours of entertainment even after assembling the model. It was a great introduction to systems design.
I’ve been wanting to get a re-release of the original grasshopper. It’s too cool to pass up.
My best friend had a Hornet. I was so jealous.
But you know you had a serious problem when you started ordering sealed ball bearing kits to replace the teflon bushings in the drive-train. That's where my adolescent paper route income went, instead of drinks or drugs...
That said, I'm surprised once in a while, like Yodobashi camera in Japan, or some other specialty stores in akihabara etc which feature lots of this.
any other must-see stores?
It was a bunch of plastic and nothing competitive but I must have rebuilt it a dozen times just for fun. Then at some point I got a Motown Missile 48,000 RPM motor for it. It was a battery connector melting ballast resistor glowing riot. But eventually my parents got tired of taking me to the hobby shop for replacement spur gears... next xmas I got a rc10 graphite and never really looked back at Tamiya anything.
But it was a great low-cost introduction to how cars work and the hobby in general, super fun times.
RIP
Of course the old NiCad battery is long since dead. And R/C frequencies have changed since then, so the controller and receiver are probably useless. But from time to time I wonder about what it would take to modernize and revive it.
