A Thousand Model Cars

Seventeen years, I've always been making someone else's characters. This one is mine. The first one.

Seventeen Years

May 2026 R&D & Design Division Tooling Workshop

Takeda spent seventeen years as a figure prototype sculptor in Osaka. Worked for Bandai, Good Smile, Kaiyodo. The Gunpla parts he's sculpted could cover a full tatami room. But they were all someone else's IP.

At fifty, he quit. Spent six months in his studio sculpting a 1:64 Subaru Impreza 22B — his favorite rally car. He wasn't selling a license. He was selling himself. He wanted to make a thousand, under his own name.

He approached five factories. The first three quoted prices that included IP licensing — they assumed he had a license. He didn't. The fourth said a thousand was too few. The fifth never replied.

The sixth email came to us.

A Mold That Doesn't Live on Volume

1:64 diecast is an extremely mature category. Hot Wheels makes hundreds of millions a year, mold cost amortized over millions of units, pennies per piece. One thousand units, six molds — body, chassis, interior, wheels, front bumper, rear bumper. Each mold costs about eight thousand yuan. Spread across a thousand cars, tooling alone is forty-eight yuan per unit. Add material, paint, tampo printing, packaging — cost per unit comes to over seventy yuan. He planned to sell at one-fifty.

Margins were thin, but they existed. The real problem wasn't margin — it was finding anyone willing to make six molds for a thousand pieces.

The tooling lead looked at Takeda's prototype and didn't say anything. The prototype was a twenty-millimeter-thick block of pale gray resin, sculpted by Takeda with carving knives and sandpaper over three months. The roof curve transition was so smooth it looked like it had been calculated by a mathematical formula.

He said: I'll handle the tooling myself.

Six Molds and One 22B

The molds took six weeks. The hardest was the body — the 1:64 roof curve is a double curvature, and the precision of that entire surface from windshield to rear determined whether the car looked right. Takeda's prototype was laser-scanned and reverse-engineered into CAD. Then three more days of manual surface refinement. Eleven revisions.

The wheels used zinc alloy die-casting. Fingernail-sized, but the spokes were only 0.3 millimeters thick — nearly half the width of a standard 1:64 wheel. Four mold iterations before they cast without breaking spokes.

When the first finished car came off the line, Takeda sent three words in Japanese: kore ya.

This is it.

A Thousand, Not One More

A thousand blue 22Bs. Numbered 0001 to 1000. Laser-engraved on every chassis. Takeda sold them out in two hours on launch day. His website crashed — he'd rented the cheapest shared hosting.

He sent a long email later. Not chasing the next batch. He said from the day he entered this industry seventeen years ago, he'd always wanted to make something entirely his own. At fifty, he thought he was too late. You made me feel like I wasn't.

A thousand model cars. Cost seventy, sold at one-fifty. He wasn't doing it for the money. He just wanted to see — after seventeen years, could the first thing he ever decided entirely by himself be held in a thousand pairs of hands.

Project Summary

Deliverables

1:64 diecast car model ODM full development, six custom molds

Resin hand-carved prototype laser-scanned to reverse-engineer CAD, eleven surface refinements

Zinc alloy wheel die-casting, spoke wall thickness 0.3mm

One thousand limited-run production, individually laser-engraved serial number

Sold out in two hours on launch

💡 Seventeen years making things for other people. Seventeen years later he made a thousand of his own — and every single one was held in someone's hand.

⭐

With gratitude to local authorities, agencies and their members for their service and assistance.

Thank you to all departments and team members involved.