TOPIC:

Does anyone know when Tamiya stopped producing 4-way box wrenches with their branding on the side? 

I'm certain my NIB Grasshopper BITD had one, and I'm confident some much later cars had them too, right up to the Bigwig.

IIRC around the Monster Beetle (58060, very end of 1986) is when they began to change - but I could be completely wrong about that.


My reason for asking is that larbut has given me access to the articles section of the site, and I wanted to post something small as a test ...

I picked the 4-way box wrench & the first 100 as something suitably small, but of course it's grown, and I'd like to put in something a bit more accurate than my finger in the air guess.

TIA

  

Sorry Jonny. Can't help you. I'll see in the bigwig box if it has the wrench and if it has the lettering.

I'll find the wrench from my Super Hornet, and see what it has on it.

I can dig out my early Fox's one and check if that'd help? I'm not sure exactly what year it was made, as I think it'd been in the shop for a while when my dad bought it for me, but it's early as in it's got the early CVAs with the extra floating piston and a little spring instead of the rubber diaphragm, and doesn't have the droop limit blocks on the rear arms/gearbox.

Pretty sure all vintage Foxes had them too, but all info will help
 

Jonny wrote:

Pretty sure all vintage Foxes had them too, but all info will help
 

You are, of course, correct!

 

And now that I look at the photo I took, I appear to have focussed on the dust on the windowsill instead of the wrench... Oops!

Had a look, and no markings on my Super Hornet wrench.

Thank you both

We've narrowed it down to somewhere between 1986 and 1993, but I'd like to do a bit better

It should be said that I don't believe that there's a hard date at which Tamiya decided to through out or remelt their stock of branded 4 way wrenches in favour of plain ones - there's a possibility the box wrenches were outsourced, some moulds could wear out, and it's likely that Tamiya would have had multiple lines putting kits together, so multiple parts bins, etc. 

This might explain why I think the Monster Beetle (1986 to 1993) didn't (I've had two, the early white body one didn't come with a wrench, a presumably late red body one had a plain wrench), but my Avante (1988 to 1991, I had an early one BITD) did.

Hypothesising on top of that, I'm inclined to think the cutoff date is around 1992 - unless anyone can add anything  

It's probably the type of things difficult to narrow it down. Memory is sometimes playing against us, and further, NIB kits are only a time capsule within the production. The fact that sometime one kit have something specific doesn't show it was the case for all the kits;. I believe this is true for Tamiya, but it is also true for Kyosho and for Marui... I've look into some specific differences between models within Marui range, and the only thing you can find nowadays is NIBs, pictures of NIB, memory of some (maybe failing) and dated press article (one of the reasons I like rcpaper.com, retromodelisme.com and some other sites that allows to consult old rc newspapers and catalogs) - and sometimes those dated articles goes against the rule you can extrapolate from NIBs... 
And if you ask Tamiya (in that case it is possible as they still exist), they probably won't know as well (or they don't care). Good luck in your search