I've been modeling along time and have seen many kits reboxed and sold by other manafacturers. Peerless to Italeri to revell etc. But lately its seems to becoming more and more prevelant. I bought a Marquette Sig 33 Pzkpfw I Bison not to long ago thinking it was a new kit, but what I found inside was a complete kit of the old Italeri panzer mkI and a resin and white metal conversion kit. Its going to take a lot of cutting and fiddling to make it right. Now I see revell is reboxing some of the old Dml kits. Are these molds leased to other manafacturers or sold or are the companies partners in this deception. Finally how expensive are these molds to make . It sure seem like a long time between new releases

part answer:

Molds can run anywhere from $100,000 US (think M151 Mutt) to $1,000,000 ( I know this is what is cost Academy to make the SU-27 in 1/48). Most kits probably fall in the $500,000 US range. It also depends on where the molds are made and what they are made of...Japanese, American, and European machinists are much more expensive than those in Asia. And high-tensile steel molds are more expensive (but more resilitiant) than Copper plated steel molds (what Academy uses = cheaper) or regular cast steel plates. Most of the expense lies in time to cut the mold due to the material it is made of, and also in how fast the molds can be cooled before they are used to make another kit (= more expensive to cool faster). Help?

as for reboxing...Maquette's ideas was to give the modeler the whole kit in one box rather than just a conversion...even if there is quite a bit of hacking involved. Maybe they need to make more extensive conversion pieces though...

And other companies like to rebox old moldings if they think they can make $$$...Europe seems to have a harder time getting DML kits than the USA...some kits are even "Not sold in Europe". So Revell and Zvezda are just cashing in on a empty area.

And some molds are just bought outright when companies fold or get rid of them. Peerless to Italeri for example.

I think the owning company leases the molds to another company. I imagine this does not involve actual moving of the molds. Most likely the lessee gets a set number of presses of a kit from wherever the factory actually is. They then put the kits in their own boxes.

The reason why I don't think the molds are moved is that they would then be susceptable to damage. Most of us older folks remember the "Great Train Wreck" when Aurora went out of business and Monogram bought their molds. There were a lot of molds worth a lot of money that were damaged beyond repair and scrapped for the metal.

I bet the DML factory is just pumping out bag shots to Zvezda and Revell of Germany so those companies can issue the kits and try to sneak the old ones by us as new ones. This also works to our favor like the recent Esci M60 kits that are coming out in Revell and Italeri boxes. Great kits available once again.

Have something to add to the molding cost thing. I am working in an industry that I need to make plastic injection molding every single month. (In fact, I had took Armorama member Sushi for a tour in one of the tooling factory). Plastic tooling is not expensive to make, for a plastic kit with the complex of the F/A-18 1/32 from academy, my estimation on the tooling alone will not exceeding USD 150,000.00. However, I do agree with jacques on his accessment, I believe most of the money is invested into research. Although there is a tooling cost is somewhat fixed, there is really no telling how much a plastic company is investing in researching to produce accurate kit.

And for DML, Tamiya, etc, these companies that are operate in the Far East, the tooling cost is cheaper. and PS injection's mold is also cheaper than ABS tooling, and with the company looking at an estimation of less than 500,000 kits sold in the tool's life time, they don't need to invest in really high quality steel for making the mold, that knock down the tool price as well.

If not for the unfathomable research cost, I will be going to the model business. there is really not much to the investment.

The cost to make a mold varies from country to country and in the way you make it. I can talk for what concerns Italy:
- To make a mold designing the kit parts 50% on CAD and 50% by hand it ranges between 40000 and 80000 USD (this is the Italeri approach)
- If you are going to design it using 100% CAD the cost can easily double what I've already mentioned because of the extra time you have to spend (this is the Tamiya approach)
- If the mould is going to be done in tempered steel you have to add another 20 to 30% on the above mentioned cost. Over the last years lots of manufacturers abandoned this technique due to the small number of copies they do, so the molds last less and cost less, this is the reason why we see models coming up and disapperaing an year later they've been issued to re- appear some time later. The old ones were all tempered so the very old molds are almost indistructible and this is the reason why you see the models often re-edited
- in the majority of the cases moulds passing from a manufacturer to another are leased, only some times they're purchased
- very often other manufactures just re-box the other's kits that continue to be manufactured by the moulds owner. This is the case of Tamiya in Japan just re-boxing Italeri kits coming from Italy under the big T's label
- the mould "deployment" time depends from how many people is involved in the design and implementation phases. Here it's between 2 and 6 months
I hope this can help.
Ciao