jbwelda

now youre just being silly.

whats got me is the owner of reliable resin evidently did a "buy it now" on it for a thousand dollars! thats pretty hard to believe. 1000$ basically for "hush money"? and if thats a fraud, who is going to pay the ebay bill for it? doesnt that add up to something of some consequence for a 1000$ sale? anyway i bought one RR body once, think it was a 1/32 king cobra but dont recall for sure (could have been a lotus 22 or 15?). it wasnt junk per se but lets just say its sitting in a pile of slot car bodies for which i have no use. EDIT: note i was confused and the "RR" i was referring to is NOT the "RR" in question. mea culpa end EDIT

so that was on the up and up after all. i saw that and thought, man this steve hinson guy gets around. i went to a model car show in london when i was there in november...i was bugged i didnt know about it beforehand and bring something to enter. i probably would have at least won the "furthest travelled" award out of sympathy if nothing else!

thanks ramone, i knew don tognotti while he was still alive (here in sacramento...one of the reasons i want to build this model) and i saw pics of that car many times and actually have some copies of color pics so i basically knew the shade...but i would like to know what you or anyone thinks would be a close (enough) match available in a spray can today. ive looked at the model master and tamiya colors and nothing there matches my imagination but maybe theres a duplicolor or factory color available that someone knows about that will match well? on the other hand maybe if i ask nice (and trade my old plymouth johan convert with box that he covets so) maybe i can get jerry amaral to airbrush it for me with custom blend paint. but i would rather do it myself (and keep my plymouth for a bigger trade when he gets *really* desperate!)

"hate" is a very strong word...lets just say that ive not really loved the moves the corporations that have controlled AMT for the past decade or so have made. theres the quality control issue, theres the issue of not including all the parts from the originals, theres the distant stance they seem to take to their customers and there are the staid (by my standards anyway) offerings. but you cant have everything i guess and i was just expressing my frustration at what, when i was a kid a long time ago, was to me *the* best model company (but my subject interest was a bit different back then) with consistently interesting subjects and lots of extras in the box and nice box art and all that. to see them reduced to their current state (not to mention the future state of non-existance that may come about) is very disheartening to me. but theres plenty of other stuff to build so im not going to run out of material...more likely i will run out of time first!

dont take this the wrong way, but... head check time for sure.

i dont see our city styles raffle prize cheby truck hauling the v12 32 orange crate either but then everybodys a critic! i did think i saw some photos swapped around though, like i think i was wondering, what was steve hinson doing in atlanta? oh well schedules are tight and mistakes are made. its the way of the magazine world.

i would: a) throw that stupid kit away (it probably wont build properly anyway) and never even look at another amt/ertl offering at least as long as that loser rc2 has anything to do with them or for that matter, that loser ertl has anything to do with amt. check to see what tamiya or another quality mfger has to offer that interests you c) if you got some time to waste, write a "f you" letter to rc2 reminding them why they cant sell any kits (eg: customer service, beancounters evidently choosing what to release and really crappy quality control) and tell them if they cant do it properly then dont do it at all (which seems to be a foregone conclusion in this case). maybe they will send you another kit if you do #3. but it will probably be missing the same parts. and you should just trash it anyhow because its most probably ###### on a stick. just my humble opinion...ive already done #a and typically follow my advice on #b. oh yeah one more: d) tell that hobby shop to piss off while youre at it. and mean it. in this day theres no reason to support a lhs with an attitude like that; not when you can probably get anything for half that price on line or at worst on ebay. 22$ for an AMT kit? :shock: is that a model king release or something? if so i would contact model king (or whoever) and see if they care when amt/ertl/rc2 losers obviously dont. from what ive heard MK might just be sympathetic.

how many of those kits you got? :shock: probably could have bought a real caterham kit for what youve got sunk into them! but i dont think the real thing would be as detailed as your models are.

>FYI, Castrol Super Clean is no longer sold in California. while this was true for a while, its been reformulated and is now again available i believe. though the reformulation seems to have cut some of its power...but it still works like a charm on testors enamel seems like

like zeb says, fred sterns is great. used to pick up a lot of cheap cool stuff from him, pre-ebay and internet.

i know what you mean, i looked around quite a bit to score it, from a guy who read my half-hearted plea here somewhere. it was pretty expensive by my standards but in this case ive wanted to build the both of these cars, but esp the wild dream. in reality i got too many projects going right now to get seriously started, but im beginning to think about specifics. one problem with it though, im not going to be able to build the wild dream with those big slicks on all four wheels, and those chrome side panels got to go. other than those two "improvements" i will probably build it right out of the box i again have to thank the guy who sold me the kit, it made my year right there! the kit is almost too nice to build but i promised i would. if you hound ebay you will find some available without the box or partially assembled or something like that. at the NNL west there was a vendor who had the pair of cars in a fairly nice box, partially assembled, slightly molested but all there. he told me he got $25 for it. i would have jumped at that if i had been on time.

i am planning on building the AMT double kit of Wilhelms Wild Dream and Tognottis King T. ive got photos of the cars back in the day but i was wondering if anyone here could suggest colors to use to near replicate the originals. they need to be available in spray cans please as i do not use an airbrush. any brand would do i suppose but im partial to tamiya. duplicolor, krylon or of course model master would suffice especially if you could tell me the exact color name and/or code. the AMT directions suggested colors but of course they were from their long gone paint line so thats not much help. if i recall correctly the Wild Dream was sort of a lavender or maybe darker purple candy sort of finish while the King T was like a pearlescent white with maybe a hint of lavender or purple in there. many thanks in advance!

an update though it still doesnt concern tamiya paint: i started the rebuild of a "big tub" i bought as a built up glue bomb this weekend and one of the first things i wanted to do was strip off the nasty thick silver paint that was currently covering the body etc and i was expecting grief when i put some super clean on it. much to my surprise it started working literally right before my eyes and it took all of about 60 seconds to rip right into that stuff leaving behind clean orange (yuck) plastic. so super clean still does the job as long as its old school paint (seemingly...dont know what kind of paint was on there but i have to guess testors silver from the 60s). worked great stripping the chrome too and seemed to de-bond some of the massive glue bomb business too. heres a funny thing ive never heard mentioned: you know the orange plastic i mentioned that the big tub was evidently molded in? well you sand it and guess what? it smells like an orange. im not imagining that. kinda weird but appropriate. anyone else ever notice this?

benzio by a mile.

i used castrol super clean which is purple so maybe its like this purple power stuff but they seemed to change the formulation so it doesnt work nearly as well anymore and that wasnt on tamiya anyhow...but it used to work a treat on enamel like model master or anything else i would dunk in it. that said i just stripped tamiya spray off a miata body with super clean; it just took soaking it in it for about a week with some removing, brushing with a toothbrush and resoaking for another day or so. but it did strip it clean off eventually without bothering the plastic. by the way like others said the clear shouldnt have bothered those decals if it was misted on the first couple coats...

hey zeb thanks for the tip on the black blade business. thats part of my problem: my eyes cant track the blade against the foil because they blend in together too much. part of the reason im thinking about switching exclusively to 1/8 scale. its a b*tch getting old. cue "mothers little helper" on the turntable please.

i have an austin/morris countryman (i forget which brand used that name hence "austin/morris") resin body that i bought from that scalekraft guy in south africa. looks very cool other than its exceptional thinness (may be a plus or a minus, depends) that i want to put on a tamiya mini chassis one of these days...is that the source of your body or did you build that from a normal mini body?

i like that engine stand! strangely enough, one of the things i like most is to see what people build to hold things either in place or until they are ready to be installed and that engine stand is right up my alley.

that camber looks a bit much even for a vw...kinda looks like my ghia when i broke an axle! cool looking rag top too.

i was under the impression that the type 2 corvair was a completely different car than the type 1 except for engine. one thing for sure, the type 2 sure looks a lot cooler. theres a white convertable thats been lowered and hot rodded down the street from me and i lust over that frequently.

oh i gotcha...those tracks where you can run >1 car per slot. never had any experience with them and im not really sure i get the concept except that maybe it would be more realistic in that you would have to fight for a passing lane and couldnt just pass any old time. but...no experience with them. having an "X" over track or a chicane where the track narrows so only one car can pass at a time is enough of a challenge for me.

is that quasi-leica as quiet as a leica? if so, thats impressive; those were the quietest camera in the world.

bill i was kidding about the "mr obsessive" question...i think the answer is rather apparent! do you know that if you coat your clear parts in future floor wax or even just run a small bead of it around the windshield, that super glue wont fog it? and i seem to remember that if you put some on "fog" that has already appeared on styrene or acetate clear, the fog goes away? future: one of the miracles of the modern age.

zeb you mean the two lane ones or the four lane ones? ive never run on a four lane one but scaley sells inner and outer turns just for those...ive used the inner and outer to make increasing or decreasing radius curves from time to time but never set up a full 4 lane track and right now my and my friends slot racing space is limited so we barely got room for a decent 2 laner. as for how well they work, well they dont work really at all unless you have two power supplies and rewire the track to use one power supply per lane. not hard to do but if you dont then your car runs x fast with only one car on the track but only half x fast if another is put on the other lane, and it *really* gets exciting when one of the two comes off the track because the remaining one doubles it speed which is all fine and dandy unless youre in the middle of the curve and then its a disaster! but the great thing about modern home track is that they have steel instead of aluminum rails and that allows you to use magnets for better traction. but that gets old after awhile because you get to the point where you can just hold the trigger down and go full bore all day long without even watching the cars. so we have pretty much ditched the magnets in favor of having to drive; or at the most have a small magnet for just a bit more traction. thats an advantage to open body motors like pittman etc...they have this big honking magnet built into the motor and you hang that thing as low as you can and you have "no magnet" but magnatraction anyway! makes them almost competitive with cans! another thing is the lap counters and timers that are typically available with the scaley tracks suck. i got a cheap computer and some lap timing software, mounted some photocells in the track and a light overhead (just a high intensity lamp on an arm really...jazzed it up with some banners so it looked more like something at a starting line) and that worked great. the monitor looked like a digital scoreboard. unfortunately we dont have room for that so we are back to no lap counter/timer. i wish i didnt have so many real cars so i could set up a nice track again in my garage but that aint happening. im thinking about moving to utah next year and if i do im going to buy a house big enough for me and my toys including one room just for a nice track. problem being all my friends will be back in cali including my girlfriend.