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FresnoPete

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About FresnoPete

  • Birthday 03/12/1960

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  • Scale I Build
    1/24th

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    Peter McKay

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  1. DoubleD, I have been reading some of the stuff there and learning as few tricks myself. One of the reasons I had wanted to do these here is because of the varied subjects I do, and having to try and decided exactly which area they would go in. With a "garage" in one place everything I can bring to the table can be here. I don't want that to sound egotistical, that wasn't the intent, but there are some great builders that I'm having to run down all of their build strings in all of the different topic areas to see what they did, and how they did it. I'm just hoping to make it easy on anyone trying to do the same for my stuff.
  2. July 28, 2011 - Vinyl top 1969 Nova SS This is a build of what's left of the 1969 COPO Nova that was robbed for parts with the last couple of projects. I have enough parts to make a really nice SS 396 but I wanted something different that what I've done over the last few builds. Since I am working with one finger down most of what I've done is just paint. I have the SS hood, so the decision to make it so was pretty easy. I have a nice 396 engine that will be a part of this deal. I scanned though a few of the 1969 Chevy code sites and didn't really find a color combination I liked so I sort of went off the radar with the choice. I have some of the nice ruby red pearl metallic left over from the '37 Ford, but that wasn't enough. I've done five red Chevy's in a row, this one couldn't be "just red". I have done a few vinyl tops before, the last was about 12 years ago on a Dart GTS, so the time had come to pull out the book of tricks. After masking off the entire top area I shot about 3 coats of semi-gloss black, after it dried completely (aided by a 101 degree Central California afternoon) I masked off where the top seams would be. I then shot another 4 coats of semi-gloss black and pulled off the masking. After it all dried I shot it with 2 coats of dullcote, and put it back outside for an hour to dry. The raised area on the top replicates the seams perfectly. Once dry it came back inside and allowed to cool for half an hour before I masked it off and shot 3 quick coats of Testors Revving Red Pearl, and then back outside for an hour to cure. After that I started doing the trimming. The chrome trim on the top was made by putting down a piece of electrical tape and then putting Bare Metal Foil on top. I then carefully cut it and placed it on the border of the top. The rest of the chrome trim was all hand painted with my 5/O brush and Testors Chrome out of the bottle. That's sort of tough, being left handed and having a splint on my index finger. It'll be a lot tougher after Monday I think. I haven't decided on an interior color, I'm trying to avoid black again so it'll more than an likely be a dark gray, I want it to be somewhat visible and the Fred Gibb car isn't all that visible in all semi-gloss black. Another choice would be a red interior, a sort of blood red. Blood red....yeah. The shiny part on the top in the pic was recently touched up black, it'll dry semi-gloss like the rest of the top. July 30, 2011 Been working a little on the Nova SS, I've been finding that it's not nearly as difficult as I thought, I was going to take time off but even with a splint it's not too hard to do simple stuff. I don't think I'd want to try wiring or anything like that with my index finger out of the picture, especially on my dominant hand. The chassis painting was fairly easy, just patience and property thinned paint, I can actually stripe with my right hand too so there was the advantage. The Nova chassis reminds me a lot of the detail on the 1969 Camaro RS, very nicely done and it fits great. Since I went off the radar on the body color I did on the interior color too, with a sort of sable gray. The carpeting is just slightly lighter than the rest of the interior which will help add dimension when viewed through the windows. This is a 4 speed car, but there is no center console in the kit. I was planning on using one from another kit but this works too. Since my finger is really a major problem with detailing at the moment this one won't get the engine wired or any special interior extras. But sometimes a nice, clean out of the box build is just as good. I did the extras with the top, that should be enough to make it a nice attractive car on the shelf. ***I had cut the legiment in my index finger a few days before this project was started** July 31, 2011 OK, the little Nova SS is off to the detailer for a wax job, but otherwise it's done. The tires are Goodyear Polyglass GT's, they look oversized on this car but they were an option that most high performance guys picked. They ride on the 15" SS wheels that were also optional. The black pin stripe came with the SS kit, I had considered a white stripe but with a black vinyl top the black stripe make more sense. The 396 is not details as I said earlier, but it is painted correctly and sits well in what was an engine bay for a COPO 427. I have a good reference book for this car, with the optional tires and wheels, bucket seats, 4 speed and a posi rear end, vinyl top and AF/FM with an underdash Delco 8-track player (model #91BT411) the car would have topped out at a whopping $2,863. ***This Nova sits next to the red El Camino on my nephews shelf.***
  3. July 21, 2011 - Lindberg 1937 Ford Convertible This is Lindberg's 1937 Custom Ford Convertible. This is an out of the box build, metallic dark red with black fenders, black and red interior. This is a fabulous kit, one of the best street rods I have ever built. The chassis alone would make a great base for '32 Ford's. The suspension is very well done, the rear end is an IRS type and the engine is a nice big block style without a lot of detail, like a lot of the contemporary street rods have. Wheels are big 'n littles with directional tread generic tires. The interior has some interesting accents molded in, I chose mine to be the black and red with the chrome of the body being repeated in the interior. I sort of wish I had gone a little darker red on the seats and door panels but it's fine the way it is now. The main body, frame, drive shaft and intake plenum are all Testors Revving Red, suspension is aluminum metalizer, engine and tranny are a mix of aluminum and stainless steel metailizer. July 23, 2011 OK, the Lindberg '37 Ford is done, not quite a day but minimal detailing so no big deal. The customer wants the top on so I threw in a nice photoetched mirror and some red dice. This is a great kit, very anemic on the engine details but it wouldn't take much to bring that out too. ***Ultimately the customer for this car failed to pay for the build so it was repossessed and now sits on my wife's dresser. It is her car for all intents and purposes.***
  4. Greg, thanks. Like any move it's going to take a few trips to move my stuff in. I'm not going to do every project I posted over there, some will just be finished pics, but the projects that I did something someone may learn from will be featured here. I haven't been building for a couple of months now because of a health issue, but I have started tinkering with some of the kits I was working on when I got sick. Those, if finished, will also be posted here on MCM.
  5. July 16, 2011 - Red El Camino L79 The Monogram 1966 El Camino is a great kit, I've never built one myself and I'm really impressed with this one. This car is a 396 cubic inch car, not the 327 car that I'm patterning it after, but everything else will be nearly identical. The car I'm doing will be a Regal Red with black interior car and bucket seats. The car will have body color steel wheels with dog dish hub caps donated by a '69 Nova COPO. This will be a moderately detailed car, the biggest problem is going to be the chrome trim. I tried using the paint markers like another member had done with his Shelby, I couldn't match his results so I applied Bare Metal foil over it. In some places the foil came out really rough, such as it is sometimes with foil. After the foil was applied the entire car had 4 coats of Future wax applied and eas then hand rubbed to smooth it out. The combination of the clear coating and rubbing did help with some of the foil issues. Frame rails are gloss black over the same red as the body. Exhausts are my usual multi tones of metalizer. The interior is coming along too, I need to hit it was some dullcote, but the flocking/carpeting is in and seat belts are right around the corner. I thought I had some PE window cranks but I can't find them if I do, so the molded in parts just got a touch of chrome paint. July 19, 2011 OK, the last few steps of the El camino build: The wheels and tires were taken from a Revell 1969 Nova COPO, the red line is a decal that I had the dickens of a time with getting straight. Other than problems with the foil in places (old foil mixed with my shaking hands) I'm happy with the way it came out. On the shelf it seems like I have more red Chevy's than any other color. *** This El Camino was given to my nephew who proudly has it displayed on his shelf in his bedroom.***
  6. July 12, 2011 - Vintage NHRA Coupe Started working on one of the Lindberg twin pack of Vintage Dirt Modifieds today, decided to make it an early NHRA modified instead. I did the chassis essentially stock with the exception of the tube axle in the front. I had intended to use the Mongoose spoked wheels and tires but I couldn't get the wheels into the tires. So instead I just used some stock stamped steel wheels, front and back. The rear tires are the narrow slicks from the AMT TASCA Mustang. The car is powered by a HUGE Lincoln flathead engine with 3 carbs on top. This engine came from the Anglia Low Rider that recently met it's demise and was already wired and just needed some updating. I'll have dragster style pipes, three on each side since the flathead had Siamese exhaust ports in the middle of each side. I built a simple roll cage, not sure if the top will be on or off, some interior detailing will be present but not much since there wasn't a lot back in the era this thing would have raced. Chassis is semi gloss black but the body will wind up being either orange or yellow, not sure which one just yet. July 13, 2011 OK, swapped out the big front tires for something skinnier, found a decent hot rod fuel tank and modified the Mongoose steering linkage to work on the little red altered. The pipes are Mongoose kit parts cut from the bracket. And yes, I know they're all catawampus, you have to remember many of these cars were built in garages and exhaust tube bending usually was done around a truck rim to get "the proper curve". I've pretty much decided top off, there's just so much good detailing in the cockpit and with the top on it would have been a pain to get in and out of. The wife has laid claim to this one, I was looking through some decals last night and she found some interesting cat style pinstripes from the AMT '32 Deuce kit that she wants on it. I still have fuel lines, radiator hoses, some electrical, the decals, a lot of touch ups and other stuff to do, more pictures later.... July 13, 2011 (evening) OK, Little Red Cat is done, for being a less than 24 hour project where a lot of the work was already done if came out remarkably well. And there ya go. I left the top off so things like the pedals, seat belts and other cockpit parts are more obvious. The engine was already wired when it came out of the Anglia (no saving it this time) and I just had to redo the fuel lines and some of the electrical. About the only thing that wouldn't be mid 1950's is probably the tire lettering but I liked it and it went on. I left a little bit of the seam on the rear slicks, could be a hint of the tread that came on them, who knows. These Lindberg Dirt Track cars are great, they can be a number of things, from a 1950's NHRA "B" Altered using the Kustom Koffin kit all the way to an Indy car of the same period with the Lightning. The engines are total garbage as are a lot of kits from this vintage. replace it with either a flathead or a Y-head from the same vintage, or even a really nice Chevy straight 6. ***This project will be revisited sometime over the summer of 2012 and done using a Potvin powered 283 Chevy from the Revell Parts Packs.****
  7. July 1, 2011 (continued later) Lots of progress today, the car should be done tomorrow if I can get all the little parts done. Tire lettering is from an old funny car kit, I still need to run some of the electrical and the lines for the oil filters and pump and the steering linkage. I haven't gotten the steering wheel in either but I have that figured out, it's going to be an orthoscopic proceedure but not too hard. This evening I was trying to tweek the nose part of the upper body and it broke, so I have to do a little body work to fill in the break. It's only slightly noticable and actually looks like a seam that I just did not fill. July 2, 2011 OK, Ivo is done. I finished it up today with the oil filters, steering linkage, all of the cockpit stuff, put the coil and other electrical in, a final waxing and a few touch-ups. Everything lined up pretty well except for the front axle supports, they were a little fidgety. Getting the cockpit stuff in like this wasn't nearly as hard as I had originally though, I had considered doing seat belts and the chute release but I thought better of it now. I've already gone over my head a few times on this one, I really don't want to use up all of what little aftermarket stuff I have left. There's going to be a pause of a few weeks before I get back to building, I wasn't able to place my decal order like I wanted to yesterday, it may be 1st of August now but no biggie, the car is on the shelf and it's just fine. I might do a couple of clinics, like maybe a wiring clinic or something in the mean time. For now Mr. Tommy Ivo makes it to the display shelf in the front and center position! ***The Ivo car took a total of 4 days to build, start to finish. You'll see in a lot of my builds that they only take a day or so. The reason for this is because I tend to work on models 12-16 hours at a time (back then), being retired and at home this was what kept me busy.***
  8. June 29, 2011 - Tommy Ivo, Part One. Since the rain has ruined my work plans I started working on my Ivo car last night. This is the better of two 1960's era dragsters, the other being the Monogram Mongoose car. There is a generous amount of research available for both the period and restored car but lacking are the pictures with the body off of the real car. I couldn't even find a description of what is under the fiberglass. So much of what you see here is going to be speculation. I started working on the body work first since that is going to be about 75% of the labor involved in this kit. The main part of the body work is a two part deal that has fitting issues. The bottom of the car when the halves are joined is not flat, it has a rather annoying wedge shape. To combat this once I glued the halves together I weighted the body with the chassis in place to help flatten out the bottom. The top piece also seems to be ill designed, because it extends from the cockpit all the way to the front axles there's no way to take it off once the engine is in place and the headers installed. The way to get around this is to cut it right at the rear engine mount, most of the models I found with the bodywork removed did just that. I'm going on further by gluing and then molding in the cockpit part. This is going to make getting the cockpit parts in a little more difficult but not impossible. It's also going to give it a more realistic look. The frame, interior and exterior bodywork will all be painted the same color, in my case Tamiya Brilliant Orange. I have the cockpit nearly molded in, then had to pop off the part I was molding in to put in the seat I had forgotten. Don't forget the seat BEFORE the body. After getting the seat in and putting the cowl piece back on, a little putty and it was just fine. I only lost half a day on the whole deal. I'll have to go back and repaint the seat but I figured I'd have to do that anyway, I looked long and hard at the plumbing on the top fuel engines of the period, and I found a few that had the same sort of materials I had on hand, mostly 1 1/2" fitting line and AN fittings. I went with that, here's the nearly finished engine test fitted with the fuel line to the tank. I still have to go back and paint the fittings and the line in a few places, and do the oil lines from the filter. Those will be done once the engine is fitting in the chassis. Unfortunately I ran out of the orange paint so other than doing some minor work on this car getting the engine in the chassis will have to wait until the paint is done, which will be Friday. Completed engine ready to be installed. It has 12 #3 combination fittings, 3 pieces of #3 fitting line, a Parts by Parks pre-wired distributor, several scratch built parts and scavenged blower belt decal. Not 100% accurate but it will none-the-less look good in the car. July 1, 2011 Work continued on the Ivo dragster, the engine got it's exhaust pipes but not in the form it was intending. The exhaust are made up of two pieces for each side, and they don't go together very well at all. I cut the pipes from the header bracket and just glued them on individually. It was a real PITA to line up 8 pipes but once I got it down it looks pretty good. Today I got to the hobby shop and got the Tamiya orange I needed to finish up the exterior paint. After an hour or so to dry I did the decals. Now, let me say I am not a fan of decals that require to be cut because of opening panels, especially if I have to do the cutting. This process was complicated when one side absolutely shattered from being so brittle, it took nearly half an hour of re-wetting and careful manipulation with an X-Acto to get the pieces lined back up. Everything lined up really good and allows the top piece to be removed. After the decals dry I'll hit them with a coat of Future Wax and tomorrow start putting the rest of it together. If I had the model to do over again I would do the interior and frame a different color, looking at it now it would have looked better a metal color rather than orange, I just took the lazy way out.
  9. I've been sort of putting this off for a while while I decided what to do about my membership over at another forum. In the last week several things have happened over there, along with the way they were handled by the mods, that have prompted my to "hasten" my permanent departure and relocate here. Over in that other forum I have a builders string, this string contains many different projects with tips and tricks I have learned from 40+ years of modeling. Since the end of June, 2011 that string drew more than 15,500 views and over 800 posts. I will be transferring selected projects here one-by-one over the next few weeks for everyone here to see. It is not my intention to clog up or dominate this forum, and if the mods object please let me know and I'll adjust to whatever you suggest. But short of creating my own forum this is the next best solution to share what I know. So...let's begin at the beginning, shall we? This was about a NASCAR T-Bird I was doing back in June of 2011, and some of the internal detailing I do... I pulled out some 20 year old modeling tricks on this car, the first being drilled window braces. Detail Master now offers a photo etched window brace set for something like $5, I prefer to make my own for about a nickle. Years ago I watched my first wife as she transferred a pattern for a dress she was making with an interesting little tool. I borrowed it the next day and used it as a drift to imprint pilot marks on strip styrene, it worked perfect. I took a small drill bit in my pin vice and drilled on the pilot marks and after sanding and painting I had perfect 0.10" wide window braces that were very close to the 2.5" wide braces cars at the time (1985) used. My ex-wife never got her pattern tool back, and after 25 years it still works great. I shoot the plastic matt black so I can better see the pilot marks these days, my eyes are not what they used to be. Another popular and fairly common practice is to make roll cage padding out of electrical srhink tubing, most of you guys I'm sure have done it at one time or another. I like the look much better than just painting the padded part semi gloss black and the older RM NASCAR kits did not mold padding in like they did with their cars from 2000 on. The gaps you see in the shrink tube will all be hidden behind parts of the body, and this being a short track car I only pad the parts of the car I may come into contact with in a crash. That's why you don't see the whole drivers side padded. When I raced hobby stockers in the late 1970's we used water pipe insulation material for roll cage padding, it wasn't the best but it worked in the crashes we had on our small 1/4 mile tracks in Texas. Unfortunately as I found out later it is also extremely flammable, after a roll over that resulted in my fuel tank breaking loose and drenching the car in gas and catching fire. I raced in a set of coveralls that were treated with a flame retardant but it was no match for the dripping molten plastic of the padding and I got seriously burned on both forearms and chest. That was essentially the end of my racing career.
  10. Never had a problem with Mega, they're my go-to guys for Ross Gibson, Detail Master and R&D Unique stuff. Another place to find some out-of-production models is a nice little west coast dealer called V-8 Models. Dennis is a retired guy that buys out a lot of hobby shops and collections, all of his stuff is factory sealed unless otherwise noted.
  11. I had thought I read Speed City was doing them, just checked the site and they're not there.
  12. Niko (and everyone else for that matter), all of the Squadron putty's are lacquer based, if you add just a touch of thinner to it you can adjust the consistency of the putty. This came into best effect when doing aircraft seams but on things where you need a little putty into a narrow gap it works great. You can brush it into sink marks and it will work easier than with a blade or scraper. When you have big gaps between, say, a head and the block, thin the putty to a consistency of soup and flow it into the gap. It'll preserve the line between the parts but fill the gap nicely.
  13. Around here we've been having a great Hanukkah, for the past 5 days I've been cooking something different each day (except for Friday night when the wife cooked), today my wife's Hispanic Christian beliefes and my Jewish traditions collide in what can only be described as Food Fest, 2011. We have fresh tamales that her and her mom spent 8 hours making yesterday, we have an 8 lb fork tender brisket (slow cooked for 7 hours) with baby red potatoes and baby carrots and a traditional garnish of pomegranate seeds, raisins, orange slices and blackberries that have soaked in Merlot for 3 days, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, and rice pilaf. For beverages we have orange juice fresh squeezed from fruit off our own trees, spiced cider, tea, even my own home brewed dark ale specially made for this meal.
  14. 2011 marked a return for me back into modeling after about an 8 year hiatus. I had built maybe 3 or 4 in those 8 years I was doing other things, all of those were finished because they were customer cars. But in February I started a whirlwind of building that saw me order or buy maybe 50 cars until the beginning of November, and 6 of those were actually bought to use as parts cars for other projects. I have another 3 on the "in progress" compartment of my work desk and 2 that are opened in anticipation of being built. Most of my early builds, 6 of the Revell Ferrari's, a Tamiya Ferrari 360 and a number of other cars, are all on my nephews shelf, I have limited space so I only have 15 on display here, including a couple of cars I built 15+ years ago. Some of that 50 were replacements for collectors cars that I had to sell during those lean times in 2008-2009.
  15. The Potvin blowers on the small block Chevy's are still in pretty common usage, you have to decide if you're going to use injectors or carbs. The one in you photo is injected, which I believe was most common. The metal Shapers website is about the most historical resource I found when doing one of those Revel Part's Pack's SBC's with the Potvin: http://allshops.org/...d=9980114546393 Some of these pictures are rather dated but I think your subject will match. There are also a number of different configurations, laying on the side, upright, etc. Scroll down about 2/3rds of the way down this page for about the best wiring and plumbing pic I was able to find: http://www.mooneyesu...roducts_id=2155
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