alan barton

Do what you need to make it presentable and leave it as it is. If you have six other re-issues, build one with your current skills and keep your teenage one as a time capsule of where you started. Cheers Alan

What a beautiful conversion. Now I'm wondering if I can try the same trick to a Monogram 41 lincoln! Thanks for the inspiration. Cheers Alan

It's on again - the largest model car show in Australia, and one of the largest in the world! Presented by Perth and Districts Model Club, this will be the sixth year in the Cyril Jackson Recreation Centre. It's in the heart of our winter but with a large hall, the entire display is undercover so don't be put off by a little bit of rain! Last year we had over 1200 models on display - cars, trucks, bikes and pretty much anything with wheels. This year's feature display will be a 5.4 metre long, nearly seventeen feet, double sided featuring a time-line of NASCARs from the earliest days of beach racing up to Shane Van Gisbergen flying the flag for New Zealand and Australia in his 2025 campaign. There will be free slot car racing for the kids and free facepainting as well. There are still just a few tables left in the swap meet so be sure to contact us on Facebook if you want a table - but don't delay! Model Car Spectacular Cyril Jackson Recreation Centre off Fisher Street BAssendean Sunday 13th of July 9am til 4pm. Adults $10, kids under 16 free.

Wouldn't. Change. A. Thing!

Thanks everyone, it is nice to know there are a few others out there who appreciate car/boats! Cheers Alan

Rule Number One - See it, buy it! It won't be there when you come back for it later. You can't dream about or plan a build unless you have that kit in your stash. It is a pointless exercise. So make sure you have the kits you dream about building. Fortunately my wife is extremely supportive. She is also a prolific patchwork quilter so her stash is up there as well. The same rules apply. I am sitting on about 350 right now but have built about 120 since I retired three and a half years ago so I'm pretty happy with that output. My biggest problem is building models from parts instead of complete kits. You end up with one more model on the shelf but the same amount of boxes in the stash! I build mainly hot rods, dragsters and speedway cars and often they are built entirely from the parts boxes except for maybe a body ( which might have been a spare anyway!) Resin and 3D printing dont help matters at all. It's a terrible problem to have. My biggest saviour is that the model companies have all but stopped doing new releases of the cars that I love so I can just keep working on the stash. Probably bought eight this year - that's a quiet year! Cheers Alan

In 2010 I got to visit the amazing American Museum of Speed in Lincoln Nebraska where I saw the fullsized version of the Red Baron. I grabbed a bunch of photos for research and came up with this version using the correct Pontiac OHC straight six. The chassis has been lengthened and a number of other details added, including the German helmet from a small Matchbox car that I used for an aircleaner. The hardest part was trying to reverse the headers - not as good as I would have liked but there comes a time when you have to cut your losses! Cheers Alan

O.K., I'll play. Built these about twenty years ago. I don't get too wound up about their true scale accuracy - to me they are just a fun build that looks cool. Does anyone know what the intent was for the "door knocker"engraved into the dashboard? I've never been able to work it out! Cheers Alan

Got that issue - recognised the model as soon as the first image popped up! Will be interesting to see your new reproduction of it for sure. Cheers Alan

Oooops, my bad, I was thinking of Beechwood 4-57891 Apparently the other song was done by Tommy Tutone, according to google! Thats why Is tick to building modle cars - I know squat about music! Cheers Alan

I love it when model builders pay attention to how a real car weathers, rather than just slopping rust all over it. The phone number made me laugh - a favourite Carpenter's song of mine! I also like that you wrote the For Sale sign neatly - not everyone scrawls it on - some people actually have neat handwriting! Cheers Alan

Thanks everyone for your kind comments, and a special thanks to BelugaWRX for directing me back to my original thread which I will continue to use for the towcar project. Finally, a sneak peak of what I think will be my final car/boat conversion, inspired by an ancient article in Model Car Science around 1964! It is a 1964 Impala grafted to the otherwise ugly hull of the Lindberg Owens Corning boat. The box art made it look like a sleek cabin cruiser but like many things Lindberg, it wasn't that accurate and looked more like a tugboat in the flesh. TIs a long way from getting back onto the bench but for those of you who like car/boats, I'll just leave it here! Cheers Alan

Thanks to Beluga WRX I finally found this original thread so will add the finished boat here. That way I can continue here with the wagon build as I intended. Hard to believe it has been four years since I last posted this project but I've been crazy busy on model building since I retired three and a half years ago and I guess this one just slid off to the side for a while! The new full thread for the boat is in the "'All the Others"category. Sorry for messing people around - I really hunted high and low but simply couldn't find this original thread til BelugaWRX linked it for me. Me and computers are not good friends! Cheers Alan

Im working on the same 3D kit at the moment. You have done an outstanding job on your version - you've now got me considering grey as a paint option! Cheers Alan

Originally I had a WIP post somewhere on this forum featuring both this boat and the 56 Crown Squire wagon I am building to tow it. I have tried every search title possible, both within the forum and with Google as recommended in the help section but after two weeks have drawn a blank so I thought I would just create anew post and combine the build and finished photos. Some of you may have seen my build from many years ago of my red 57 Chevy Bel Air towing my 57 Chevy Bel Aqua. Its in Tim Boyds thread about the Chrysler Hydro Vee boat kit in the kit review section. Anyhow, it seemed obvious to me that I should attempt a FoMoCo version of that combo. The project started off with two toys - a roughly 1/28th scale 56 T bird plastic pull-back toy and a maybe 1/32 scale, maybe smaller 'toy cabin cruiser. The smaller sizes makes for a less massive appearance behind the tow car. After all - tis a boat, it can be any size it wants to be. Even so, the hull required splitting and narrowing to suit the size of the top half of the T bird body. I figured it was going to take a LOT of bodywork so I used a soldering iron to weld the two disparate bodies together. Not pretty but very effective! I also cut vee-d slots into the hood so that with the help of some hot water I could bend the fender peaks together at the front. I really wanted to keep that sharp fender line running from stem to stern. Then followed a lot of the monotonous but necessary putty, file, sand, prime, repeat process that this sort of project demands. I don't know how many times I thought it was nearly ready only to find another flaw. My young friend Jackson Bull 3D printed some 56 T-Bird tail lights for me with exhaust ports coming through the centre. Ideally the model would have a marinised Y block under the deck but after all the bodywork I couldn't face opening the deck lid! I then had to seriously cut down the interior so that it would fit back inside, as well as knock up some spacers to hold the dashboard in place along with the windscreen - there was a fair bit of ship-in-the-bottle stuff going on here. I've still got to find a propeller and a rudder but otherwise it is pretty much done. The Tamiya Bright Orange paint and Racing white interior will match the two tone paint on the still-to-be- finished 56 Vicky wagon. The trailer is basically scratch built from Evergreen with 25 T cycle fenders. Cheers Alan