Russell C

(psst: Jim would be just fine if he wasn't completely nuts)

Story on these is that back when I first started attending the GSL contest in Salt Lake City, the special Bonneville / Dry Lakes class tended not to have many models in it. I figured I could at least fill it in with one more model each year, and mess with folks' minds a bit with small scale deliberately brick-shaped vehicles. My first entry in 1992 was a Magnuson models Checker cab. It's a bit on the rough side considering the primitiveness of the resin body. I chopped the top by slicing off the entire 'greenhouse', grinding about an 1/16th inch from the bottom and then lengthening it by adding a cross section in the middle. The windows are bits of black exposed film negative material, the headlight covers are dish-shape pin ends, the grille is bits of model ship photoetched railings, and the tires / wheel covers are plastic 'lathe-turned' on my motor tool (a method I explained in my post over here). I drew the black parts of the flames and the words "Bonneville" in a computer program and printed them out on clear laser print decal material (the "5 piece kit" - 4 wheels and a resin body - came with the other decal lettering & checkerboard stripes). The colors are air brushed nail polish pearl white / purple-to-light blue flame area. The next one is one of my favorites in my whole collection, built for the '93 GSL contest. It's a combo of the Wheel Works '34 Ford with a Roco salt spreader unit (out-of-production, I think, it's the same as the accessory in the dump body of this other guy's truck). I shortened up the salter body and made the load by forming the basic shape out of aluminum foil over a cardboard frame, which was then heavily sprayed with white paint, followed by a sprinkling of flour and several dry mist coats of off-white. I chopped the cab of course, and the windows are bits of black exposed film negative material. The headers are brass wire formed to shape and capped with a metal ring I found that happened to be the right diameter. I 'lathe-turned' the plastic tires and aluminum wheel covers on my motor tool. What could be more unaerodynamic than a van? Hot Wheels had a nice chopped top Divco milk truck out in 1999 when I made this one, so I just removed its silkscreen stuff and painted over its pearl white with some nice nail polish pearl blue & magenta-ish red to mimic the Pierson Brothers' 1934 Ford Coupe. All three of these models sit on cheapo craft shop stained pine bases that have "salt" made from dinged-up, slightly dirtied sheet styrene.

I have two small but permanent bump scars on the back of my fingers from one of those incidents. Gruesome how far the skin stretches during the pull....

x 2. From living here as long as I have, the dust storms that folks elsewhere in the country go ga-ga over lately never have been anything out of the ordinary ever since the landscape from here to Tucson got churned up from agriculture, roads, and residential living. Drop a giant cold air downburst from a thunderstorm and dust flies, big deal. Folks around here are annoyed by the dust but ignore it otherwise, while out-of-towners turn the photos & videos into viral sensations as though such dust had never been seen before. Blame the interweb for that. 'Through the roof' humidity would be the 80-90% stuff back east which I really dislike, but it never really gets that bad here even during the rainy time. As for the 'looking Hispanic' thing, I'd have to say that's an overhyped item elsewhere, none of my Hispanic friends or co-workers ever brought it up in any way.

This one, correct? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a1__niLIAQ#t=133

When it comes to paint removal, it turns out this is more of a hit-or-miss for me with 409 cleaner and spray-on Easy Off. The 409 reduced the flat black & silver on this old model to the point where it was easily and completely removable with an old toothbrush. The Easy Off loosened up the white the same way. But neither worked all that well on a couple of old flat and gloss black scrap parts I had in my own scrap parts box, while the Easy Off did loosen up a gloss orange part I had and the 409 finished that off. Chemists will have to explain how such degreasers work on various kinds of paint….. Meanwhile, I solved some of the steering wheel problem. By the eyeball engineering standards I'll be applying to this rebuild, it looks like the steering wheel is the right diameter, but the rim is way too thick. My dad is an expert machinist with his own lathe, and for many years I've been using the elemental lathe-turning concept on my hand-held motor tool. So, I cut the wheel off the shaft and chucked it in my motor tool (not a Dremel, but an old JC Penny version with a speed dial built into the end), and used a small file and x-acto blade to knock down the thickness of the rim and make the horn button more round and defined. For photo purposes only, I put the motor tool in a vice and held the file or blade near it to give you-all an idea of what it looks like from my perspective when I hold the motor tool in my left and and the 'cutting tools' in my right hand. If you guys haven't tried this before, you can lathe-turn little parts on Dremels and such quite nicely, it just takes a bit of practice….. but as all the lawyers and concerned parents would say, wear safety glasses and BE CAREFUL! I'm most of the way there with the wheel now, but it will probably get a bit thinner still before I declare it to be good. My dad gave me a miniature lathe a long time ago, but sometimes it's easier to bash something out using this method, especially when super precision is not all that important. I'll probably make the front fender running lights using this method, too, out of thick aluminum wire rod. It's a handy method to turn small pieces into really crisp circles. For example, the silver door lock buttons on the door handles of my Porsche woodie wagon are not mere imprecise dots of silver paint, they are perfectly circular bits of polished aluminum wire that really sharpens up that little detail while also acting as an anchor securing the handles to the body. Same method for the itty-bitty circular parts and wheels/tires for my 1:160 Ford tank truck.

Well, not all the time, today was quite nice. A person can get used to the fierce sun enough to feel the need to roll down the long sleeves when the temp dips below 80°. Some days can be on the annoying side, though.

Over extended time, cardboard will dry out, any masking tape sealing up something will lose its adhesive eventually and turn to powder, and rubber bands will turn hard and fall apart, if you use any to wrap up something. Bottle paint will turn into bottles containing colored rocks. Say goodbye to the water & solvent content in stuff, basically.

I combined the two Monogram 32nd scale Bison / General kits onto one model way back in 1981, thread over here, where sometime later I'll have a chance to clean and fix it up a bit.

The Revell Carrera RS also had a clipboard, with a flashlight molded into its surface, if I remember right. The AMT T police car had a long flashlight and a few other weapons and apparel. The Revell 32nd scale VW pickup had a 3-wheeled ATV.

When being "back in the red" is a good thing. 409 cleaner made the silver & black paint brush-offable overnight but didn't make a dent in the white paint. Since my really old Easy-Off had evaporated to powder from years of neglect, I had to try a new yellow spray can version. It reduced the white to almost nothing in ten minutes or so. Friction-fit together here just for laughs. Next up will be how I fix the steering wheel, assuming that turns out ok.

While I feel somewhat sorry for other people's ancient builds, I feel sorry for a few of my own, too. A decals wanted thread here at MCM prompted me to fish out another of my ancient history builds just to see how it was holding together in storage, and to see if it was salvageable for display again. Not too bad, had to pop a couple of pieces back on temporarily with Elmer's glue just so they'd stay put for the photos. I built it in late 1981, an effort to combine what I preferred from the Monogram Bison & General kits, with an excuse to indulge in my liking of double sleepers. From the Chevy, I chose its quarter fenders, capped straight stacks, air deflector & bumper (minus some lights), and I used the General's grille and headache rack. The 'tag-axle-in-the-air' appearance is not intentional, but is instead an indicator that my frame extension ended up not being all that happy over time. Fun exercise in a simple original paint design, but built with rather inexperienced teenage model building skills. I'd say it is worthy of some restoration / cleanup work: polishing out the orange peel, ditching the air deflector, blackwash for the grille, fixing / lengthening the frame a bit more, substituting some better wheels and tires, plus some other tweaks to punch up its appearance. Wouldn't take a whole lot to get it looking really nice and sharp.

Jealous of the craftsmanship, very well done!

Good chance that all of us here are seriously demented. Fabulous work, and one more among the ways of wiring wheels. I've bookmarked your before 'n after photo as an inspiration for a Jo-Han '31 Cadillac idea I have rattling around in my head. That one seems like a nice kit, except for the wheels.

Fun thing about this hobby for me is getting hit in the head with a tip like that. I've used pearl paints, but the faulty notion stuck in my mind was 'pastel-paint-for-license-plate-backgrounds', when of course in 1:1 scale they are not pastel, they're reflectory..... like pearl paint colors. D'oh!

Welcome here, and this would be the place to acquire a seemingly infinite amount of tips and shortcuts for recreating scale replica stuff, along with attendance at any variety of large or small model contests. What I've seen over the years is that just about every modeler is approachable and more than willing to share such information, whether it's a person who only started building a couple of years ago to the guy who has two grand champion Best of Show awards under his belt. The other fun thing to discover is there is often more than one good way to achieve a scale model effect. For example, over in a thread about creating thin piping stripes for seat upholstery, I tossed in my tip, but read about another that I hadn't thought of and might end up using instead.

Evil Andy knows I'm a slave to temptation regarding the running joke I have for the GSL contest's "Group" category. Could be done, should they choose this model, in a hokey tractor-like manner. Wish I'd saved a photo from an ebay listing I saw a couple of years ago where somebody did up a nice 1:1 kit car dragster version. Found a different 1:1 with just the standard Chevy V8: http://www.britishv8.org/MG/EdLaBrush-MG-TD.htm

911 Turbo woody wagon, narrowed '39 Chevy panel roof and a bit of scrap plastic to 'square up' the back end. Cheated on the wood by cutting 'n pasting portions of a magazine photo of some guy's cherry wood bar onto this. The lighter wood trim is from a magazine photo, too. Also did a virtual mock-up of an Aston Martin shooting brake using my CorelDRAW program, but this is as far as I plan to go. If anyone wonders what could be done with the Tamiya Aston kit, here y'go.

So far, the silver on the radiator/headlights and the black on the convertible top cover soften up overnight soaked in 409 cleaner, and scrub right off with a toothbrush. A quick Google image search for Gowland & Gowland MG TD confirms this is not one of those, while a UK site I found does seem to confirm what John says above about this being an Aurora kit (we have to ignore the box art, the model is a right-hand drive...... unless there were British and American versions). But what that site says about the thing having real rubber tires is I believe an error. While the tires are a tad softer than the red plastic, they also have die punch marks on the backs, so I'm thinking they are vinyl.

The '89 Turbo coupe I fell in love with at the Porsche dealership I drove by every day was a deep metallic blue/gray or gray/blue, depending on how the lighting was outside. For http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/uploads/post-12144-0-51293100-1373871875.jpg, I at least wanted to get as close to scale size metalflake as possible, so I settled for one of the Testors gunmetal metalizer airbrush paints. Sometime later I discovered some nail polish pearl colors really look like 24th scale metalflake, so that's an option to consider.

Saw it recently on ebay for less than $4, it looks like a 1:32 scale, no kit maker's markings on it anywhere, don't know a thing about it other than the seller said it was "built in the late 1950's or early 1960's". The inspiration for getting this is the late Albuquerque Model Car Club builder Rick Wright's old polished plastic box-stock beauties. This model's blemish-free plastic color just seems to beg for a really good shine-up, and a much better build execution. (photos by the ebay seller of it assembled) A Google image search of these helped me figure out why the seats looked weird, whoever built this put them in backwards. They have a single backrest and two seat cushions. With the dash, I've discovered the black paint quickly dissolves with 409 cleaner, but the white.... not so much. Haven't tried removing the silver paint yet. Unless someone convinces me to do otherwise, I'll put in a couple of corrections, one for the too-long wheelbase (shortening the space behind the doors) and the height of the grille (removing some of the bottom edge of the fenders to bring that inter-fender pan up and removing a horizontal section of the lower grille). A few more refinements such as headlights with reflectors & lenses, clear red taillights, new windshield, and a nice tan interior along with some other bits ought to turn this into a nice little gem. Looks like the kit maker got the grille too tall and the front fenders' inner curves to the frame too vertical, so this model ends up looking more like the earlier MG TC at the front. Can't fix the fenders without a ton of work, though, but I can probably get away with just the shorter grille. Reduced it to its elements here, the whitewall paint on the tires chipped off very easily. Really brittle glue, it all came apart without major difficulty.

Irish. Or Irish.

Had to dig out my stalled dually project dating from 1990-ish, mostly as an excuse to be notified when more pics of that CAT Chevy racer are posted.

I'll drop by for the usual truncated visit. Care & feeding of my elderly parents tends to always occupy my weekends,

I'd commission a full size one just like that. A much better sounding one then the garden-variety tractors out there.....