Richard Bartrop

Oh, the idea has crossed my mind once or twice.

Nobody's forcing your to embrace anything. You can still write the same eloquent replies that you always do.

My own thought on the bannana was that it was such a tired cliche. Exhibiting a found object and telling everyone you're challenging the nature of art may have been daring the first time someone tried it a hundred years ago, but now it's about as daring as painting a bowl of fruit. At least painting a decent still life takes a certain amount of skill. Now there was a group in the '80s called "the New Academy" that decided they were going to "challenge the nature of art" by doing meticulous recreations of the 18th Century French Academy style. Some of the results were pretty nice. Anyway, since this is the Model Cars Magazine forum, and not the Explorations in Contemporary Art forum, back to the original topic. Personally, when modeling hot rods, I like to try and find out why things are a certain way, of often, the process of finding out is as enjoyable as the actual building. But that's me. Everyone has their own ideas of what they want out of modeling, and I'd be lying if I said some of them didn't make me grit my teeth, but you know what? It's not up to me. Life is too short to be worrying about whether other people are enjoying models wrong.

A little outside of your time, but the ones on Revell's '40 Ford look great, and are just about the right size. Here they are on a Monogram '36 Ford.

I haven't tried this on a model but you might want to get yourself a blending stump from an art supply store, and use that to apply chalk in patches. Try it on something you aren't worried about messing up. You could use a paper towel, but these are cheap, and give you a little more control.

While the Revell '48 Ford is listed as 1/25, if you compare the engine with the one in the Monogram '36, you'll find it's almost identical in size.

The Revell '48 Ford Custom coupe has a nice flathead with vintage speed equipment. The Monogram (later Revell) '36 Ford also comes with a hopped up flathead.

Pyro was still a separate company from Lindberg when they made this.

I think Replicas & Miniatures offers a set.

In the 1930s, you had carmakers like Bentley and MG offering cars with crank driver blowers they just let poke out in front of the radiator. A really cool look, IMO. It would actually look pretty neat on something like a Deuce roadster, though I imagine trying to thread the intake under the radiator and over a V-8 might get a little unwieldy.

The Chariot from "Lost in Space" was built on a Snowcat chassis, and Moebius did make a 1/24 kit.

The idea was that they were a rolling billboard for the company. Labatt's commissioned a fleet of streamlined beer trucks for the same reason. One of my personal favourites, the Texaco Diamond T Doodlebug

Some of those streamliner trucks would make great kit subjects.

I'd like to see them upgrade the '65 Riviera kit the way they did the '66.

"Car" has been used to describe railway carriages and the cockpit(?) of an airship, so it's not exclusive to automobile. If you really want to get really pedantic, "automobile" just means "self moving" so I guess an aircraft counts as a kind of "automobile". "Flying car" is a good term for what they're attempting, an aircraft that has the same utility as a regular car. Kind of like how "horseless carriage" encapsulated what those gas buggies were about in the early days. As that Firebird II movie shows, we should know better when it comes to making sweeping statements about the future. Lots of otherwise clever people do let themselves get seduced by having their own ideas parroted back at them, and bad ideas get magnified and distorted.. Personally, I think just the fact that we can make machines that can just look at something, and kind of sort of understand what it's looking at is pretty amazing, but it wouldn't be the first time something that was considered a trivial detail turns out not to be so trivial after all. On the other hand, some things that seem insurmountable turn out to be pretty surmountable. so we'll see. Are we becoming too dependent on technology? If we are, that happened about the time people discovered spears are better than teeth for bringing down a mastodon. Being dependent on technology is kind of H. Sapiens' thing, and for the most part, it served us well. Ironically, one of the ways the horse was supposed to be superior to the automobile was that it could think and react for itself in a way no dumb machine ever could. Maybe people will develop an affection for their self driving cars the way people do for horses. I think people will still want to own cars if they don't have to drive them. There is still that idea of your own piece of mobile territory, and the whole notion of pride of ownership, and there are all kinds of ways that people enjoy cars that aren't about how they drive.

I thought it looked like it was far from home.

Fair enough, I get the urge to restyle. Here's the car Exner was referencing, if you're looking for inspiration for paint.

It could use some extra details to make it less toylike, though I really hope you resist the urge to "improve" the styling. The Exner quirks, both good and bad, are what make it interesting.

Just so you know, the Print Screen button will let you take a snapshot of your screen, our if you hold the mouse over the pic and press the right button, you'll get a menu. Save Image As lets you save the image to your computer, and Copy Image Link lets you copy the image location so you can paste it into a post like this.

I know, typing out whole words and sentences is pretty archaic, but I like it.

I'm a big fan of using styrene to patch styrene whenever possible. Work some Evergreen rod of appropriate size into the seam with a generous amount of liquid cement, then let everything set thoroughly.

I'm a big fan of using styrene to patch styrene whenever possible. Work some Evergreen rod of appropriate size into the seam with a generous amount of liquid cement, then let everything set thoroughly.

I spent way too much time doodling the Astro I as a kid, so that would be my first choice.

Space Ghost Jonny Quest Bugs Bunny, but that was more of a Saturday evening thing. The Herculoids