Russell C

Instrumental ... with classic cars. ( I'm old enough to remember when all but the convertible there were new cars )

Hilarious. Didn't even recognize the light bar (I still live in the past when those were big blue & plastic things), thought it was something in the farther background. Plus, I never followed any of the Transformers stuff.

Somebody forgot to put a winch on the front ...... and a 4x4 drivetrain under it?

Add a few more cylinders to the engine to fill it in?

One of those videos where it makes me wish I had real talent. Four hands are better than two!

Friction-fit nearly all of the AMT version of the 1928 Lincoln Sport Touring phaeton's luggage rack together and accomplished the critically important trick of making it stay together … because that was the only way to be assured that the 2 mounting tabs on the back brackets would line up with locating holes in the rear frame crossmember when the whole assembly is finally glued together. Did that by touching tiny brushfuls of MEK to the joining bits, capillary action pulls that solvent in. Had to cheat on the friction fit by first gluing the 2-piece folding horizontal section together a couple of days earlier and then putting a weight on it to keep it completely flat (additional brass rods om the crossmember for stronger frame installment later). What a fiddly process! Could be that back in the day, the MPC version of this kit had crisper-molded pieces that went together easier where it could actually fold and unfold if you skipped gluing it.

This all ties together - the tan 1:1 Chalet above is #1460 (these are designated by the last 4 digits of the camper serial number plate), and the guy who had that one was unable to sell it from 2015 to 2018, rare as it might be, because he was asking as much as triple what the going rate was for these in the condition his rig was in. Possible that he never sold it, maybe. And yep, I've heard from more than one dealer worker that the dealerships couldn't move these back in '76 - '77 off the showroom floor or off the lot for over two years after they got them. One guy told me how one of these was dropped off by GM at the dealership in the middle of the night with no warning it was coming. Lately there's been a flurry of interest in the 1:1s by a tiny handful of rich guys with lots of dolars but no sense about looking into the prior sales histories of these, sending 'em up to really inflated values, but I think the air is going out of that speculation bubble more all the time. Me, I used to own Chalet #1747, and I'm still the caretaker of the ancient blazerchalet.com website. Tragically, I have zero time to bring it up to 21st century speed. I went so far several years back as to snap up three cheap eBay kits of the MPC and Revell and Monogram kits, but still haven't figured out which is the best base for a factory stock GMC Jimmy Casa Grande version. If one of these kits was re-tooled and also altered to be more accurate in proportions and details, it would save me a lot of bother of trying to fix the basic scale problems in the kit, where I could devote more time to scratchbuilding the camper unit.

Fun thing about this is how infinitely tweakable these can be before the final printout, as opposed to the old fashioned way of hacking/mashing physical bodies together, where after it is all done, we wish one or two dimensions were just a bit different. Borrowed your Mustang's side view for curiosity's sake to do simple 2D cut & paste to see what a slightly longer door / rear wheel opening further back would look like ....

Mark's hit-and-miss on emails sometimes, but when I emailed him a couple weeks back to alert him to an old model kit on eBay, he affirmed that he was keeping plenty busy on the GSL planning. The July mass email update said, "GSL will be presented at the Salt Lake Sheraton hotel - where we’ve held the Championship for many years. Room reservations will open in January of 2023."

At the grocery store after noontime. Didn't get to hear this one, appears to be quite a big air scoop under the front bumper.

Might be the one from this 2010 tractor show video ...

4 door Nova after noontime at the grocery store.

This seems to depend entirely on which batch is bought. I described my experience back in this other thread, the stickup and the metal itself (wrinkles are unavoidable) has held up in all 4 sheets I got - no joking! - for the last 42 years.

That's an interesting custom mix 'n match idea, though. Not heading in that direction with my own offbeat '34 street rod idea where I need to retain the fender-mount headlights so that there is no doubt it is a '34. But since I was curious to see what your idea looked like, I taped together enough of the eBay glue bomb I got several years back and held up a Danbury Mint '32 crossbar / lights / horn to it. The pointed grille puts them all a bit farther forward. A person might have to tweak the appearance by maybe moving the headlights inward on the crossbar, and maybe shortening the outer ends of the crossbar so that they sit down just a bit further ....

Ya beat me to getting to work on the idea, one of many "I wonder what it would look like" ones I have. My variation was a 'what-if' the winged Mopars had been allowed to go on another year, answered by a winged Thunderbird. I was thinking the pointy nose '71 T-bird done up to mimic the '71 Pearson #21 Purolator Mercury Cyclone would be fun .... but a quick look when I first had the idea into the prices for the MPC Donnie Allison Cyclone kit prompted me to say, well, forget that.

What ads?

Easiest paint removal ever! This is the '60 Buick I showed in the "What did you get today" thread on Sept 9, where I was wondering if the paint wouldn't come off without a fight. Turns out it already was feeling a bit tacky with a spray of 409 cleaner on it to clean off the grime, and after a coat of the spray can Easy-Off oven cleaner, the black washed right off with an outdoors water hose sprayer. Was almost the easiest disassembly ever, very lightly glued, except the headlights would not budge from behind, so I had to cut off the big bosses that the chassis screws pm to. Not enough clearance to pivot the grille / bumper out, otherwise. Had to break the bosses off the backs of the headlights and trim what was left flat to the body, and then use a long rod to punch them out to the front. They had a good grip to the buckets, but that at least saves their front faces from being marred, in case anybody will be needing them.

Recognized that build right off, but had to go digging through my old Owner Operator magazines to find it: No doubt your friend George was disappointed to come in second to me in Lou Kroack's July 1982 Tabletop Truckarama contest, to my '62 Peterbilt well driller. Knowing my own build quality at the time, if Kroack could have seen both of our models in person at the same time, George would have gotten 1st place. Yeah, I put a lot of effort into mine, but it could have been done much better. One of these days I might rebuild mine better, but additional time will have to fall out of the sky first.

Many would recognize the "Luv Machine" as the pickup that became a Revell kit:

'60 Buick out of a 2-bidder eBay auction where I got it for 50 cents more than the other guy. Helped my razor-thin budget that the (I assume) estate saler miscategorized it as "Pontiac promotional material" instead of putting it in the "Vintage model car" category, where these old buildups tend to become unaffordable for poor guys like me. No engine, missing one red lens, hood tough to fully close, has a heavy black brushed-on paint job that might be stubborn to lift off. Nice enough to not deserve a "glue bomb" label. Great to snag one with a usable enough body to lend to a street machine project idea I've had for years, was beginning to wonder if the main element was priced out of my reach.

I can see how. Had my fun shoving the chassis / wheels / engine of the '55 Chevy gasser under the Checker Taxi a while back. I should do a couple more mashups, they aren't too difficult ...

At first, I thought you were talking about the other Ford F-250 converted for use as an aeronautical craft ....

My search skills might be letting me down when it comes to dredging up the most current figures, and finding other corroborating statistics would help nail the figures down better. For example, this one page puts the total for fully electrics right around 3 million (many news items show big jumps of brand-new EV sales), while this other page puts the total vehicles altogether for all of Europe - lagging behind if I read that right - at just under 405 million for the year 2020. Unless my math skills are also letting me down big time, that puts the percentage of EVs in Europe at not yet reaching .75% of total vehicles. In that second web page above, their full PDF report has a page 13 to it that breaks out vehicles by fuel type (still lagging back to 2020), and unless I'm misreading it, their figure for all-electric cars for the European Union area is .5%, while gas cars were at 51.7% and diesels, 42.8%. Open to corrections and more firmly calculated figures, of course.

Does anyone know what the ratio of gas cars in Europe on the road vs EVs is?