October 2, 2011
George Sellios has been doing the craftsman kit gig for a long time. It is fair to say he has the whole thing down pat. I surmise many will concur.
For starters, George packs a lot of stuff into those yellow boxes (roughly the size of a shoe box). Not only does he cram a ton of model railroad goodness in each yellow box, he does so very carefully. Here you see the kit box as first opened:
And here we see the kit's contents all neatly packed:
For $265.00 plus $15.00 shipping the modeler gets:
- a bunch of color-coded stripwood,
- a thin roll of roofing paper,
- some rubber bands,
- 4 plaster castings (which are amazingly detailed),
- a small box of metal castings (the real reason many folks purchase an FSM kit),
- some plastic window castings,
- a small length of scale chain,
- color signage for the structures,
- corrugated roofing material,
- 4 very large instruction sheets,
- one giant sheet of detailing and weathering tips (which many testify have taught them to be the modelers they are today),
- a last minute addendum to the instructions referencing Karl Scholz's findings when first coloring the plaster wall castings
- and one large poster with photos of the finished model built by George Sellios himself and photographed by George's daughter Tara.
All comes neatly packaged in a manner that will cause the box never to close shut the way it arrived at your doorstep once you open the kit's box. I have no clue how the man does it. Yet he has been doing it hundreds of times each year for the last 30 plus years. This is very encouraging. It proves to the modeler that one has purchased a quality product. Perhaps that is why many of these kits sit unbuilt on model railroaders' shelves all over. The kits are just too pretty to muck up by taking everything out of the box :-)
Here we see the artwork on the box's lid:
I've seen autographed box lids in the past. Mine is not. Perhaps this makes mine special.
A brief look at the instructions sheets and the color poster with delicious views of the pilot model:
And lastly the box inside the box. The highly detailed metal castings which for years have set FSM kits apart from the rest.
Next up, the new stuff. What makes Yehuda's unique among all FSM kits. The plaster castings.