Odd thing about new Tamiya SLR 722

A three-piece front bumper? Was it too difficult to mold? I thought the 722 just added a splitter to the bottom of the stock bumper. How come Tamiya didn't just do the same - mold a splitter and attach to the bumper?

http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x82/BVC500/SLR722.jpg

It sure is odd; there are so few differences between the standard SLR kit and the 722; just the front bumper, the emblems/decals, and the wheels. Everything else is the same. The revised chin splitter couldn't just glue over the smoother one from a standard SLR, but I hardly can figure why this required making it in 3 pieces, since the draft angles/depths of the overall parts is almost identical. Perhaps Tamiya's better mold engineers have left for greener pastures?

It sure is odd; there are so few differences between the standard SLR kit and the 722; just the front bumper, the emblems/decals, and the wheels. Everything else is the same. The revised chin splitter couldn't just glue over the smoother one from a standard SLR, but I hardly can figure why this required making it in 3 pieces, since the draft angles/depths of the overall parts is almost identical. Perhaps Tamiya's better mold engineers have left for greener pastures?

Don't know what the tooling looks like, but it could be that within the limits of this tool, this was the only way possible to tool this part, again I'm assuming things here...

That is weird, another extra effort to hide the line for us modellers. :lol:

The original bumper was molded with the body, and it was made with a multi-piece sliding mold, which is more expensive than a conventional two-part mold. Apparently Tamiya decided to use the cheaper two-part mold to make the 722 bumper, so they had to separate both ends.
Fitment of Tamiya kits is almost always good, so I'm sure the the lines can be easily erased by using one of those thin plastic welders.