Russell C

Gettin' there. Interior and windshield installed, tonneau functioning, although not openable as far up as I wanted. Not to worry, I'm not quitting my day job to be a hinged panel engineer.

Much thanks for those!

Great coverage at your Flickr link!

Well, scratch that, on my limited attendance time. First one I'll have to miss altogether, but regrettably my mom fell and banged herself up enough to require 24hr pro homecare this past week and has me filling in this weekend. Long story short, she's already improving in mobility and should make a full recovery in a couple of weeks, such as that is for a person over 90 years old. Ah, well. See some of you in Salt Lake at the end of the month.

Are you sure you can't do without the dogs in the big room? (I never saw any in there, and have no idea what that's all about) Your debut was fabulous, it would be great to see you return!

With my Ranchero speedster, it was the basic idea of a vehicle I'd never think of building as a personal choice which otherwise appealed to me, apart from some problems which I could fix. Sorta like a foreign/exotics-only fan spotting a nifty-looking dirt cheap '50s American pickup saying "I wouldn't mind having that ... except I'd change the wheels, and fix the grille." But one other reason is finding a really old cleverly done custom only in need of cleanup and re-assembly of parts which is a piece of history that shouldn't be lost to the sands of time. I've seen a couple on ebay like that, but other people with much more money to bid must have also looking out for those, and hopefully gave them an appreciative home.

Motorcycle. =)

Will do. I created a MCM badge fro myself last time, graphic artist that I am. It looks just like my avatar & name layout here, vertically orientated.

It is still a can't-miss event for me.

Me, but once again regrettably only long enough to rummage through the swap meet, and to look through the contest models, then I'm off to my obligatory weekend caretaking of my elderly mother at her house on the other end of the valley.

Now, does the one in the first post appear to be a really old copy, or something more recent? By comparison, this 2013 thread about a "weird Ford cabover" caught my eye because I recognized it as a copy of the original Bob Nordberg cabover that was the co-top winner of the 1964 Revell Pactra contest (which I happened to locate afterward as described in my thread here. If I have it right, the original Nordberg cabover will be restored and re-shown to the public at the upcoming GSL contest for the first time in 50-some years) Wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't other old copies of famous models lurking in people's closets out there ....

Back bumper with polished rounded ends of aluminum paperclip wire serving as bumper bolts. I don't have any vintage decal white pinstripe artwork, so I used some modern ones out of the Revell '32 Ford 5-window coupe, the two small bits over the taillights and the central one (which sorta looks like a bonfire to me). It replaces the big honkin' Pennzoil decal that the original builder put in the middle of the tailgate. While such white pinstripe stuff looks out-of-place at the moment, you'll see how it ends up unifying the whole flame theme when I have the completed tonneau cover in place. I had the brass dollhouse hinges at the front of the tonneau cover framework rattling around in my parts box since the 1980s. The paper-thin plastic sheet will be glued onto the framework, and that aerospace paper-thin black anodized aluminum sheet material with its adhesive backing will be the cover's surface. That stuff has a consistent dead-flat finish, and was dirt cheap since I fished it and more like it out of the scrap bins at an aerospace nameplate manufacturer business I worked at years ago.

Welcome! I can vouch for Kurt personally (insomuch as he would be a fine fellow if he wasn't totally nuts), particularly on his dioramas. Hope to re-see them in some "under glass" posts, one of my favorites to this day is still the "neglected dusty Ferrari in the backyard weeds" one. But I also liked the stand-alones, particularly his cabover Chevy pickup custom, and Kurt's propensity to pepper many of his models' windshields with grasshopper bug splats.

Completed interior. For goodness sake, this kind of speedster dragster must have at least some kind of roll bar setup …. Taillights. The big gouges in the front of the bed wall are for the hinge mounts of the tilt-up tonneau cover. The grille got a blackish, thin whitewash for the turn signals. New flames decals for the hood, different than what the original gluebomb builder had. For being more than 50 years old, they applied ok, but I'll have to scrape away the really crumbly clear areas between the flame licks, and I'll have to neaten up some other spots with a fine-tip black marker pen. The flames at the rear fenders are what the original builder applied, but I scraped away a bit of their front areas to make them look basically better. (Old full decal sheet courtesy of Tom Kendall via trade). The original builder used the other bunch of flames, which to me, just doesn't work well here. So, I opted for the smaller bunch, minus some of the flame licks at the front. Then I cut the other long flames to have a ball-shaped beginning.

Sparkly blue. Looking forward to seeing this one in person!

No clue, but it gives me an idea of what a customized MG TC with a V-16 might look like.

I permanently borrowed this thing from my dad in the early- mid-1980s, it's formal name is the "JC Penny Microworkshop", and I have the whole thing just like what is seen in this recent auction page. It finally needed a bit of oil in the bearings a few years ago to get rid of the increasing vibration, but otherwise still works like a charm. What I like about it is the rheostat motor rpm dial which allow me to choose any speed above 10k rpm to I guess some annoyingly high speed. Wish I could slow it down further, though. Yep, angle in from the top and dig away. It won't be pretty, but in such hidden areas, who cares? Using the even rougher grinding wheel bits, I can dispatch unwanted stuff to plastic heaven in mere seconds. At minimum, I take a deep breath and then blow the offending plastic fumes away from me, but better yet would be to have a mini-fan nearby to send the quasi-melting plastic fumes away.

Never knew what these bits were officially called, I just used 'em. Assuming you have a motor tool of some description, you simply use the bottom edge of the cutting tool to grind whatever you need into plastic dust, as in what I just did to the ribs of this unfortunate plastic piece.

Now, that's wild right there. My restrictions were always to the GSL-chosen model kits for the "Group" category, but there's really no limit to what can be done with other vehicles. Let the creativity fly!

None that I've ever heard of, and I've been attending GSL since 1990. My Ford Y-block engine WIP thread was for a 'semi-secret' model going to the prior GSL, but that was just my own fun over messing with people's minds. This time around I have the thread going for my gluebomb restoration that's just going to be on the display table, but I also started taking photos today of another relatively quickie project for a WIP thread of a car I do plan on entering, but which will not likely win any awards. I'm about a third of the way through that latter one.

Beats me, actually, I've been collecting bits of wire since the early '80s, and I've ended up with lots of varieties such as the more or less black steel wire that I use for spark plug wire, copper that I mostly use to pin parts together, and various diameters of aluminum wire. The advantage over pre-made store-bought rings is that I can create a ring of any diameter using wire of any diameter.

In the original gluebomb the whole interior was unpainted plastic. I didn't feel like painting the dash overall or the gauges, and for that I cheated a bit and used Best Model Car Parts' printed paper gauge faces. I also used my motor tool to 'lathe-turn' a glove box button out of aluminum paperclip wire. The ignition key receptacle was 'turned' the same way out of larger diameter white metal scrap, with a deep stab of an X-acto blade to make the keyhole. That's Bare Metal Foil for the gauge pod. I still need to complete this with the addition of white plastic radio station push buttons. All those other knobs looked like featureless white blobs, and I knew I couldn't paint silver at the back of them consistently enough to resemble the bezels that are supposed to be at the bases of these knobs, so I created tiny wire rings - see my How-to post on that here - and glued them in place with Tenax liquid cement. One thing about wire, it is a consistent size, compared to potentially blobby paint applied by shaky hand.

As in something that brings life to otherwise featureless knobs on dashboards. At the upper left is the non-painted dashboard for my Ranchero gluebomb restoration. At the very least, I figured it needed something to make the radio and other knobs stand out, and I don't have the painting skill to make the metal rings at the bases of such knobs all a consistent size. So, I created the rings out of thin scrap aluminum wire from who knows what dead electrical device I used to have. The basic procedure is to loop the wire around something cylindrical -- a drill bit in this case -- to form a perfect circle ring, then mash it flat, and use a razor blade to cut through (I used a stainless steel drill size guide as a "cutting board" here) where the wire overlaps itself. Mash it flatter if necessary, and it should fit snugly around radio knobs, antenna bases, etc. I glued these down with Tenax liquid cement applied with a very fine brush. Here, the 5 knobs were too close together to simply place the whole rings over them realistically, so I placed full circle rings on the two outer knobs and the one central knob, and then cut other rings into thirds and located them as needed. Eyeball them from a half inch away and you can see how they aren't perfect, but from regular viewing distance, you wouldn't know they aren't all full circles, and they do all appear to have a consistent size, and that was the entire objective.

For my decades-ago stock '57 T-bird, I put a small diameter brass rod into my motor tool that had a polished flat end to it, and lightly bopped it spinning onto some rectangles of Bare Metal Foil. Took a while to do after practicing first, didn't turn out especially bad.

This site is a heckuva reference collection for '69-to-present plates: http://www.15q.net/usindex.html