Still Rolling along

I’m sure some of you will be familiar with ATC (“A Top Collector”) Models from Hong Kong.

They did some pretty nice Rolls Royce and Bentley models, which needless to say were not licenced by RR, so no UK or European dealers would import them in case RR found out and had them seized by Customs and crushed. They had to be bought direct from Hong Kong. One or two of their efforts were criticised for inaccuracies, but I doubt if any model producer has escaped criticism for the occasional detail fault, and generally I thought these ATC models were pretty attractively done.

However, I think I reported here 3 or 4 years ago that I had given up on them because they didn’t seem to have anything new, they just kept shuffling the same old pictures around on their website to try and give the impression of new offerings. I wondered why they were still trying to flog a dead horse.

Then a few days ago I got an e-mail saying that for technical reasons their old website didn’t work anymore, and giving a link to their new website – which looked exactly the same and seemed to have the same old stuff. Then I saw they actually had two new items. A Rolls Silver Seraph and a Corniche V (the convertible version of the Seraph).

The Silver Seraph, a much-improved successor to the Silver Spirit, was introduced in 1998 while Rolls were involved in the messy business of being taken over by BMW, so the car didn’t get much promotion, didn’t sell that well and was dropped in 2002. RR were particularly picky about licencing models in those days so (to my knowledge at least) nobody modelled the Seraph, although for some reason Minichamps were allowed to do the identically-bodied Bentley Arnage. I resorted to making a resin copy of a grille from another Rolls model and grafting it on the Minichamps. Better than nothing.

But now ATC have done the Seraph and Corniche, in a variety of colours, and they look pretty nice to fill a gap in any RR collection. The sedan is US$85 and the convertible is US$80. Free shipping worldwide.

I decided to order one of each but although the website says PayPal is accepted, when I went to the checkout they seemed determined to make me register all my personal details including credit card number – and my Firefox browser was flagging the site as “not secure” because it didn’t have “https” encryption. So I e-mailed them, and within a few hours a lady replied, saying she understood my concerns about the security of my details but it wasn’t a problem – she would just send me a PayPal payment request. Which she did, and that worked fine.

And this morning I got an e-mail saying

Well, I thought to myself, there’s gratitude for you.

Here's a link to the site, if anyone is interested

1/43 Rolls Royce Silver Seraph 1998-2002 [1998-red] - $85.00 : Yinmei E-commerce Model World