Russell C

Yesterday's arrival for me was a free plastic cone-shape piece for a future cement truck comedy act. Today's arrival is more elaborate and fun, a nicely priced $25 + shipping eBay score. I spotted this one around a month ago, the seller misID'd it as an Indycar, looked like '60s F1 to me, but probably not a Ferrari. The seller had a tape measure next to it showing it as a foot long, so via a combined internet search of the "Matra" lettering on the valve covers plus my guess of it being 1/12 scale, it turns out to be a Tamiya or Ebbro Matra MS11, confirmed by our own MCM forum's John Brolin in his ongoing buildup of one of these. Never heard of the Matra team, I'm more of an early '90s F1 fan, so I learned about how spiffy their V12s were, plus it was a French team with blue cars. Who knows what the long-ago builder of this one was thinking on painting it candy apple red. I alerted the eBay seller what this was, he fixed the title/description in his first listing. No bidders in that one or the 2nd, same happening in its 3rd relisting, so I just could not resist on the last day. Single bid win! It's missing the nose / radiator, but that's ok, I have alternate plans that I've been kicking around in my mind for a long time based on computer illustrations like what's seen in the bottom image from a guy who combined exotic cars with F1-style exposed engines. Seen that similar idea drawn by another illustrator, plus there was a image right here at MCM a decade+ ago of a C10 Chevy pickup with major F1-syle enginework out back. A cheap 18th scale (close enough for government work / custom work!) diecast American classic car is "in the mail" to me.

Got a tapered plastic cone today. Found it where house building contractors had thrown a bunch of scraps into a dumpster, might be a cap end for PVC pipes or something. What I've been thinking for several years after I won a pile of glue bombs in an eBay auction, is that I could use a cone shape like this for the one really forlorn-looking 32nd scale Pyro Ford Model T Coupelet that was included in the pile. (I couldn't bring myself to toss it out because … save the gluebombs by any means possible!) Now, with this cone and a bit of re-shaping and 'angle work' to the roof, and some other scratch built mixer machine items, I'd be able to prove Steve Scott really did use a T truck cab from a 1915-era cement truck to make his Uncertain T. 😂 Mixer drum probably needs to be a tic shorter, and have a tic smaller diameter front section made from an old film canister or similar diameter thing like a small aspirin bottle.

?? You might be thinking of someone else. My Sept 2 irk would more likely start with an "N", as in nutcase.

Elvis would at least get the person sorta back on track for the season. But this is the same increasingly irrational neighbor (with equally similar visiting relatives) across the street that I described in my Sept 2 irk. White, red and neon super bright green lights right now would at least make sense for the next 4 or 5 weeks. But this 6 months-out-of-date show makes me wonder if the resident is not right in the head. With my luck, the person would instead start blaring Yankee Doodle Dandy music or the William Tell Overture and start firing off roman candles.

Since I'm a stickler on "Christmas starts after Santa arrives at the end of the Macys parade," it's a little bothersome to me when folks put up their Christmas lights barely into November, but that isn't the irk. It's the display of the neighbor across the street. Her all-LED lights are up now a day early, red and white - Christmassy colors so far - but the 3rd color is best described as 'nuclear-reactor-meltdown-radioactive blue.' Super bright. It looks like the 4th of July over there.

My one-and-only daily driver didn't start out as a classic, was only 7½ years old when I got it in late 1993, but with just the exception of the last two years in a row (local obligations interfering) and with one other school attendance obligation, my annual summer vacation road trips to SW Colorado have always been around 540 miles each way. Replace the items that wear out, and they just keep on going. Will celebrate its 39th birthday sometime next year. Really needs new paint these days. I'm poor, however; accepting donations - just remember to make the checks out to "Cash." 😂

Got jagged scraps and sorta roundy scraps ... 'cause ya just never know when one of those will come in handy in this hobby.

You'll shoot yer eye out, kid!

Fixed a little, maybe. Front wheels farther forward, back end truncated, and a bit of sectioning above the beltline. No clue what the make/model is, though .....

Where I go vacationing in Colorado in the summertime, soft dents only on the front = sudden deer or elk encounter. Soft dents everywhere and no windows? Likely a very angry human.

No use for "oil" or "smoke" switches, but probably could use a "hindsight" switch in my daily driver 38 year-old VW GTI. How you folks across the pond can drive cars with center mounted manual gear shifters is beyond the comprehension of hopelessly right-handed drivers like me, thus I'll gladly be able to drive Bond's Bentley.

Older post, don't know how I missed it, glad it was brought back up. Fabulous work!

For model cars, the question is whether you build a vintage kit, and wreck its unopened box collector value, or leave it unopened. For vintage food, I can personally attest regarding a somewhat vintage but otherwise mint condition box of Kraft macaroni & cheese, it was not a terrible idea to go ahead and cook it up and eat it … it just wasn't that great of an idea, either.

A couple years back here at MCM, a different person asked about Hank's, and I had a go at trying to see if his pages had been archived somewhere. I think he may have prevented the Internet Archive site from doing crawls of his pages, but I thought I'd have another look into a different archiving page. Check this one out -- scroll down its page and click on (if you are using a mouse & computer) the individual truck maker names. Works for me, I see loads of IH pics, but first I have to jump through its hoops of doing a verification to make sure I'm not a bot. (edit: It looks like some of the clickable truck makes like the one for Kenworth divert to a pointless site with a far east language, but others like Mack show Hanks old pics at least as smaller thumbnail pics, but if you click on those to see the larger image, they divert to the pointless site instead) https://archive.is/gElQE

Turned out great right up to the point of the giant flashlight strapped to the top of the engine ...

Had to stop it at the 12 second point. As usual, A. I. proves once again it has no idea what it's looking at when it comes to cars. Fixed some of it using my 2010s-era photo manipulation program, but can't do a thing about the person driving it while sitting on the center console. '57 Cadill-bird-ercedes ... or something.

I'd say it's less about "Google being broken" and more about the public not being aware that the company isn't working on behalf of the public, but instead for itself. The one angle is classic "Madison Avenue," where they guess you are doing a search on something to buy which causes them to bend themselves into pretzel shapes to trick you into buying something. I learned years ago to scroll past any search result which looks like it's "sponsored" and I clear the cookies off my computer after every visit to Google (and pretty much to every other website) so that it can't get a good handle on what my purchasing interests might be. Also helps that I have a killer ad blocker. More than a decade back, before I did that kind of clearing, I was amazed that the Google side ads in Google searches were always for Chevy trucks and a particular GM car dealership only a few miles away which I could care less about. The other angle is not on selling, but instead an outgrowth of the mindset of their top administrators and programmers. They may not realize they're doing it (some people suggest they do), but increasingly they are trying to steer you toward information rather than simply outright provide information. Case in point, a prominent famous person said something major and controversial several years back, I heard it clearly and so did many folks across the country, articles were written about it. But more recently when I wanted to repeat what the person said and couldn't remember the exact words, it took me probably 30 minutes+ to finally locate one article that included a video clip of the person speaking. Generic search words turned up the opposite of what I wanted, because … well … Google's top end people must have thought what the person said was damaging. So they buried it. The way I forced a result out of the system was to put particular words / phrases between quotation marks, which forces the search to only yield results of the specific items. For a non-controversial example of how that works -- if I asked the thing to show me results for Model Cars Mag, it comes up with results of models of all kinds (meaning model behavior, runway model women, model homes), cars (of every imaginable type), and …. you get the picture. If I type in "modelcarsmag" between quote marks, I get MCM right here. It's just one way of the larger method of boolean searches. No offense to the other search engines, but my experience from doing intensive searches both for specific hobby pursuits and for items within a particularly politically divisive topic, I've see that Google is still head and shoulders above the others on coming up with the hard-to-find results I'm after. The other search engines just aren't that good. It drives me nuts, though, that lately a person needs to work extra hard to extract results that were easier to find 5 or 10 years back.

With decades-old daily driver vehicles, a person needs to set aside irks and think always positive. My battery gave up the ghost today, not an irk because I got an extra half year out of something that otherwise usually lasts 3-5 years tops. It would not give me one last crankup even after charging for hours on end today, and I'd found out last night that the nearest parts store didn't have one in stock. Not an irk, par for the course on dying batteries, while the next nearest did have one, which pleased me. The clerk there said it was good that I ordered it online to be available today since these particular ones to fit Mk2 VW Golfs / GTIs are just less commonly stocked lately. And in the Phoenix metro area, otherwise known as the Valley of the Fierce Sun, the high was not even too much above 70°F, a nice day for a long bike ride to go fetch the battery. Pleased that the wire basket I'd acquired last year to clamp onto my bike carrier was bigger than a car battery, which made carrying that load a snap.

This one? https://www.rocketfin.com/ Instant-opens for me.

Every generalization is false. Including this one.

What pleased me today was the delivery of this - looks like an old camera, but it is not. It's a replacement all-aluminum mkII VW fuel pump housing. While I could have posted a couple of weeks ago about the crack in the plastic factory original fuel pump housing for my '86 VW GTI as an "irk", it really wouldn't qualify. My car is over 38 years old and plastic items like that in harsh environments don't last forever. Reality is what it is, no reason to complain. Probably it was cheaper for VW to make these in plastic than metal, but oh, well. This one is fabricated by the guys at ProAlloy in the UK to solve the age deterioration problem that lots of mk2 VW owners around the world want to fix. It's nice that this generation of '85-'92 VWs has enough of an enthusiast following that such a solution is available. Not cheap, $495 with overseas shipping, perhaps a quarter of the value of my entire car in its current so-so condition (rust-free, though), and painful because I'm too poor to get any other vehicle replacement. But that's the price to pay to keep such an old daily driver rolling safely. I'll be even more pleased when my car is back to being leak-free.

Now that you mention that, I wondered about it myself, and from the fun I have altering photos, I wanted to see it instead of just trying to visualize it. Dunno, with the back edge of the door farther back, it might necessitate moving the B pillar back to meet the vertical line, and make the window opening a bit too wide?

This late afternoon today, hope the next time I'm over in this area, the guy will have the cover off. Black, has a flame job on the front as near as I can tell.

Still live in the 1980s, I do. More than one kit manufacturer has done the Ferrari 512 BB factory stock, and Fujimi has done a few Koenig Specials with no stock parts, and not the 512 BB at all. So, I'd like to see AMT style 2-in-1, stock and with the Koenig add-ons.