Ace-Garageguy

If the car below is the one in question, it's possible to extrapolate the wheelbase from known dimensions in the photograph. On my screen, measuring the wheel diameter and length of the valve cover shows the image I have here to be approximately 1/27 scale. Measuring the wheelbase on the screen and multiplying by 27 gives an approximate real-car wheelbase of 130 inches. Not exact due to a variety of factors like parallax effects and my own judgement, but PDC (pretty damm close).

My originals don't.

Just FYI, my go-to tool for that kind of work has become the Tamiya scriber handle with a selection of tips. Not cheap, but worth every penny:

Yeah, please. The life you save may be mine. Last year, a good friend's perfect Caddy CTS-V coupe was totalled by some fool woman slamming into it's tail while texting. Year before, a dumb little girl ran a light in front of my truck, also texting. If I hadn't been paying attention, I'd have plowed into her door and popped her like a zit. GET OFF THE DAMMED PHONE AND DRIVE.

The control system is apparently directly descended from small drone tech, as evidenced by video shot during development of the flying prototype, which uses what looks to be an RC drone joystick module for control inputs. I imagine the hardest part was either finding or developing the motors and props that had the requisite performance for such a relatively heavy vehicle. The rest of it is straightforward aircraft-quality fabrication. All of which implies that, with a little reverse-engineering, there's really nothing now stopping a skilled tinkerer from building a one-off for a small fraction of the cost of this one. Hmmmmm...

Looking good. Nice mods. Always liked this particular car and the period it represents, and have enough of the originals to keep me busy for some time. Is the apparent warp in the frame actually there, or is it an image artifact caused by one of today's crop of lenses apparently designed by folks who generally seem to have no understanding of the concept of "optics" in the word's original context?

Perhaps you haven't noticed that's pretty much the universal SOP these days...

The fact that the intelligence of the average consumer (and whoever markets to him) is in free-fall?

I still buy too much through eBay, and every time I'm aggravated by the general glitchiness. For all the constant fiddling and patching, both the rationality and overall usefulness of the search function continue to deteriorate. Workarounds are often required to get meaningful search results...and in some cases, just to pay for stuff. It's not helped by idiots who continually post their merchandise in the wrong categories; the search algorithms just aren't smart enough to compensate for rampant human stupidity. PS: I generally refuse to buy from Amazon (unless there's just no other convenient source) for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that almost everything I've wanted in the past couple of years has been available considerably cheaper through eBay...so I continue to put up with the problems there.

I didn't know about this one. Just exactly what I need as a tow vehicle for a 356 race car.

Enjoying this, and your detail shots of the real cars are much appreciated. I have a Fernando Pinto version acquired a couple of years back. The body lines look very good on that one also. His Porsche 550 Spyder gets the lines right too, better than any other kit. I've had the opportunity to see a few 166 Barchettas together at one time, and the differences from car to car, with individually coachbuilt bodies, can be quite striking. I also appreciate the effort and skill you're putting into opening panels on these thick castings. It's not a job most modelers could get right..

Actually, those of us who paid for p-bucket from the beginning (which I did to avoid the moronic, screaming, marketing gibberish you had to sit through during uploads to the "free" version) didn't get caught in the hostage-taking debacle. I still have my grandfathered-in account, and it works without watermarks...and it's still cheap.

Very clean custom work. Looks great. Hows about a bubble top?

Nice lines. That's a tough chop to make work well, and you succeeded admirably.

Yup, that's been my experience too...other than kits like Guillow's balsa flying model airplanes and heavier wooden ship models...both of which are built up of flat pieces, like RR structures and older wooden RR cars...and in the case of airplanes, don't do a very good job of representing curved surfaces, particularly compound curves. Anyone can see the obvious limitations of smooth sheet-metal curves represented by a buildup with wooden stringers covered by paper or fabric on this completed Guillow's model: And though there are some fascinating paper kits out there, the most realistic results are obtained when the subject is something that's built primarily of flat elements anyway, like this 1/25 scale M25 tank transporter tractor: