Russell C

(repost, since it got lost in the server meltdown)

If I may first gripe, a $1500 model I'd buy would at least never have chrome-plated headlight lenses or red-painted taillights. Those would all be clear material with chome reflector areas beneath the lenses. But consider the flip side, how much do any of us charge per hour for doing what could be described as quality work on anything? $20? $35? By way of example, (when I used to track the hours I had in a model) the 911 woody in my avatar photo has about 100 hours in it. Multiply that by $20 per hour, and it's a $2000 model. It is not for sale, of course, but I could be commissioned to duplicate it, and I might be able to put in an interior this time and still get it in under 100 hours. Except I have other things to do and such a project would eat into my time..... so if a person desperately wants me to duplicate it, do you see how the price goes up in order to make it worth my while. Could another modeler do as good of a job in less time? Maybe, but for how much of a lesser price before he or she ends up working at what would end up to be a minimum wage? It burns down to supply & demand, along what the sheer quality of the build is. If you want good work and don't want to do it yourself, you'll have to pay what you can afford, or you won't get it. In my view, too many modelers are placing way too low of a value on really good quality work.

Or for those of you with Apple computers, for the #2 & #4 steps, you press the Command key (with the ⌘ symbol on it) and the C key / V key.

The WIP is still here up to page 5 where the server crashed....

Yes, indeed that can be done. I just tried it with this post that I copied from the Cache and put back into the current thread on using a Dremel as a 'lathe'.

(copied 'n pasted back in here from the Google Cache "crashed version" of this thread) Posted 26 November 2014 - 07:37 PM Yes, indeed, anything that is small and round or cylindrical in some way. In my MG TD glue bomb restoration post #16 I showed how I knocked down the bulk of the too-thick steering wheel. 2nd pic below is a close up of a board I made back in the '90s to show to the guys at the Albuquerque Model Car Club of what could be done. I've had the same JC Penny variable speed motor tool this whole time. Wear safety glasses and be careful when you use a sharp blade as a cutting tool!

Anytime. Clarified a bit more here with help from one of the other commenters, on a detail I could have described better. Spotted the tip elsewhere several years back in a scandal where a not-too-internet-savvy person thought an incorrect statement could be erased and nobody would be the wiser. That is not the way the internet works, so the lesson learned is that whatever is said or shown had better be something the poster is comfortable with being carved in stones - plural - forever. One or two of those 'stones' can be busted or hidden, but not all of them. Finding the remaining ones is a bit of a trick, sometimes.

That is the l'il arrow I spoke of, not in the error page result, but in the Google search results. Clicking on that arrow is what brings out the "Cached" button, and clicking on that takes you to the last saved version that Google has.

....... but not exactly. To see what was lost in many cases, check out my explanation on that, please see my post here. For those having the time to copy 'n paste material, at least some of what is re-posted doesn't have to be rewritten from scratch.

I used this thread in my other General comments section post to describe how lost thread material is still out there. The other photos from the "crashed" version of this thread are here.

However (seen the adage elsewhere), what has been seen on the internet cannot be unseen. It is out there in more than one place. So, with regard to attempting to retrieve what was out there, try this: First, if any of you happen to remember the date you may have started a post, plop it in a site-specific search like this example for December 2. What I get for the top result is Clayton Scheiber's "What cool trucks, (rigs or pick ups), did you see lately?" thread. When you click on the headline for that one, it gives you an error result like this, a thread seemingly lost. However - click on that teensy solid down arrow at the end of the second line and it pops out a box saying "Cached". Click on that box and you get Google's cache version of the entire thread up to the point of the cache capture on December 8. .......... Now, how can that be transferred back into the MCM forum here? I have no idea...... But this is one way to retrieve thread material.

And, if you chose to leave off one of the reels, you could then insinuate that Roth wasn't playing with a full deck.

Eek. Real life mimics art. Or, I wonder if Bob Nordberg back in 1964 based his model on a phantom update of the Convoy CO Fords. Fun to see you got the one photo from ATHS, I've belonged to that society since 1986.

While the words search feature usually works reasonably well at most web sites, placing the word "site" immediately followed by a colon and any given web page url preceded by or followed by (it doesn't matter) the words you want found in any search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) will open up worlds of material. Once you are into those search results, don't forget to click on the search engine's Images link, so that you can more readily see what you are looking for. One more thing, place your chosen words within quotation marks and it narrows down the search to yield only results for that specific phrase rather than showing you results for one or the other but not both, for example "1952 Plymouth". From that you see just two results, as compared with all results for 1952 or Plymouth when there's no quote marks around them.

Welcome. Watch out for the AZ guys, they are merciless when the other fellers are going on about snow and cold temps this time of year.

Yes, but that result comes from placing the string in the web site url window. Don't place it there, place it in the window I show in the green oval, to the right of where you see web site addresses, and hit the Enter key on your keyboard.

I've got a 2007 iMac with Safari version 5.1.10, not updated since last year. Plopping the "site:modelcarsmag.com custom decals" string in my Google search window works in an instant, I just tried it. However, I pretty much always use Firefox and whatever version they keep sending me as updates. I've been using a bookmark for some time now, made for the times when I need to find a particular model here, except I have it set up to find images in Google.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Kirk: "Of my friend, I can only say this: of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most...... human." Meanwhile, the two quotes from my post #s 359 & 399, plus one new one, all from the same really weird movie: "Pudge is a fish?" "Wow. San Fransisco." ("Rowr!!" crash, smash, crunch ["EEEeeeee! Save me! Rowr! EEEeee!"] crash, munch crunch) "No more caffeine for you." "You sure it's a dog?" "Uh huh. He used to be a collie before he got run over."

Wrecker operator set it down rightside up without disturbing hardly any grass.

Dug up that other one, after remembering what title it could be found under in my internet link history. Blurry pic here, but the rest of the last expired ebay listing (scroll past the other advertisement stuff here) for it shows some details better. Not knowing my old kits, I couldn't say if it stayed within the bounds of what came in the kit or had other different parts.

This seems to be a variant of the "What do model builders overlook… " thread applied to 'famous name' builders: I'll put my head on the chopping block first before tossing in my 2¢. I may have been somewhat well known in the early '90s since a few of my weird models made it into magazines from national model contests, e.g. my 911 woody wagon. That model may be criticized for its design, paper magazine 'wood grain' and the cop-out of becoming a interior-less slammer, but it was originally intended to be a full knock-out Turbo coupe. One could say I rose to the challenge of not shortcutting it on the '88 Porsche details such as the proper separated-from-bumper front valance, proper number of pleats on the rubber bumper bellows, multi-reflector rear lights, lathe-turned door locks, more-to-scale metalflake paint, side mirrors with separate black surround pieces with the mirror surfaces aimed toward the driver's seat headrest, valve stems/wheel weights, etc. While attending contests at that time, there was a particular builder (who I can't place now) at either GSL or the Southwest Challenge contests who had absolutely killer paint jobs worthy of best paint awards, and his detailing was really very good. I vaguely remember one of his being something like a mid-'60s Chevy with an elaborate breathtaking red, white & blue paint job and really good engine and interior work…. but the jaw-dropper for me was the kit's chrome plated front turn signals of which he covered with two blobs of Tamiya clear orange, some of it bleeding onto the bumper. The glitch was like an irresistible eye magnet to me. I could never approach his painting skills, but I most certainly could have cut out the chrome lenses, built rectangle boxes for each, filled each with strips of bendable chrome mylar for the reflectors with a gray circle in the center to simulate a bulb (a shortcut, yes, but visually effective), filed some clear lenses flatter on the back / polished smooth to avoid the mile-thick appearance, painted clear orange with teensy dots of silver for the lens bolts, with the end result being killer turn signals. Such an effort might have only taken an additional hour of work. Even just the visual trick of additional semi-clear over the chrome with 'bulb' simulation like I described for my Lambo 300 could have been done in less time while still yielding an effective appearance. I was left wondering why a person of his skill level had overlooked that detail. Who knows, maybe he spaced it out completely and contest deadline pressure didn't leave enough time to fix it beyond those quick orange dabs. Or maybe he hadn't fully grasped the 'every model element can be a stand-alone model itself' philosophy of killer model building. Daunting goal to achieve sometimes, and a reason why some of my projects stopped dead because I couldn't resolve a problem of how to achieve realism that satisfied my own standards.

Me, neither. The blasphemy is so wild, it would be worth building just that way. I'd make a more subtle substitution, though, ditching the 6 taillights on the roof for some kind of vertical recessed taillights at the back of the fenders.

I didn't know it until recently that the old AMT (?) customizing kit had so many extra wheel spats, fins and other add-ons until I saw a glue bomb on ebay a month or three back. Would that be what's happening with this current glue bomb listed there? For non-purist Vette fans like myself this one creates quite a different look, when you overlook all the excess paint.......

Another hint: "Wow. San Fransisco." ("Rowr!!" crash, smash, crunch ["EEEeeeee! Save me! Rowr! EEEeee!"] crash, munch crunch) "No more caffeine for you."

Thanks, gents. Admittedly, not all factory car designs appeal to everyone, and when a person starts to mix 'n match them, that's a risky thing to do. Mix 'n match two different eras, and things get more dicey. I like it myself, although I'd criticize the transition area of the fenders, and the difference between having mostly black front bumpers and solid chrome rear bumpers can be too weird of a mix, but there's really no solution to it without losing major character at either end. For me, the thing is like 90% of the way toward being a successful mix, but then the doubt creeps back in. And there was the fun of watching guys' reactions to it when I first had it at the Southwest Challenge and later at GSL, where I could see how they were trying to figure out whether it worked or not. I suppose this, on the heels of my Mercedes NASCAR, is what caused me to be addicted to messing with people's minds.