Russell C

Franklin Mint 24th scale Checker Cab, usually pricey on ebay, but this one is missing its box, the luggage, 3 door handles and a few other bits, so it was not a half bad purchase for $29.99 & free shipping. I have a future potential project in mind, an ambitious non-stock custom perhaps, but I'll drive off that bridge when I get to it. Tack on a few reasonably realistic replacement parts on it, and I have a nice addition to the four other different scale cheaply bought diecast Checkers I have.

In my day from what I remember, diecasts were few in number and not all that impressive, whereas nowadays a guy can go into a Walgreens and buy a pretty impressive 24th or so scale car that looks really quite nice overall for $20 bucks.............. and this sort of thing is what causes non-model car folks to dismiss the value of a quality built model. Might work (or might not) for you to hold up a dashboard out of one of your models and ask your pal how much time and paint it would take to replicate the appearance of a full size equivalent if he was to do it - and then walk him through the steps involved in such a process: the mere initial process of of cleaning the parting lines and other manufacturing flaws in the plastic piece (filling in shrink spots, etc); assembling the steering wheel or other separate parts; the consideration of substituting something like the old-style radio knobs (blobs of plastic, basically) with something more realistic such as flat head needle pins, or a polished aluminum rod end for the glove box door lock; then there's the paint, which is at least one or two shades of a particular flat color; and what to do with the gauges - pure black? or the raised lettering dusted with white and the needles painted orange? or drill 'em out and replace the gauge faces with killer decals having a clear plastic lens over 'em? Bare metal foil on the stainless steel / chrome trim bits? Photo etched air vent vanes? And the research to make sure the dash is correct for the year of the desired car? Do the math on whatever the length of time for the effort here, quick & nice or museum-quality level, then place a wage level on it. If a person can bash out a nice dash in an hour and charges $15 per hour for that (low, perhaps, yes?), then how much is the same effort for all the other efforts on the rest of the model. For a museum-quality dash, now you're looking at a piece that costs, say $60 all by itself. Stay at that level and you have a complete show winner model potentially at a conservative replacement value of $1500. Fall in love with a tremendously unique highly detailed model that qualifies as a work of art, and you are looking at who knows how much. You better have a Jay Leno-sized budget. Such is the disconnect the non-modelers have with our hobby.....

The Wraith is found at RocketFin's resin searcher thingy: http://www.rocketfin.com/resin_product.cfm?id=5013

Brutal, my bad. (also nuts, but that is a different topic) Sorry for the potential surprise injury, but it was too tempting to dig up really old photographs. Remains to be seen if I can build another normal model, I suppose.

Thanks for the kind words. The '57s were my favorites. I will admit that back when I built it I was also scheming on how to build one for myself where a Formula 1 Benneton Ford engine/tranny could be dropped into the back, but the cabin would have been shoved so far forward, it would have rendered the thing into being way too weird looking. That, plus F1 kits weren't available in 25th scale that I could find.

Luv salt flats. Very crisp.

Andy Martin is merciless about beating me up for not making normal models, but I did at one time in the distant past, when I tried my hand at work-for-hire model building. At the local hobby shop I'd seen a 3x5 card on their bulletin board about a guy wanting classic & muscle car models, so thought I could raise some money by having a bit of fun. Turned out to be an ear, nose & throat doctor in Texas, and it was rather fun to restore one older '57 Oldsmobile (promo?) of his, build another quickie Jo-Han '59 Caddy Fleetwood, and this T-bird, but I ended up becoming too much of an artiste for the '60 Caddy Eldorado convertible he wanted. He was willing to settle for what I thought was too simplistic of an interior, and I couldn't bring myself to finish it out with a substandard interior from whatever resin kit he'd provided, considering how much work I'd put into the nice stainless steel wire trim on the body (designed to fit in scribed-out channels). You know how it goes, you're truckin' along fine until you are stumped on how to do a particular bit right and the whole project grinds to a halt. So what we have here is the AMT '57 T-bird I built for him in 1994, pretty much box stock except for refinements with various metal bits, such as the lathe-turned rings for the taillights, bits of polished wire for the door handles, a little bit of engine wiring, and the then-new photoetch scripts and emblems. The "engine turned" dash piece is just Bare Metal foil, but where I somewhat laboriously pressed a spinning flat-end rod (in my motor tool) into the foil. Took a few tries and ripped out strips, but in the end I got it to look reasonably convincing. Probably various T-bird purists will spot errors in it, but it met my approval overall and the Doc sure did like it. Pics here are digitals taken of my old overly contrasty photo prints.

If kitbashing is an option, a V6 + a V8 = a V14. Haven't seen one of those, myself...

Another idea I had been kicking around after seeing a widebody Datsun 240Z was to take this Fujimi Fairlady kit and graft a 930 backend onto it, ditch the Porsche engine, but drop something spiffy in the front like a Ferrari V12, for a really weird mashup. Might keep folks guessing where the engine is 'till the front hood is popped open. Problem is, after doing this photo alteration, I really think those two cars don't go together...... So, I put this one in the no-go project pile, more for visible infeasibility. ** M.I.A. 240Z / 911 Turbo mashup photo**

Luv widebody cars. I bookmarked this illustration from this guy's widebody work, since he had seemingly captured the look of the 427 Shelby Cobra roadster's fender flares....

'31 Cadillac Flatterphaeton Another model - at least of this particular vehicle - that I won't get to, basically because I've chosen a different and potentially more interesting classic touring car. What prompted this idea was a little thumbnail I saw of this particular photo which somebody's computer scan file must have accidentally compressed vertically, giving it the look of the much flatter Ruxton phaeton… or the appearance of being sectioned. So I took that photo along with two others and erased the section from the top of the rear fenders up to the interior openings. I've lowered the windshield / top on the last two photos, but never got around to lowering the windshield height on the first photo (oops, also cut the top off the front fender light). The last two photos have the vertical strip between the front and rear doors almost completely removed. The rear tires & wheels are wider in all three. Naturally, the kit to use is the Jo-Han '31 Caddy, which begs for either hand-laced wire wheels as in Jürgen Kowalski's thread here, or the alternate method like what Bob Steinbrunn is doing here. Sure takes a lot of the top-heaviness out of the original car, I'll say that.

Hmmm..... doodle your own flame vapors? Click in drag across the screen here: http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/index.php

Carl Green's Pacer Pickup prototype from 1977 was the inspiration for the flame style & color on my Lambo Diablo Speedster Flambé. I'll have to do an "Under Glass" post on that one sometime.....

Rok, Welcome to this forum! I remember the old days when people could only correspond with pencil and paper, now we have the means to share hobby interests across the globe, and to travel in a virtual way to so many places. I just dropped the name of your city into the Google Maps site, and then arbitrarily placed the Streetmobile person on a randomly picked street, and now I can see that some parts of town have limited parking. Amazing technology. And I remember when diecast cars had very poor detailing compared to what all the companies offer today.

Don't know if other modelers do this with customs, but for me, when I get an idea for a one, I can usually see it reasonably clear in my mind's eye. I always feel more confident to butcher some kits after I create an illustration, though. My avatar is one such example, but since that one dates to B.C. time (before computers, for me anyway) I had to sketch it out using pencil tracings from a Porsche brochure. Trained graphic artist that I am these days, I swipe various photos off the internet and hack them up in my CorelDRAW program. Visualize having multiple copies of a photograph and using a virtual scissors to cut 'em into pieces, layering the pieces on until the desired look is achieved. I used to do this stuff in PhotoShop, but I can't afford the upgrade that would make my old version 7 work on my newer iMac. Since Dan Palatnik is showing off his original 3D drawings in his own thread in this forum, I thought I'd start off mine here with a hat tip to two of his pieces. The first one was purely for my own satisfaction, to see if a 3-wheeled '49 Ford could be done to keep up my running joke of such vehicles for the GSL "Group" category. It worked, as can be seen here, Dan's original is at this link, and right below is my alteration of it. Dan had a good laugh at it when I emailed it to him in 2013. Next is a more recent alteration of Dan's set that was a '54 Pontiac, where I tortured bits from his '57 wagon to fit on it (the passenger side headlight is out-of-perspective). I believe the overall idea would work out reasonably well using parts from most any '57 kit and the Monogram '53 Chevy (or whatever else is out there that I'm not aware of), but at the rate I'm going, this is a project I most likely will never have time to get to. Dan is a good sport about my alterations of his work. Then there's this one, where I snagged some photos of a 1:1 Robertsham LLC custom kit car version of the Daytona Coupe (originals are the small inset pics). Much as I love the original Daytona Coupe, the kammback always looked like such an unsightly afterthought, to I grafted on a regular Cobra roadster back end, and then did various other proportional tweaks, as in shortening the hood just a bit while lengthening the cabin just a bit. No offense to the Shelby designers, but maybe it sorta evens out the whole car a bit better. However, this is a project I'll never probably get around to building..... My stuff isn't all that crisp or professional compared to others, and pro photo alteration guys will easily see the flaws in my work, but then again it's just a kind of virtual sketching exercise to see if some of my wacko ideas work or not. Trust me on this, some of 'em just obviously do not work, and I toss 'em into the virtual trashcan. But some are keepers since they seem like they are maybe 90% on the way to being an actually worthwhile idea. Stay tuned, I have a small stack of those to share.

And friends, for those who don't know, Dan has a blog of spectacular 3D auto art he's drawn, my 3-wheeler '49 Ford was inspired by his sectioned '51 Fords. Remember, this stuff translates to 3D printing, as one person has already used Dan's work to do that.

Silly Andy. I recently learned that the oddball designer Gus Marktavson changed his name in the '60s to "Red" Eoth to get away from being plagued with his design flops, thus a model of what folks called his "Mysterysteerin' Rod Agent" yellow three-wheeled car would be a real model. I could even enter it in GSL's Replica class. And by sheer coincidence, Eoth's car was based on a '56 Ford Victoria.

Can't miss it, and I already have a reasonably good idea on how I can torture a '56 Ford Vic to lose of one of its wheels for the Group 15 category...

'20s ragtime cover of a commercial ditty, from da man who made cover songs for really old jazz famous:

Well, 'shriek' is a somewhat subjective term, the Ferraris & Lambos no doubt had that, while others had whatever folks would say V8s sounded like, but the MP4/5 V10s had what I'd describe as a distinctive combo of bass noise that could be felt in the feet along with a really piercing shriek. Just the nature of that cylinder arrangement, I suppose. Whatever caused it, it hooked me.

I was living in Albuquerque in 1989 when F1 came to Phoenix, my brother invited me over to see the free-to-the-public practice sessions. I was strictly an Indycar fan at the time, but the bass/shriek of the V10s hooked me to F1 for that era. What a sound. Then there was the entertaining scene within the skyscraper walkway area where we knew the cars were leaving a block or so away from the pits and would soon come around to our spot. There was some homeless guy staggering around wondering why he couldn't cross the street with all the temp fencing in the way, then he was even more bewildered when Senna came around the corner and flew by making all that concentrated noise, with his $16 million or so salary. Heckuva contrast. I'm a lousy sports photographer, this was the only decent shot out of the whole roll.

Spiffy ol' Dodge, but in dire need of some kind of bumper, so I stole one off the Ford & pasted it there.

Stumbling upon "Cobraman's" 8 wheel top fuel dragster just recently, it reminded me that I needed to dig out a TFD of my own that I built back in 1998. It's not a model type that I'd normally build, but I knew the upcoming contest that summer by the White Mountain Plastic Modelers had a special theme category of "build us a 4x4", but they never specified what kind of 4x4. Knowing that one of the Albuquerque Model Car Clubs's regular attendees at the contest was Big John Pattison, famous for all his drag racing models, I thought I'd do up some fictional main sponsor decals and put them on something that was a cross between Revell's Pennzoil TFD and an AMT Snake Bite monster truck, just to mess with his mind. Ferrari decal on the nose, of course. If I remember right, the front driveshaft scales out to around 16 feet in length. Midship bearing? Naw, just extra spinning mass to slow a guy down. Who needs that? Oh, wait. How many cylinders does the engine have? Well, not 8 anymore. Such an alteration would leave an unsightly forward gap on the head, and we can't have that. Just turn the magnetos 90°, that'll solve the problem. It was quite a load of fun filling in the details for the driver's area and the engine, despite not knowing exactly what I was replicating in various spots. If anyone complains that the oscillation overthruster is missing its fuse link harness or something like that, all I have to do is say this is a top fuel monster truck dragster.

Sheer laziness for the failure to spell out my last name in the user name part. Or something. The car might be the one most notoriously tied to my building career, but I don't know for sure. What inspired it is beyond my sorry excuse of recollection, it started out to be a factory replica stock of a 930 cabriolet and I had gotten as far as a fully detailed engine (which is now buried, a few details can be seen when it is upside down), but somehow it turned into a woody wagon. I guess I decided to go for more 'gotcha' appeal midway through the build process.....

Tuning in a bit late here, but while searching for something else, I ran across your WIP thread for it, then had to see how it turned out. Fabulous, and as folks who know me somewhat well will say, I have a particular weakness for demented thinking. Hey, I resemble that remark!