[Car] Scale question

Most of the manufacturers outside the US use 1/24th. I suppose Monogram went with 1/24th to attract a bigger audience overseas. For me it always meant that I'd just as soon skip their kits. They just don't look right sitting with 1/25th cars, especially if they're at all similar. Most of my Monogram purchases were the antique cars because a Duesenberg will look gigantic next to a Model T anyway. Thus the disparity in scales was not so evident. Where I tripped up was going for their

1/24th Thunderbirds. The '58 doesn't look too good next to AMT's '60. Nor does their '56 next to AMT's '57. To make things worse the only '70s Thunderbird out there is Arii/Otaki's 1/24th '72. It sure looks big next to AMT's '71. I completely skipped all the Mopar muscle and Mustangs they brought out over the years. It says something that several years ago they threw in the towel and put out kits in 1/25th.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

I don't know how the history of scales came to be, but there is an arithmetic pattern. As I understand it, and I may be wrong, 1/24 and

1/25 had nothing to do with each other; they were of different systems.

One system was:

1/100 1/50 1/25 Obviously, each scale is twice the one preceding it.

Another system was:

1/72 (where the 6' figure is 1" long) 1/48 1/32 In this system, each scale is 1.5 times the one preceding it.

1/24 sort of fits in as it's twice the size of 1/48. 1/96 is half the size of 1/48. 1/144 makes sense as it's half of 1/72. Similarly 1/200 scale is half of 1/100. So these other scales sort of creep in like that.

Where 1/35, 1/40, 1/43, 1/76, 1/87 and all the strange scales came from is beyond me! Don't even start talking about box scales... and the latest one of those was the William Brothers release of the Lockheed Electra in 1/53 scale in the 1990s!

--- Tontoni

I don't know this answer but I find a thing funny.

When measuring in feet and inches, scales of multiples of 6 (1:24, 1:48 etc.) have more sense: in 1:24, 2 feet of the real thing equal to 2 inches of the scale model. When measuring in metres and centimetres, scales of multiples of 5 (1:25, 1:50, 1:200 etc) are a wiser choice. 1 meter in 1:25 scale equals to 4 cms, plain and easy.

While in N.A. they use imperial measuring, car models are made in 1:25 scale, in the rest of the world where metric measuring is mostly used,

1:24 is the common scale.

Ciao! R.

I think your math is off on 1/24. 2 feet on the real thing is only 1 inch on the model.

1/24 scale goes back well before plastic modeling. It is an architectural scale. Architects like scales they can express as so many inches per foot. Look at how many of the popular modeling scales are divisible by 12. So 1/12, 1/24, 1/48, 1/76, etc. had roots in architectural scales. Of course, there IS such a thing as an "architectural scale" in the hardware sense. It is frequently a triangular thing with 6 scales on it, most of the divisible by 12 (or a fraction of 12) scales