Just to ramp up the intrigue surrounding Meng and their tooling work for Wingnut Wings, I understand that as well as the 1/32 Fokker Dr.1, Meng were also doing the tooling for a Wingnuts 1/24th scale Fokker Dr.1.
Yes, it seems Wingnuts had plans to launch a whole new range of 1/24th scale kits. As well as the Fokker Dr.1, the line was intended to include a Sopwith Camel and Albatros D.V/a. If only….
Dave Wilson
Gold Coast
Australia
If true, that goes some way to explain why WNW ceased trading.
I really can't see many people, having heavily invested in 1/32 WNW kits, deciding to fork out yet more money for the same kits in a larger scale? Yes, some will, but from what I know about modellers, not many.
It's just financial suicide. They have numerous sold out lines that obviously have untapped demand remaining, which they could tap by running more batches at a lower marginal cost, since all the development costs are already sunk.
They could have reduced the number of boxing's, by including late/early parts in the same box, like many manufacturers do, thereby reducing costs.
They could issue just a single version of unpopular/expensive kits, like the DFW & Felixstowe's.
They could have opened the market potential by providing special edition kits to sell up, and Eduard style overtrees kits to sell down.
But no, let's start up an entire line of 1/24 kits, based upon - I assume - PJ's desire to model them. Just crazy.
At some point, an accountant looking at the books, the budgets and the projections, must have seen the writing on the wall in the form of large losses that got larger as WNW did more kits, and flagged up the figures to PJ. Even multi-millionaires have a limit, and it seems WNW crossed that red line, given a push by the coronavirus nibbling away at his wealth.
The 1/24 line doesn't strike me as that crazy, as long as it was done in moderation and used for the most iconic aircraft of the Great War. I think they would have sold just fine.
Clearly, what killed them is not producing enough bread and butter kits like the DR.I (earlier) or the SPAD XIII, etc.
On top of that, the killer surely was getting bogged down in excessive development time for hugely complex, large, and expensive kits that were doomed to poor sales numbers from the start. And I'm pretty sure we all could have known which kits those were going to be before they even went into development.
As I have mentioned before, the Felixstowe is a good example. Those kits have been available for below retail for a long time; they are just too big, too complex, too much rigging, and require way too much display space to be financially viable.
Still, the development of maybe one of those sorts of kits probably could have been offset by lots of good selling popular kits.
But the ratio of complex/crazy kits to iconic/bread and butter kits was all wrong.
This jibes with our Dave and WNW's Dave in their respective podcasts suggesting WNW could have been financially viable had they gone a different route.
WNW's efforts at creating good rigging instructions were always rather insufficient.
I think the largest factor in keeping a lot of modelers away from WNW products was the rigging. Had they done a better job at making that process much easier for the modeler, it may have helped.
The simple diagram they include in the instructions could have been much more elaborate; I always said they should have had a second instruction manual just for the rigging, walking the modeler through the process stage by stage just like the other aspects of the kit. The idea being to make the process less intimidating to the uninitiated.
It's all water under the bridge now!
