Intro - Why Model Factory Hiro?
The short answer is that if you are interested in building 1/12 scale car models, your options are limited and most of the existing ones are old and leave much to be desired.
The hefty price tags of the MFH kits make most of us wince, but once you consider the ~$250 eBay price of a 1/12 Tamiya F1 car, plus the perhaps outrageous $450 Top Studio detail-up set... it starts to make sense. Or at least, whether that makes sense to you or not, you can see why the market shakes out as it does.
And sure, if you are intrepid you could save on the detail-up set by scratch building/printing everything yourself.
But the real reason to buy these kits isn't because you couldn't do so, but rather because you just want to save the mental bandwidth and start with everything you need inside of the same box.
And that's all assuming you're even working on something for which another manufacturer makes a kit. Which they probably don't.
Still, most of the details included are things that I could CAD model and print or otherwise manufacture myself, but that takes up a lot of time and mental bandwidth. Between CAD modeling, testing print iterations, and prepping the parts to be used, I've probably put a few dozen hours into simply making a new Jordan 191 seat that doesn't have belts molded into it (barf).
Such is to say, I do place some premium on actually being able to start and finish a model in a reasonable amount of time, and starting with all (or most) of what you need goes a long way towards that goal.
All of that circles back to the appeal of the MFH kits:
You get a box that contains 99% of what you need to create a genuinely outstanding model. In large scale.
The only limiting factor on your result is your own skills.
I don't know about you, but this is exactly the kind of thing that draws me towards modeling in the first place, and it probably explains how I was drawn to MFH.
That, or I just like F1. Hard to say.
So if any of this interests you, the following posts will explain my process for actually dealing in the construction and finishing of these kits. I just wanted to start with a bit explaining why one might be into this in the first place.
Thanks for reading.