A bear! A bear, all covered in hair! And other news.

 Finally, some news in this long drought of no-news-ness! Sorry, I'm too chronically-sleep-deprived to come up with a better term than that. But anyway - NEWS! First, Breyer has a new test run model for Collector Club members to enter for - and it's a BEAR! 

The paintjob is pretty detailed, really, but I guess it is a test model, after all. From the website:

For the first time ever, we’re offering up a non-equine test run model for one lucky Collector Club member to purchase! First introduced in 1967, the Bear was sculpted by Breyer’s in-house sculptor and tooling engineer, Chris Hess. The Bear is sometimes found with a Bear Cub, and other times released solo. This particular Bear is the latter, and is painted as a lovely, shaded brown with handpainted claws, likely dating to the early 2000s.

Handpainted claws! Nice. It's a little too expensive for me though, and I don't collect the animal molds anyway. Good luck to everyone entering! 

Our other exciting piece of news today is: the Classics gambler's choice model is finally in stock! Say hello (again) to Johann! 

 

They'll go up for sale tomorrow around 2pm EST. I'm not buying any of these either - so that's a few more for the other Collector Club members to buy! I'm sure they'll sell out fast, so don't dawdle about purchasing them. Good luck tomorrow, everyone! And let's hope we get some more exciting announcements soon! 

Warehouse Find TWH is here!

Good news, everyone! My warehouse find TWH/Bear arrived today, and I have photos! Behold!

First off, here's what the box looked like (sorry for the poor photo):

This is pretty much what I was expecting - generic box, nothing personalized about it. No breed blurb on the back, etc.

Next, the horse herself!

She's pretty basic - flat black, no shading to speak of, chestnuts and horseshoes left black instead of being painted. I should probably be grateful she at least has eyewhites!

However, not painting the shoes and chestnuts does make it easier to avoid screwups. And she is pretty good, quality-wise - some pinpoint white flecks on her off side and maybe a couple other minor things, but that was it. It's hard to screw up flat black, for what it's worth.

And here's a bonus picture of her with the original Bear:

It's hard to see in the photo, but the original Bear does have some reddish shading that the TWH doesn't. Plus the details, of course.

And lastly, here's a photo of their VINs:



TWH on top, Bear on the bottom. The TWH's VIN reads August 08, while Bear's was Oct 2011 if I remember right. So these aren't models that have just been sitting, forgotten, in some dusty warehouse corner for the past few years - they were painted only a couple of months ago. As for why Breyer doesn't just use them for special runs or something, it's probably a cheap/easy way to paint up some old bodies to sell. Especially since most of these warehouse finds have been on older, less popular molds. Rather than flood the market with low-run web specials that won't sell as well, just paint them up as reissues of old regular runs and get rid of the bodies that way. Makes sense to me!

That's all I've got for today. I wonder what sort of warehouse finds we'll get in the future!