Here’s a closer look at the Cacho Customs ‘50 Merc. If you get a chance to see this ride in person, it is to die for! Suede black, chopped, dropped, and customized beyond belief! They don’t call it “Misfit” for nothing!

That grill is mean muggin! And some clean pinstriping to top it off.

Now that is just Cool!

That’s what we call “Layin’ Frame!”

Here is the front view of the tooling sample. It’s not quite as low, but hey, it’s gotta roll right?

And here’s the back, I think she’s got some junk in the trunk!

And here is the final product. Well, one of them, it will be produced in various colors, including one that is identical to the real “Misfit.” Keep an eye out for this one!

So yesterday I was called upon my duty as a parent to go on a field trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. We have twins (a boy and girl) that were both going on the field trip, but on separate buses. Our little guy though (Jacob), it was his first time at a place like this. He’s always talking about animals, he loves watching anything on discovery, and he loves sharks, tigers, and lions in particular. So we started our journey on a Monday morning, the fog was back, along with the traffic.

Here’s Jake, ready to go, hiding behind the sign after we entered the park.

Things look so much bigger and cooler from his point of view!

He’s on top of the world!

This little momma was swinging around with her little baby clinging to her. It was so cool! She stopped right in front of us and cheesed it up for our camera!

The girls (including my daughter) wanted to cool off, and were playing with this thing that dropped water randomly and when they pulled the ropes. Here they are scattering when an unexpected drop of water came down, and little Jake got caught in the melee and fell to the ground, losing his shoe! Crazy kids!

As we were walking the rigorous up and down paths, we heard a roar. When we heard it, we happened to be walking on a dirt trail with trees on each side, the girls freaked out thinking something was coming after us. Well, we found the tiger’s area, and Jake wanted to get a closer look.

After that we saw some elephants and everybody was pretty tired from all the walking, including daddy CASTRO, a.k.a. “Tour Guide CASTRO”.

And with that…Jake said…”I’m Outta Here!”

You may wonder what this has to do with Die-Cast or Toys for that matter, well, NOTHING! This is just a day in the life of a CAPD designer, and it’s experiences like this that keep me creating and enjoying life! Till next time!

Here’s another “Maisto out of the closet” item. Not a new product (we used to make a line of 3″ military die-cast) but instead a different sort of packaging. This was one of many ideas supplied to us by an outside toy development firm about eight years ago. We didn’t use a single one of their ideas.

But it definitely was “The Bomb!”

Today we would like to give you a little insight into diecast design by way of the E Sheet. E Sheets are a critical part of our design process. This is one of the many tools our talented in house designers use to design and create our diecast products. Here they can choose critical information such as body color, graphic design/vector art, pantone colors and wheels from our library.

We start off by taking pics of our vehicle, in this case we have a 2006 Ford Mustang. We then bring those pics into Adobe Photoshop, the industry standard for image editing. Photoshop gives us plenty of ways to manipulate the body color on this model, and in this case we go with white.

We then save our file and bring it into Adobe Illustrator (another standard) by placing it into one of our E Sheet templates.

This is were the fun really starts. As we said earlier, we design our vehicle and add all necessary information to be used in the engineering and manufacturing process. Our finished E Sheet should look like this:

Buy turning off a layer in the file we get to see our vector art.

And here is the finished product!

R2B2

…well, actually like 8:30 to about 6:00! We were extremely busy today, so I didn’t have time to post anything. But busy is good right? It’s not just today either, we have loads of stuff to knock out in the next few weeks so you guys can have more cool stuff to buy soon! We’ve got a zillion e-sheets to do, packaging, turnarounds, and several other projects. Plus we get bombarded with mockup requests on a weekly basis, oh and the BLOG! We want to keep you all informed on the latest happenings with Maisto, our twin Sistah from anotha mother Bburago, and the CAPD! Some things I’d love to share, but you know, we gotta keep some things secret! What does everyone think of having some contests up in here? You know, giveaways, limited stuff, customs, stickers, freebies, what does everyone think? Let’s see some comments!

…that’s all we are saying! This is another installment of “Maisto Out of The Closet!” These entries are really fun because we get to go back and look at old releases, crappy deco’s, and some concepts that just didn’t quite make it. This one is actually pretty cool, and it really was produced according to Charles (a.k.a. The Keeper of Maisto Knowledge, a.k.a. The Grim Reaper!) Seeing this piece will take you back to ‘69, back to Woodstock, and make you want to break out your bell-bottoms!

Here is the kicker, Charles dug up the ‘99 catalog where this piece was available, and it was branded under VW “CE” Edition. “CE” standing for “Consciousness Expanding”…WT…? WOW, something tells me if these were sold at Woodstock, we would have made a killin’! (figuratively speaking, of course!)

These are 1:18 scale by the way. GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVY!!!!

Part 4 of our ongoing story of following a new 1:24 scale model from beginning to the store shelf.

No “new” news but here are two more photos from the measuring session.

What color exterior/interior should we make first?

Yeah, so it’s Monday and the Maisto CAPD is already hard at work, going over new castings and e-sheets. B-RAD is all caffeinated and ready to go! R2B2 is going over his list and checking it twice! And T-LUG, well, he’s overseeing everything making sure the conference table is freshly dipped!

Here we have B-RAD adding up all the work he has ahead of him…

and Ralph making sure his list matches the rest of the teams…

and CASTRO, he’s thinking about what he’s gonna have for lunch… (hey how are we supposed to work and be creative on an empty stomach? Right?)

here’s a little peek of stuff that’s just laying around on a daily basis… (and Ralph in the background looking…unsure)

these Transporterz were sitting in the foreground and I just had to share. They sure are nice, and the Merc…is gorgeous!!!

I think this Fire deco is one of my favorites! B-RAD killed it on this one! Don’t sleep on this set!

it seems T-Lug got upset with all the other toys getting all the attention, he started to pout and Ralph had to console him with a big “T-Lug Hug!” There, there T-Lug!

After witnessing Ralph and T-Lug in a big “manly” hug, Darrell came in with a WTH? look on his face. But when he noticed the camera, he took off running.

Behind the scenes, Jose was getting down on some deco designs.

and Charles was getting down on some files that didn’t look too fun! Sometimes for fun Charles likes to have us throw ideas into the air, while he shoots them down at a rapid-fire pace!

Christian was mysteriously out today, are there any soccer games going on? Oh wait, it’s Cinco de Mayo, I bet we can find him at the local bar. I went to the big man’s office (r h b) and he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’s at the bar with DiMex celebrating!

So my wife asks me this morning, “What is it with young boys and cars?” You see little Ralphie was never handed a car since he was born, and now look at him, naturally playing with a car on a floor rug that has a road printed on it, all on his own.

Now I can vividly remember my days as a youth having little diecast cars in my hand and the feeling I got. I am 32 now and I still get that same feeling when I hold a pro rod or an outlaw in my hand. What is it?

Personally to me, as an adult I think its the fact that you can own a Lamborghini Gallardo without breaking the bank, and as a kid, well i think its the fact that you can drive a “cool car” (what lil Ralph calls them) around the world!

We here at Maisto would like to ask you all the same question, What is it?
R2B2

Part 3 of our ongoing story of following a new 1:24 scale model from beginning to the store shelf.

The Product Development Request form has been signed by the company president so this is now an official project (we knew it would be so we jumped the gun a bit on getting photos and specs in advance). It has been assigned an SKU (stock keeping unit = the part number) of 18-42016. Brian and his crew at our Hong Kong headquarters located a GT-R there. They took measurements and shot more photos. They will now be further analyzing the information and will be planning the number of parts, determining the various materials to be used and instructing our modelmakers in China to begin sculpting the master model.