Russell C

First, I'm aware that the rally wheels in the Revell '77 van are not correct for that vehicle, that's covered in another thread. However, not knowing these two kit types well (and not finding any results about it in a lengthy search here), I'm wondering if Revell created new wheels for the van that actually are 1/24th scale, or did they rob the tool out of the 1/25th scale Camaro kits. If anybody has one or both styles rattling around in the ol' parts box, could you post the diameter of 'em?

http://www.autozone.com/greases-and-gear-oil/lubricant-grease/crc-freeze-off-super-penetrant/898352_0_0/

Link to his license plates category here.

Do keep in mind that it's not just a simplistic tie between lake levels and precipitation, you also have to factor in water allocation between the lakes, and who decides to keep how much in which lakes and how much to let loose for irrigation and when that's done. This site http://www.water-data.com/ charts all of that, folks who love to graph things can work out the details among the site's Water Database flyouts for each lake in the Colorado system. Then on top of that, you have waste. By virtue of being in Phoenix, my idiot apartment complex gets its water from the Central Arizona Project's Colorado river-fed canals, only to waste it by having floods which water the roadways instead of the plants and trees. I do my bit by telling 'em where the leaks are, but they refuse to listen.... Less waste all the way around would mean less water drained out of the lakes.

Edsel Ford's custom-made golf cart. Henry did not approve.

"You got 48% (21 right out of 44). The average score is 45%." Seems I got more half right by correctly guessing on when the particular styles were trendy....

This page? http://www.missinglinkrc.com/

Oh, I guess my vote would be for the 1991 Colorado vacation where I spotted a spiffy dirt side road north of Silverton along the route going up Red Mountain Pass, which I thought would make a nice place to drive up and eat lunch at the last place before I'd have to turn around. Such a smooth recently cleared road, I ended up stopping east of the summit, and afterward I just kept heading west. Had to have been cleared & flattened mere days earlier by a bulldozer, turned out to be Ophir Pass, essentially a 4x4 jeep road not suited for 4x2 tin box hatchbacks like mine. Reckless of me not to know what was over the crest or where the road ended up, but luck of the draw gave me a ride that was not usually smooth, having only one minorly hairy crossing of a wash with a little water in it. It sure was fun and scenic.

I hadn't been paying attention to bidding pages like that before, but sure enough on this one: http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=171887681445&showauto=true I did a quick copy 'n paste of the "r***j" / "a***l" bids into the wordcounter.com site, and the score is 49 to 48 so far on the bid count between the two.

Regional/random marketing experiment? The store at Tempe Marketplace had nothing but $19 - $24 car kits this morning.

Yay! We have a winner. It's missing from the clips below, but when asked why it was important to supply Pudge with a peanut butter sandwich every week, it is because "Pudge controls the weather." For the sheer number of weird quotes in it, it must rank near the top for such things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZQu7O-AxoQ

No takers on mine yet? I'll add two more hints. This movie was a big hit, someone's bound to remember it. "Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!" "Let me illuminate to you the precarious situation in which you have found yourself. I am the one they call when things go wrong, and things ... have indeed gone ....wrong."

........ sez Gregg, to a collective group of people who basically have built an entire model or three before saying,

Spotted an opportunity to pick up a convertible kit for cheap, not planning to build the whole thing, just rob some parts out of it. Upon seeing the dead satin chrome items, I thought I'd check the photos here to see if I was imagining things by thinking I'd previously seen shiny bumpers & such. Turns out that was a factory defect. One other handy thing I found elsewhere (or so it seems) was this German site's how-to on fixing the kit's defects: http://www.modellversium.de/galerie/12-autos/1756-1960-pontiac-bonneville-sports-coupe-trumpeter.html Google's English translation here.

Folks fail to factor the physics involved in that sometimes. I vaguely remember an old account of the injuries from a jump in one of the Smokey & the Bandit movies is what led to seats in some later stunt vehicles being hammock-like and not attached to the floor. From this link describing Hal Needham's stunts, the one about the 140ft Chevy truck jump says this, Needham was hauled off to the hospital with his first broken back, a compression fracture. “This thing had a telemetry system we wired up in the cab . . .I pulled 29 g’s when I landed on the other side,” he says."

I believe Gregg is looking into this, but for me, I can't see any photos in the MCM-specific galleries, they're all black boxes: http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/gallery/category/1-members-gallery/ And from that, threads like the one I had on Bob Nordberg's vintage models show no pics?

My suggestion is that there is no convincing way to dress up chrome headlights. To go one step permanently better is to acquire a pile of various kit headlight reflectors & clear lenses either from sellers at a local model car club or off ebay when such cheap piles pop up, drill/ream out the chrome surface, install the chrome reflectors & lenses, and then you'll have a far more realistic result from not all that much extra effort. My reflector pile has diminished down to this after all these years...

Is the format customizable by the mod / site administrators? I liked how the prior one allowed individual reply-to posts to have the signature turned off or on. Seems now there is only the blanket 'on/off' switch which I found in the Account Settings page for "Signature". Plus, no offense to the new format, but having the "Quote" thing right under the post text (along with the "+" box, which I just discovered is for multi-quoting) is really annoying. It would be nicer if those two features could be moved way over to the right out of the way.

Sometimes the old vans are a ball...

Mildly entertaining post-apocalyptic movie with random clever parts to it, a few entertaining vehicles, including the star vehicle Been done here before by Rob Mattis, but one could borrow the basic theme and/or borrow the theme of another mustang movie car variant, if the offroad look appeals to you:

'40 Ford "Tudor Coupe" When I was an itty-bitty kid playing with my older brother's original issue black plastic AMT '40 Tudor, I always thought the front end was pretty, but the back was too turtle-like. Later, I built my own metallic purple paint-blistered, then orange glue bomb, and right before I junked it completely, I used the body to do a silhouette pencil drawing to cure its too-turtleness. And I ended up with the 1992 illustration below, which was too VW beetle-like. But just a few days ago, I spotted the sectioned/channeled iconic 1st version Dave Cunningham Tudor, and that reminded me of a photo alteration I've long meant to do. The result is below, from this original photo, heavily sectioned with just a slight rearward lean of the windshield and a bit of channeling. Less turtle-like, without looking too much like the factory coupe, and without turning into the Lincoln Zephyr coupe version. Call it splitting the 3-way difference. I'd also blame the curves of the trunk & rear roof on the Matchbox Rolls Royce Phantom VI that I also used to play with.

I've been keeping my eye on ebay for '57 Continentals for another of my somewhat demented customization ideas, and the Revell 1/32 scale kits seem to be continually appearing for not especially outrageous prices. For what I have in mind, a built junker might suit my purposes ok. Saw this usable $24.21 1/25th promo ebay listing just last week, probably should have snagged it... For alternative's sake, more info on the quite pricy Franklin Mint 24th scale diecast here.... And then there is this guy who scratchbuilt a 12th scale one.

Didn't know, only caught secondhand info one why you were smiling less some time after that. Put the vibes on the car that creamed you instead, maybe. That's good to know.

Tamiya Honda CRX. Converted mine to LHD decades back, should have had a resin cast done first, of course...

Courtesy of Mark Gustavson last night, his latest photo of Bob Nordberg's Ford cabover shortly after he unpacked it. He says "While the model has come apart a bit, there only broken part is the front spindle that allowed the front right tire to depart -- the rest of the parts just came loose." He will be taking studio-style shots of this one and the others of the Nordberg collection that were donated to the International Model Car Museum by Nordberg's son. Mark reminded me to say "this model shared the top adult honors, with Augie Hiscano, in the second Revell-Pactra contest (1964) and that I will be restoring the model for the Museum. The whole acquisition, and this model in particular, will be featured in the 2015 Museum newsletter. [ ... ] -- we have an identical display case for the Nordberg model." What Mark means by that last bit is that Nordberg's model arrived at the Museum with the original Revell-Pactra display bubble that was part of the 1964 award, which was partially seen in the photo in my first post by Nordberg's son. At the Museum now, Augie Hiscano's winning model is displayed in its original bubble display, seen at the middle left of the photo below, from a Facebook photo link out of Brizio's 2015 Museum photo thread. Mark also wanted me to remind you-all that Richard Mike Johnson's Pegasus model, winner of the first 1963 Revell-Pactra contest is also at the Museum - seen in the upper right of Brizio's photo. So, that whole display will soon have even more old amazing model history within it.