Russell C

That is great to know!

Forgot to include what I think is also the program creator's Philip D'Antoni's official Facebook page for his show, where you don't have to log in to FB to view the photos (although FB sometimes arbitrarily throws in a "not logged in" tag and blanks the screen). Looks like D'Antoni hasn't put in new content since last October, but I remember guys asking tech questions and/or finding answers there about details for the assortment of trucks seen on the show. https://www.facebook.com/movinontvshow/photos

The show is what prompted me to build nothing but trucks from '75-ish through to 1987. My favorite episode was where Will thought about getting his own Diamond Reo Raider. You probably already know of the official website for the show? http://www.movinontvshow.com/ Some good reference photos there. My one gripe with the current owner of the 1:1 original (?) TV show truck is - last I saw - he still has the newer Budd wheels on it rather than the proper Alcoas.

Valid question on how much to back off from pure black before it becomes just a noticeably really dark gray. I never cared too much for Tom Daniel's "California Street Vette" in orange with all those giant hood / roof black louvers and rear glass cover louvers, but lately an I idea I have is how interesting it would be in black-on-black -- matte or semi-gloss on the louvers. But the key to pulling that off well would be to different shades of really dark gray that can be mistaken at first glance for black. I've only done one model in black, a 32nd scale Revell VW Pickup shortened to GTI length, but whenever I try to photograph it in direct sunlight, it just disappears into a basic shape where the details are lost in the contrast with the bright background.

Made a bracket for the alternator out of a black-anodized dead soft aluminum tag that I fetched out of the scraps barrel from my long-ago job at an aerospace nameplate manufacture (same material I used for my GSL Group 15 entry's Y-block engine generator brackets). Bends but doesn't break easily, quite carvable. Touch up the bare silver metal areas with a black Sharpie marker and it's all good. Thought I could just lathe-turn grooves using my motor tool into the three Revell roadster pulleys and then create a new fan belt out of heat-stretched black plastic sprue. That worked well for the bottom pulley, but the longer I looked at the upper ones that would be silver-painted, the more certain I was that I'd end up smudging the paint man-handling those into place. No way to smudge aluminum. So, I used my mini-lathe to create the two top pulleys from aluminum rod.

Try as I might to like the wheels / narrow tires & drum brakes in the Revell '29 roadster kit that's the basis of this Common Kit class, the road racer in me prefers disc brakes and tires with a bit more contact patch, even though this build will be a rod that motors around to shows not all that fast. Since not so many street rods are seen with 4-spoke wheels, and I spotted a nice set of 'em on eBay last year that were the custom wheels in the MPC 1984 Dodge Daytona, that's what I'll use. However, they are all the same offset and I want big meats in the back. To cure that problem, just slice the outer rim areas off something like the front wheels off the Revell IMSA Mustang (thanks to MCM forum modeler Dan Doane for lending his parts box set!). The experienced mini-lathe owners will spot the one I have in the 2nd pic below and ask why I didn't just turn a new pair of rims out of aluminum. Answer: I'm not that good at machining. What I did there was chuck the wheels into the lathe to get a good true circle cut into the wheel at the depth I needed (fer gawd's sake, be careful with that saw not to impale yourself!!) and then I rotated the chuck by hand to carefully saw the rest of the way through. Don't know where the front tires I have came from, the backs are the 2-piece plastic ones from the Revell Chevy Luv pickup .... because they just happen to be the size / width I need, and the tread pattern on 'em isn't terrible. Not too difficult to cut a bigger wheel opening in 'em.

Bicycle pump at the 1:18 point count as an instrumental music device?

Oh, man, that brings back fond memories of the college station in Albuquerque. No top 20 megahits ever, but instead the full range of connoisseur music all day long drifting pretty much seamlessly from one style gradually over into another, classical to ragtime to WW2 big band to Miles Davis to country swing to fabulous blue grass. Bach to Earl Scruggs. Weekends were specialty programs like the "Thistle & Shamrock" (a national show done somewhere else in the country) and the local pure 1920s jazz records collection I listened to every Sunday night in the half hour drive from my parents' house back to the college dorm. The only commercials they had were the gag ones the DJs created along with their short filler bits. "You're listening to N.P.R. - National Paranoid Radio ... on KUNM, 90.1 FM."

Chose the smallest headlights option, got those & their aluminum wire rod brackets more or less figured out. Didn't like the look of the really deep recesses behind lenses, so I used "89AKurt's" tip on how to make headlight reflectors out of standard aluminum foil. The reflectors are just temporarily dropped in here as are the headlights on the wires, they'll all be lined up and fitted better in the final assembly. Heat-stretched clear plastic sprue will work as headlight bulbs, where the ends will be hit with one more round of heat to make 'em look like round bulbs.

Transaxle sure does resemble the one in the MPC Ford Mark IV Le Mans race car kit ....

Started in Sept 1984 according to a note I put on the instruction sheet for this Athearn 1/87 scale White Freightliner that I was converting to be a Powerliner. That was back in the days when I was exclusively building model trucks. Made the bumper out of the same clear sheet material as the windshields, so I had to color it with a red marker to see where make the cutouts better. Since I couldn't do good enough justice to the cobbling together of the grille out of 4 kits, that's where it stopped. I am a graphic artist and know how to draw artwork for photoetch metal from one of my prior jobs, one of these days I could re-start this one and make it into a real nice little jewel, where the multi color stripes I'd planned for it could be a decal I could also draw up and commission someone to print it.

Ye of so little faith that your rod won't catch on fire. Or, conversely, me of so much faith that my 37 year-old 1:1 daily driver won't catch on fire, seeing how the extinguisher I have in it is around a third or a quarter of the size in diameter and length. ?

Dunno how I missed this build. Really nice work!

My sister showed me that stuff the last time we were in the Michaels store, all sorts of possible tape possibilities. Here's their woodgrain one: https://www.michaels.com/product/rec-washi-tbe-sm-wood-grain-5p-10683797

Switching my vote to wheel choice #5.

Favoring this look over the standard location on the shock towers.

Evil "89AKurt". Over at his now-turquoise & florescent yellow (I assume) GSL Common Kit '29 roadster build, he mentioned a "puke tube" while doing his radiator work. Never heard that term before, so I tossed it into a search at the Jalopy Jounal 1:1 forum. Of course, a coolant overflow tank! Various types to see there, ranging from whisky bottles to basic vertical tube tanks. Once I see a simple detail like that, it's hard to unseen it. A quick rummage through my metal bits pile turned up an old scrap of aluminum tube with a smaller tapered end that looked sorta like a tall stainless Thermos bottle, so that'll do, with a bit of aluminum rod 'lathe-turned' on my motor tool to be the cap that fills in the tube end. A little bit of wire will be the bracket to hold it to the radiator side, hole drilled in the bottom for the future overflow hose. Glue once, measure twice. Or something. In seeing whether things were lining up in the engine / frame department, I saw that I'd glued on the front cover / one-arm water pump in a non-vertical position - that was brilliant - so I had to pry it off and put it on right. Won't have to carve out a crevasse for valve cover clearance, that's nice to know. Top radiator inlet 'arm' somewhat ironically is sourced from the old blue-molded Revell '31 Ford Sedan Delivery (you should see what I'm doing to that kit's engine). Added a little piece of plastic to the right side of the crossmember, which will be filed flat on top after the glue hardens to serve as the surface the overflow coolant tank sits on. Ignore the black spots on the crossmember, I drilled the holes for the radiator locator pins one increment too far over to the right and filled in the holes with stretched black plastic sprue. May have figured out what to put on as a radiator cap ornament. Inspiration was the Red Baron glue bomb that provided the front part of the now elongated chrome oil pan. Couldn't remember if that pile still had its gunsight radiator ornament or not, but that must have been busted off when I got it. However, since the wire bracket for the overflow tank was such an easy circle/stem to make, I should try it to see if I can make a 3-piece gunsight ornament out of wire. This might work, take two perpendicular wires and mash them together hard with a needle nose pliers and add a tiny drop of superglue to the junction and hope it's strong enough to survive trimming off the excess to fit within the circle. We'll see.

At first, I thought I could flip the Revell roadster kit's chrome plated oil filter upside down, slice it thin at the top, and turn it into a ribbed radiator cap, but it ended up looking just too big in diameter. Plan B was to lightly crimp an aluminum dowel with pliers around the top to create the ribs, and then lathe-turn it into a shiny dome with a smaller diameter boss underneath for mounting on top of a short length of black plastic sprue, which itself goes onto the ex-Franklin Mint '41 Lincoln radiator. Decorative ornament pinned into the cap to be figured out later. Now that the oil filter is reduced to being a chrome cap for some future project, my orange glue bomb Vette scrapyard pile donated one more item to this project, its oil filter, lathe-turned a little smaller in diameter and length. Realistic orange color for Fram filters, will use a fine-tip marker to draw in that name upside down later, too.

Back last March, I tipped NY state modeler Jim Bongiovanni that Arizona doesn't require front plates like New York does, and as a sort of homage to his Revell '29 roadster buildup, I thought I'd make my build a 2-plate NY state-registered rod. Plus, I've never been to NY state, so here I can dream just a little on how nice it would be to live in the sky above Manhattan and occasionally take the rod for a summer ride out in the country a ways while being as politely street legal as possible. Handy that I had a license plate frame in my parts box the identical size as what's in the '29 Revell kit. The bracket for the front plate is a 32nd scale half steering wheel that's been rattling around in my parts box since forever, don't recollect what the bracket for the back one came out of. Since it might be a little dark under the frame extension out back, I added a little light housing on top of the Revell kit's plate, butted up against a leftover bit of the plastic sprue I left on the plate frame. Might as well not arouse the ire of the local cops for not having a lit plate back there at night. In gathering images to use as a template to draw the NY plates in my old CorelDRAW program, I was wondering why I didn't see yearly / 2-year registration tags on the back plates like we have in AZ. Finally figured out those are put in the left corner of the windshields. Wasn't planning on using the Revell kit windshield frame at all, but now I think I'll install just a short bit of it with a vestige of windshield glass to put those stickers on. Folks will see later why I was skipping the whole windshield entirely. Next, made a much stronger pair of connecting pins for the engine/transmission to that I could finalize the engine mounts, particularly since the passenger side of the V8 is gone. My guesstimate turns out right on the added length to the front of the frame, if not just a tad too much. Might end up with a shroud around the fan … or not. Hacked the radiator itself out of a Franklin Mint '41 Lincoln parts pile, and the fan comes from that pile, too. Call me a traditional mechanical stick in the mud, not a fan of electric fans. Ah. Well, I figured that a cantilevered pedestal in the interior that's fairly heavy couldn't just be bolted to the sheetmetal of the floor, so I put in a large bracket directly underneath that it could bolt down through to. .. ..... Nothing …… !

Equally divided between the first two wheel choices, not liking the black wagon wheels 3rd option ....

Put a mounting plate on the side of the engine that's missing (where it used to be a V8). Will carve those gussets down a bit smaller after the glue dries. Temporarily clipped to the transmission to be sure it's all proper flat joining surface. 'Lathe-turned' (on my motor tool) a new perfectly round brake pedal out of black plastic sprue (ignore the plastic fuzz in the treads, that will be cleaned out better). Keeping the accelerator pedal, but will sever it from the assembly after the glue dries and have it hanging from a wire arm instead. I drove one car many moons ago with a pedal that hinged at the floor, never liked how that action felt. And finally, partway through adapting a parts box auto shift steering column to the kit column, will add a turn signal lever next along with the gear selection indicator and ignition lock. Not a fan of the lonely-looking stock '29 Ford dash gauges, but I do like the aircraft-style ones in the "Red Skull" car from the "Captain America: First Avenger" movie, so I did a low-res paper printout size check to make sure it fits on the additional plastic I put on the kit dash. When I get the higher-res printout from "89AKurt" (in exchange for doing the graphics of the license plate he's putting on his GSL WIP build), I'll add some black plastic Waldron bezel rings to the gauges to give them more dimension. If it turns out that clear canopy glue doesn't dissolve the printout ink, that might end up looking like convincing gauge "glass."

Irks me that it demands "back to historic flow path." Geeze. Define "historic."

Irked by my email service provider, over an unresolved issue of why for the 3rd time in a month that my account was locked due to "unusual activity" which they can't specify what that is. Another 2 hours of my life I will never get back .....

One of my objectives is to use up every scrap in my parts pile - when they are all gone, then I'm done model building. Here, one of my seats from some 1970s AMT semi-truck contributed a corner to be the underfloor master brake cylinder bracket. The brake unit itself comes from the '69 Vette glue bomb I got off eBay, with an additional plastic scrap to fill in the empty void in the bottom of that unit. Got it figured out that a Lokar-style column shift link will work from the transmission to the steering column where I can scribe in what looks like a movable sleeve and add an arm to that area to connect to the link rod.