Russell C

Yesterday I thought if I doused this pot with water, the last sprig of the flowering plant might stay alive. No dice, too hot. Today, the cactus wren thanked me for a nice damp bowl of dirt to cool off in. Was around 113°F when I took this pic. Handy birds, native to southern Arizona here, they keep the excess spiders down to a dull roar. Scorpions keep the cricket population in check.

At least you got something in the sky up there. Down here in this side of the city, 116°F, but with the humidity up a tic to maybe 12%-ish. Sorta was a thundercloud way off to the east, entertaining idea if it headed this direction and remained intact, but now we're just getting wind gusts .....

Seen images of those for eons .. or, well, maybe since the 1970s. Didn't think to look up how they worked until tonight.

Got assorted folders on my computer of spiffy pics I've saved for potential model projects. Example is my "Finvettes" folder - in one eBay auction I saw where a modeler was headed with what looked like a Plymouth Fury fins appearance. Meanwhile, stealing one of the above pics (A.I.-generated, most likely) to put in my folder, but trained graphic artist that I am, I did some subtle alterations to it. '59 De Soto fins 'hoods' in the A.I. image with perhaps '58 Impala front turn signals with swapped in red flatter lenses? Might be doable. The '50s Mercedes wheel opening eyebrow is an interesting idea, I added one over the front.

<rant: on>Sheer stupidity. If I was benevolent dictator / king / ruler / supreme authority of the country, I would outlaw every xenon headlight out there and probably all of the latest LED ones, for being pointlessly blindingly bright. Back when I used to have to drive home at night, it was increasingly necessary for me to flip my inside rear view mirror up to the position that cuts the brights of the people behind me, and I had to increasingly hold my hand up to my driver's side window to shield my eyes from my outside mirror for whoever was passing me with their "rolling aircraft landing lights array," .... all in the Phoenix metro area on freeways / streets already lit up well enough with overhead lights that people could almost do without running any headlights at all.<rant: off>

Ditto, but what I do instead is text the photo to my email address, open up the email and download the photo to my computer desktop, then crop out any extra background and fix the sometimes too-dark shadows using my simple Photo Preview program. But I also use that program to knock down the epic file sizes the iPhone generates. I set the measurement thing in inches and reduce the widths from 24 - 48 inches down to 4½ inches and the pixels-per-inch measurement thing to 150 ... which seems to put out photos in my posts that look clear enough for my old eyes.

Yesterday at the community dumpsters, somebody threw out what looked like a perfectly good little LED purple metal body flashlight that probably only needed new batteries - seemingly so down on power that its light looked like blue fading out to a pathetic purple, I thought. Put in new batteries at midday under my kitchen skylight, bright enough, but still on the purple side. At twilight this evening, I used it to look for a model parts box down in the shelves opposite my models display —- I did not know until right then that the lower section of my Kyle Petty Pontiac wagon I'd painted back in 1992 was a fluorescent green. Looks like a regular medium green in the sunlight. On top of that, I didn't know LED technology includes black light capability. (more or less knew I'm way behind dusting off my display models … 😂 )

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scalesurvivors/ Yep, what I used to do is click on that link without logging into FB, and I was able scroll down quite a long way before the system froze and put out its "See more on FB" login box. But these days I can only scroll down three posts or less before it does that. When I get more work done on the 1960s era survivors I got off eBay, I should join that group and contribute there. It would give me the excuse to login every evening to see what's new.

Ditto, but just watched the bidding on one or three of these in the last several years. Sometimes a person can score a cheap purchase when they are listed just generically and when none of the collectors spot the auction listing. Took me forever to remember the name of the other kit tonight, but finally dredged up an image. Similar, but different to the later tri-axle original Ertl gravel trailer, two more vertical ribs, I think, and no long horizontal bar toward the bottom. Image from this Dutch site: https://public.fotki.com/modeltrucks25thscale/truckkit_instructions/amt/2021-300-amt-dirthauler/amtdirthauleropen.html

Nice pics! Looks like a neat show, and a way to beat the heat down here in Phoenix. Didn't the ancient AMT pickup kits come with some giant honkin' pushbar bumpers? Ya could put one of those on your truck and shove all the competition out of the way. 😂

Technically, Jeremy Linn's thread fits that bill, except by default it excludes really old buildups we've gotten that were built by someone else. I did a "resto-mod" of some guy's really old Ranchero speedster back in 2017, and have acquired 3 more old buildups from a different long-ago nameless builder, which will receive a similar mild "resto-mod" treatment -- all 4 would qualify for an overall Survivors thread, I'd think. Move this thread topic over into the General Automotive Talk section and I'd wager that many guys here could share photos of old/ancient buildups they've rescued from swap meets / estate sales / eBay that are a cut or three above being just gluebombs.

Learn somethin' every day. Can't guess how many times I did random millisecond glances at these on the internet and ignored them because I assumed they were just some odd kitcar customized iterations of a 1990s front engine Buick Riviera. Never saw one that I can recall where any were shown with some other car or a nearby person that would indicate what size these actually are. Now I like these much better.

Enzo purists sent screaming off into the night, redux. 😂

Looks like Mark Gustavson of the GSL contests had uploaded old contest photos to a new or different account - here's my Cobra "Berlinetta" coupe from the GSL display table circa 1993 ( https://public.fotki.com/GSL-Model-Car-Championship/gsl-xiv-1993/gsl-xiv1993/ ) with its aluminum sheet hood, shortened Porsche 911 roof, Herb Deeks photoetch Borani wheels, and fully detailed Hasagawa Jaguar V12 engine. Aim was to 'Italian-ize' the Monogram 25th scale 427 Cobra that Italian hotrodder Carollo Shelbyani would have build back in the day. Tragedy is, this is all the further my project ever got. One of these days, just like all the other stack of unfinished projects, I out to get it done.

Send us the excess. It did actually rain here a week back, weather guy said it was the first measurable rainfall for any June 1 in the metro area since 1914.

MCM library of info to the rescue. I got this really old buildup in an eBay auction a few years ago, figured it was about time to clean it up and give it a second life (will post a restoration thread soon), but the engine didn't have its exhaust headers and I was wondering what the right ones were. It didn't look like the usual Buick or Pontiac optional V8s in the ancient AMT '40 Ford kits series that I was at least a little bit familiar with. Courtesy of this thread, where our man "Snake45" said a decade ago via his page 1 list, this must be the 6-carb small block Chevy from the '32 Ford 5-window kit. Except it seems to have the pulley setup from the '40 Ford kit Buick engine option. Among the assortment of random AMT customizing parts that came with this buildup, I'm guessing the original builder had the '59 Corvette headers on this engine. Or at least minimally, they'd be the right ones to put on it.

Stashed Nash. Most likely the cover is designed to fit on some other car ... or maybe a huge golf cart.

Pickup truck. No room for an engine that size up front, so put it behind the cab in the pickup bed. 😂

"No, Lieutenant, there is no more 'just one more thing.' Goodbye."

Freeloading dove suggesting I should hurry it up a bit about the clumsy way I eat potato chips, which sends random crumbs onto my patio floor ....

If ya want to send the Ferraraficionados screaming off even further into the night, a pair of those Yosemite Sam "Back Off" mudflaps would do the trick .... 😂

Were those flames back there?

Blasfemo! Enzo si rivolterebbe nella tomba!

Rearrange some of the details in the descriptions in this thread, and ya have my former apartment neighbors, the couple of lunatic renter neighbors at the house I was the caretaker of after leaving the apartment, and a trio of the property owners next to me at the current place I'm living at. One additional detail not seen in this thread so far is that at the apartment building I used to live in, my upstairs neighbors were the Walkers. That was not their names, that's what they did, several different generations of 'em over the years, either walking around in endless circles (on a flood-damaged floor that creaked) or pacing back & forth like caged animals. 10, 20, 40 minutes at a time or more sometimes, non-stop. One thing that hugely pleases me right now: zip, zero, nada overhead noises any more.