Russell C

Nice work! Magazines for me. Didn't click on the link within this page, but it appears the plans for these are still available: https://protected.hostcentric.com/rqriley/minihome.html

Nice! Seen the movie a few times on cable TV, but your build had me wondering what the back plate said. Got a screengrab from one of the Youtube clips of the deer chase scene. I should have guessed, he 'borrowed' the car straight out of a fictional dealership.

Haven't missed a single GSL since 1990, not missing this one either. Thought with the postponements from the virus situation that I would have several completed projects to bring, but real life intervened with other non-hobby obligations, so the most I'll have is my Common Kit entry and maybe one older build for display.

Three progress items today: First, Plan B for the brake booster bracket & lever arms. Originally I thought it would be easier to glue the bracket onto the frame with a predrilled hole through matching one in the back of the brake booster assembly. That way, I could stick in the lever arms from the front side and wouldn't have to paint the bracket separately the same color as the frame later and scrape paint off the frame to glue in the bracket. Poor planning, since it was turning out to be way too fiddly yesterday to test-fit the lever arm stuff with the bracket already on the frame. So, I drilled two pin locator holes through it into the frame late last night, then sawed it off and glued in two locator pins. I'll paint the bracket and the lever arm items black instead. All that will be needed to do afterward is assemble the whole unit permanently, and then locate the brake pedal arm up into the floorboard and finally just glue the whole unit onto the frame. Next in the photo is the cantilevered pedestal I mentioned in my Feb 11 post. Don't quite know how the swivels at the top work, but it looks good enough for jazz for me. Easy to put together out of scrap plastic bits, with heat-stretched sprue again serving as the 4 bolts at the bottom, like I did with the adapter plate for the carbs. And at the top of the photo is a length of polished stainless steel wire for the gun barrel and some aluminum rod I turned on my mini lathe to be the end trumpet thing. Might be intended to be a muzzle flash reducer, don't quite know how those work, either. WHAT??!!

Thanks for the kind words! A little more primer painting today, with final coat black on the steering column/box. That little thin down pointing bit on it is the column shifter arm for the rod that goes down to the transmission. I've got it pretty much worked out what the shape & length of that rod must be and how it attaches to a short crank arm at the transmission. At the bottom of the photo is the primered top end of the steering column - ignore the masking tape at the left side which keeps the plastic bare where the steering wheel attaches. Will create a wire shift selector arm along with a wire turn signal lever on the other side of it. Rear axle / radius rods may be ready for the final paint color, but I think the frame extension there will need some more sanding in a few spots. Might be able to get the whole rest of the frame primered this week ...

Had nothing done to enter, but made the trip across town to & from in one piece (thank heavens!), and got to catch up with several old friends in my too short of limited time there. Quality work on the contest tables, that's for sure!

Temporarily double-stick taped the valve cover to the engine with its permanently glued-on oil filler cap. "Chevr O let"! And reshaped the intake manifold to better match the carbs adapter plate they're now glued to. Dash seems now to be in good enough final shape to paint white and then double-stick tape on a better paper printout version of those gauges (this version is off my old Canon inkjet just to see if I got the size right). Premiered the whole underbody brake booster unit so it can be painted Metal Master stainless steel silver next. The decade-old spray can of Dutch Boy chrome has held up well enough to shoot a coat on the rear diff cover and the two white plastic steering link ends out of the Revell roadster kit. I didn't take them off the aluminum wire rod connecting the two, so if I'm lucky when I take them off that cardboard, I'll be able to attach the whole unit to the frame / front axle and superglue them in place with minimum handling that might otherwise mar that shiny paint. (ignore the giant temporary wire loop holding the front of the radius rods to the frame)

The 'slop' of the too-large-of-holes in the coilovers were bothering me when it comes to friction-fitting the whole rear suspension together on the frame, where I could finalize the gluing of the radius rods, so I 'lathe-turned' sleeves on my motor tool to glue into the holes that I could later ream out to fit snugly onto the mounting posts. Excess handling of those ends from the Revell '29 roadster kit means I'll have to repaint the Model Master buffing stainless steel paint before the final assembly. Now, on to the brass tube & wire ends to replace the rear radius rods that came busted in the roadster kit. This is where the point comes in from my Jan 3 post about the extra 'sleeve' bits I added to the kit's radius rod arms at their connection to the rear axle. They now friction-fit onto the axle tightly enough that I could put them in place, and with the wire ends stuffed into holes drilled in each end of the plastic remains of the kit's rods, I could slide the brass tubes back 'n forth until the positions were right, and then use superglue to set them on permanently at their back ends, and then use Tenax liquid cement to permanently glue the plastic arm ends to the rear axle. Everything else is still friction-fit in place temporarily for the coilovers / front ends of the radius rods / drive shaft / chrome front diff piece, all for easy removal. The radius rods will be the same color as the frame & main part of the rear axle. (that's masking tape holding the front diff part to the axle) Because the cylinder end of the chrome diff part was not especially well plated on its bottom and it needed its length corrected anyway, I wiped it out and drilled a new hole in the front of the diff to take a polished aluminum tube the same diameter, where I stuffed a 'lathe-turned' bit of plastic sprue into the tube and drilled a hole in that exactly the same size as the post on the back of the driveshaft. Makes the driveshaft have a much better, wiggle-free fit. That is another plausible sounding scenario …..

Old thread with a busted link in the 3rd post down from the top, but is preserved in the Internet Archive, where it appears some of the photo links still work: https://web.archive.org/web/20180818153313/http://fatjacksplace.com/tableofcontents.htm

Don't need one myself, but a potential suggestion via a mildly quick 'n dirty alteration of your image - '59 Blazer?

Yup, when you type into the "Reply to this topic" box at the bottom of any thread, your reply then appears for all to see and isn't restricted to just one person. Somehow, ads that appear at people's websites generate pennies of revenue for the websites, but I don't know how. While I would like to support this MCM site that way, the growing number of ads I saw several years back just became too intolerably obnoxious to see (like what you seem to be describing about the "offer to download the PDF Manual"), so I went to the AdBlock website ( https://getadblock.com/en/ ) and clicked on their button to install that application on my computer. It's free, and it absolutely kills every ad there is that appears in this forum. ALL of them. I know there are ads because every once in a while when I am out of town, I use the borrowed smartphone I have to log into the forum, and there's no AdBlock on that thing, so that's when I see what other members here have been complaining about.

Don't know if this will be much of a help but instead more of a reassurance that you might be reading too much into what the requirements are for participation here. Myself, I have 1500-ish posts since 2013, I occasionally see notes sometimes saying my Profile is only "50% complete", but since I have no idea what that means, I've just ignored it. It's as complete as I need it to be. Regarding "Adding tags to a post", I think that means when you post your own startup topic (as opposed to simply replying in an existing thread) there's an option under the title box to add tags to the topic you want to post. I've made use of that feature a few times, but since I've never seen any benefit from seeing tags, I don't actually know what good it is. Finally, after all these years of posting here, I can't think of any time I've seen the "invitation to 'View Manual' in PDF form" you mention. Where did you see that? What manual?

Hit the radiator area with black, will tidy up the outer edges since the paint doesn't stick too firmly to the chrome. Hit the engine (masked off the rectangle area for the exhaust & intake manifolds), tranny & rear axle with primer so I can see what divots need to be filled in. Hit the front spring and inside wheel backs' disc brake areas with my old-but-still-spraying Model Master buffing magnesium, will buff those out a bit more later. I'll have to brush paint the discs on the other sides of these wheel backs, which I salvaged off my Red Baron glue bomb. That crumbly thing is giving up more than just its oil pan & fuel tank. If only the long ago builder could see how bits of it continue to live on as an entry into the GSL contest ... Bothered me that when I temporarily pinned the scoop to the carbs (which I - oops - had sideways in my Wednesday post) and pinned the scoop & carbs to the primered intake manifold, the carbs looked so visually uninteresting just sitting on the intake. And it also bothered me that after seeing 89AKurt's fuel lines out of his carbs that I would have no stable way to put in my own fuel lines & linkages without first gluing both carbs to the intake, which would need to have its final coat of paint on it. So, I created a more interesting looking bottom adapter plate that I could glue the carbs to separately (heat-stretched sprue will make create the "bolts"), where I could drill all the holes in the carbs and make the fuel lines connect, including making sure that when I temporarily pin the whole unit to the intake and temporarily pin that to the engine, I'll be able to locate to the incoming fuel line and accelerator pedal linkage in a repeatable way before I paint all the various pieces. Objective being to minimize the handling after final coats of paint.

Thanks! Having my fun messing with people's minds, too. There was an angle of truth to the "weapons carrier" bit a few posts back. ?

Thought this was an experiment worth trying. Watercolor paint dating from my grade school days, and one of those thin diameter syringes that comes with a color ink refill bottle for my inkjet printer. Seems to be working out well so far, and the nice thing about water soluble paint is that if you overfill one of the spokes where it bleeds into the center hub, just run it under the faucet and start over. Might need one more layer added, I'll see when these dry out.

Endless uses for the stuff, I've saved my various efforts over the years and use it for engine compartment wires, for pins connecting one part to another, for tire valve stems, for filling in drilled holes, on and on. One handy thing I found out was that if you file a length of sprue to a half-round shape and then heat-stretch it, it will maintain that half-round shape. Pretty much retains the shape when you heat stretch a rectangular rod. Heat-stretch Plastruc tubing and you get a much thinner diameter tube.

Engine progress. Bare Metal Foiled the valve cover except for the raised center area, which I covered with the white stripe decal section from the Revell '60 Chevy sheet. The "Chevrolet" script will go on there next. No room for an oil filler neck on the kind of GM prototype slant engine I'm doing, so the oil fill cap will go on the cover where the "O" is. One less unused scrap part out of my parts pile, I 'lathe-turned' that cap into a more perfect circle on my motor tool and scribed in an "O" on the top while it was spinning which I filled in with a Sharpie marker and polished off the excess. Believe it or not, I got some Bare Metal Foil to stay put around the main body of that cap, and the trick to getting a thin strip to stick to the bottom ridge was dabbing a teensy amount of Tenax (a.k.a. methyl ethyl keytone) with a super fine tip brush just ahead of the foil strip I was laying down. Burnished it while it was spinning on the motor tool with the edge of a piece of thin cardboard, then hit it with the Simichrome polish I mentioned in the prior post. BMF is finicky stuff, but it could be that the heat action of the burnishing makes the adhesive work better. Also worked out the wire pins for holding the Revell '29 roadster carbs / scoop together, and to the intake. Added heat-stretched sprue "bolts" to the intake flange. Scratch built a distributor cap differently than what I did for my flat 5 engine in the last Common Kit entry I build, since the parts box distributor I had was just too big in diameter. This time I 'lathe-turned' the tan plastic sprue on my motor tool into a perfect circle cylinder, then hand drilled the number of plug holes I need as close to the edge as possible, then 'lathe-turned' the upper third so that half of the hole sections were opened out - it looks like a gear when viewed from the top. Then I heat-stretched the same color sprue to the diameter I needed for the plug-in nubs (or whatever the term for those is) and individually glued them them in the open hole areas around the perimeter of the cap. After the glue dried, I lathe-turned the outer ones down to the same height. I'll drill the holes for the incoming wires later. Somewhere between 6 and 9, including the center one, if I counted right.

Front turn signals. Wasn't sure if this would work, but worth a shot if it did, and I do have fun 'lathe-turning' tiny things on my motor tool. The ingredients here is some old clear amber sprue from one of my mid 1970s AMT truck builds, then some K&S really small diameter aluminum tubing (polished with Simichrome Polish to chrome-like shine), and two sizes of aluminum wire scrap. First, 'lathe-turn' the amber sprue into smaller diameter rod, then jamb that into the tubing where it stays stuck, and then chuck both into the motor tool and 'lathe-turn' the amber bit into it its final bullet shape. Reverse direction on this, jamb a bit of aluminum wire into the open back end, clip with a wire cutters, then use the motor tool as a sort of circular vice to grip the piece such that you can use a #76 drillbit to drill the hole for the wire that mounts the turn signal unit to the headlight bucket. Then finally saw off the back to the proper length, file the back to a dome shape, polish the back end to a nice shine, and it's done.

Can't really use the either of kit's Revell '29 roadster taillights options since they'd be too far under the flatbed platform. My original idea was to put a pair of bullet taillight lenses from my junk pile into some polished aluminum tubing, but since the tri-carb's air cleaner caps look like the appearance I wanted and were nearly the same in diameter with the nuts on top being an ideal spot to run an electric power wire in, why not use those instead? The lenses were a bit long, so I chucked them backwards into my motortool and used one of those dangerous weapons of massive self-destruction to lathe turn them down to a size to match the hole in the underside of the air cleaner caps. Polish up some aluminum wire, drill some holes in the frame and the caps, and that's mostly it. I'll probably put two wire rings like I showed in this tip at the bases of the lenses to give them more of a complete look, and later on, each light will get an electric power wire stuffed into the back that goes up into the frame.

The Porsche Turbo wagon in my avatar image, I built it way back in the early 1990s. The "wood" itself was nothing more than paper that was photographs of wood decor in one of those really ritzy fancy house magazine, which I doubleside taped to the body. If I remember right, the darker areas was some guy's cherrywood bar, and the lighter strips were likely from photos of pine cabinets.

Ends 6 days from today: https://bringatrailer.com/listing/porsche-917-style-slot-car-track/

Initially thought I'd have to use a different underside exhaust setup with the header pipes collector idea I had, but it turns out I can use the Revell '29 roadster muffler & rear pipe section, while using a longer thick solder wire for the front section (handy material from my late father's electrics soldering hobby). Might use a leftover length of nickel plated tubing from my last GSL Common Kit entry's flat five velocity stacks collection, but cut shorter …. unless it looks like it's too large in diameter.

It's nice that this kit has the separate fuel tank and battery items, but with the seat in the way from the front, and the deck lid molded closed, what good is that if you can't see these items? So, back in March last year, I showed in the "What did I Accomplish Today" thread how I sliced out the deck lid. However, my project needs to haul, in the literal sense of the word. I've seen old 1:1 pickup bed conversions of Model As, but I'm thinking just a flatbed extension will work. Combo of Plastruc tubing and the bits sliced off the Red Baron glue bomb I have the held up its fuel tank, since that looks more stylish than just angle iron. Panels that look like wood will do, and because I am ever more lazy on painting in my old age, I thought I'd use a scrap of really thin 1940s or '50s-era blank circuit board material I gleaned out of my late father's electronics boards scrap pile. Looks sorta like Masonite to me. Smells terrible when you cut it, though, hold your breath. Since the flatbed displaces the fuel tank and since the Red Baron tank was one of the few bits in good condition in that gluebomb, why not just locate it in the forward area with a filler neck extension? Filler neck is thick soldering wire, I'll slice it down to the right height when I get to the point of permanently the tank in place. An aircraft carrier? Sounds like a boatload of fun. A weapons carrier is a great idea, though …..

Never had to cover a surface that big before using my adhesive back mylar trick, but if the pin can can be filed flat, either the same trick would work, or perhaps the mylar on a thin rectangle of plastic would work to provide a dead flat area, if filing the pin away leaves too much of an uneven surface.

Welcome, you've come to the right place for that range of vehicles.