Model Forum / General / Models / November 2007

Kmart had Pocher for a short time.  They got them the first time
Pocher went belly up.  That was probably at least 25 and closer to 30
years ago.  I picked up 8 kits at that time.  I built 3 of these over
the years and bought a few others along the way.  Right now, I have 8
unbuilt with the shrink wrap still intact (:>

Pocher suffered a fire in their factory sometime in the early 1970's;
they took the remaining stock in their warehouse that had smoke damage
to the boxes and sold it a rock bottom prices to raise money to rebuild
in a hurry.
A lot of it ended up in K-marts at around $20-25 in around 1970-74.
I'd heard about these kits from old Scale Modeler Magazine articles.
They were frankly awe-struck by them, with their thousands of of
plastic, vinyl, and metal parts that used almost no glue to assemble,
but rather screwed and bolted together like an actual vehicle.
To give you some idea of the detail, the Alfa-Romeo had wheels that were
made up of huge numbers of stainless steel spokes, each with a
individual metal spoke tensioning nut at the top that you assembled on a
supplied form.
Inside the engine, chromed brass pistons slid up-and-down inside of
chromed brass cylinders on chromed brass connecting rods mounted on a
plastic crankshaft operated by the front crank starter handle.
A small minted bronze and completely legible Alfa-Romeo seal sat atop
the radiator, directly under the chrome-plated brass screw-off radiator cap.
Tiny metal buckles secured in place the leather straps that held the
hood shut.
At the time, the retail price of one of these kits was $200-350 dollars,
which would equate to around $600 to $800 nowadays.
The truly amazing one was supposed to be the Rolls-Royce, with its
folding  convertible roof, key that turned the headlights on, and tiny
leather driving gloves in the glove compartment.
If you want to build a Pocher Alfa-Romeo; this offers a little help:
http://www.scaleautoworks.com/detailsetsAlfa.html#book
Even going whole-hog on the kit, it wouldn't take anywhere near as long
to build as a wooden square-rigger with rigging, especially if the ship
model  was of true plank-on-frame construction.
If anyone wants to see a oddball wooden ship model, a few years back I
scratchbuilt a Greek pentaconter (fifty-oared single oar level warship)
in 54 mm scale from the time of the Trojan War for a friend who had
given me a set of great translations of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey". I
named it the "Athena" as it was supposed to be Odysseus' flagship, and
left half the hull unplanked so you could see the internal structure.
I have a lot of jpgs of this.
I made it out of balsa wood for ease of forming the hull planks around
the framework, and ended up with a model that weighed around 1/2 pound
sitting on a ten pound display base. :-)
I still have to replace the shields and crow's-nest on it someday, but
other than that it came out as a very striking model, and was a great
deal of fun to build.

Pat

Yep, I got mine at K-mart.  Someone at K-mart found a hobby
distributor going out of business and bought all their Pocher kits,
that is what the guy at the local K-mart store said.  This was many
years ago, about 1975.