Pete J.

Long way off and the project isn't due for a couple of more months. Roughing out blanks from 3/4" bar stock with a hole saw. Knocking the rough edges off and initial sizing of the blanks. Rough blanks on the left, sized blanks on the right.

On the bench or in my mind? Seriously, either way, way the hell to many! On the bench I have 5 at last count. I generally work hard on one until I hit a road block or is that mental block and I let it sit an ruminate in the back of my mind until I figure out how to proceed(see Zen and the art of Motorcycle repair.) Right now I have a really complex aircraft build, a scratch built hot rod, a WRC diorama, and aircraft and car diorama and a Tamiya Mercedes CKL(been on the bench for over 13 years). I also have a project of a bunch of turned aluminum rims(18 if your interested) on the lathe/mill bench. In my mind: who the heck knows. Every time I see a kit, my brain starts work it. Dangerous situation, that!

There are categories on this forum?? Seriously, I really don't pay much attention to categories. Like many,I generally scroll through the new items and if a word in the title jumps out at me, I look. Things that get my attention: Tamiya, Porsche, Ferrari and other foreign makes, F1, La Mans, and WRC. Also scratch built, tips and techniques, big boyz, Auto I.D. and real or model if I were to name categories. I totally ignore drag and NASCAR and hot rod. Just not my thing.

My folks had a 64 Dynamic 88 convertible, same color of blue. I had a school permit when they got it. A school permit allowed kids who live over 5 miles from town to drive to and from school and school events when they were 13 years old. I was a very popular kid during the summer. Great looking car. You brought back some great memories! Thanks!

Heck, I've got some of my grandfathers tools that are well over a hundred years old and they have been cared for by three generations. They work just fine. First, because they were built by someone who care what people thought of his work and have been used by someone who cared about the tools. I have a simple philosophy. Buy the best you can get and take care of them like they were yours! A wrench is not a hammer. I don't use a wrench to wack something and I don't use a hammer on a bolt.

Worse than that, sitting at my work bench. I don't get up or move. I lay a tool down and it just seems to disappear. How the heck does it do that? Of course it only happens when I have my hands full of a delicate operation on a very small part. Never when I am just goofing around with the big stuff!

Sam, in the last few years Danaher has been has combined with Apex tool and was then bought by Bain Capital(Yes, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital) and has been in the process of being dismantled and sold off. For that reason it is almost impossible to track what they owned and where the tool names are still owned. I have been very upset by the destruction of one of the large US tool makers. It has done no good for any of us who work with hand tools.

I worked for Sears for almost 15 year and the decline in the tool department was depressing. Just to set the record straight. For the 15 years I worked there, the wrenches, sockets and screwdrivers were all sourced from Danaher tools. They were US based and had a lot of company names under them, such as S&K, Matco, Lufkin and many others. I remember the Danaher rep coming to the annual tool rally for the employees to see the tools. The power tools were made by Emerson electic for many years. The Emerson was the parent company of Skil, DeWalt, Porter Cable and many others. the electric tools did have a life time warrantee but that ended in the early 60's. Only the power tools with the polished aluminum housings had that warrantee. If you want to know who made your sears tool and you have a model off the ID plate the first three digits of the model number, before the decimal point are the source code. Google Craftsman source codes and a list will come up that tells who made it. That all started to change about 10 years ago when Eddy took over and the bottom line became the most important thing. Sad day. I loves selling Craftsman tools. Great tools at a great price. Unfortunately, society kind of took over. I say that because in when I first started, we got a very few returns every week. After a while people got greedy. When I left we were filling a 50 gallon drum every month with returns. People were scavenging through junk yards for tools to return for new tools and selling them at the swap meets. When we had the bad fires here 7 or 8 years ago, people were brining in buckets of burnt tools to exchange after they had been paid off on their insurance claims, so they got the money from the insurance company and then exchanged their tools for free. Where is the honor in that. I have had craftsman tools for 50 years and have never exchanged one. I had people bring in tools for exchange because they had not taken care of them and they were just rusty. It use to be that you could judge a tradesman by how well he respected his tools. Apparently not any more. By the way, Starrett is still made in the USA. They have a cheaper level that is not, but if you want the best you can still get it. While I am on the subject of Starrett, they still have the rebuilding program for their precision measuring tools. Send them a broken tool and they will refurbish it and bring it to new tool standard for accuracy for a fee. I just got a 120 dial caliper off eBay and it was damaged(a couple of the spur gear teeth were broken). $85 and I have a brand new $250 dial caliper. Money well spent and it is a great tool that will probably serve me for the rest of my life and maybe my sons.

I just had to put this up here. I am sure a lot of you will truly appreciate it! https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1480056058874103

The Sherline stuff shows up on eBay all the time. Both mills and lathes. You kind of need to be careful because there are a lot of them used commercially and can be badly warn. Beware of too good of a deal. The best place to pick up used machines is the Yahoo Sherline group. Often members will be upgrading or have multiples and be downsizing. It use to be a closed group, but I am not so sure anymore. If you are looking to get into machining, it is a good place to start.

I use to sell appliances at Sears and the hardest thing I had to get through peoples heads when they bought the new front loaders was to use the right detergent(He, it is sudsless and it is concentrated) and a quarter of a capful was all the detergent you needed. Less if you have a water softener. People just couldn't get it through their head that the machines use a lot less water so putting too much detergent in means a lot of detergent gets left in the cloths. Most people could wash a whole load or two just with the detergent they have left in the fabric. Also, mildew feeds on two things, detergent and your skin cells. Get anything wet(like towels) and you have a perfect recipe for mildew.

Shrinking product is definitely not new. This just happens to be the latest round. Hershey is generally credited with "inventing" the idea and it goes back a very long time. Hershey made its name on selling a 5 cent bar. As the prices of chocolate fluctuated they varied the amount of product not the price. It is a well known strategy, especially in industries where raw material prices fluctuate dramatically. People are generally more price sensitive than quantity sensitive. This has happened in a lot of products. About 6 months ago I noticed that Bakers chocolate cut the product in a box by half and quit putting 1 oz. individually wrapped pieces in the box. Instead it now has a single "easy break" bar that has half the chocolate. I was not pleased as it means I have to buy twice as much and had to figure out the recipes that my mother wrote calling for "one square of unsweetened chocolate". Check out your favorite brand of ice cream. I would bet it is not a gallon! They kept the length and width the same but reduced the depth of the carton. As prices rise, you can count on getting a smaller container. For the woodworkers amongst us, plywood is a great example. Years ago a piece of 3/4" plywood was 3/4" of an inch thick. One day I cut a rabbet 3/4" wide to join two pieces of ply and the fit was very sloppy. I measured the ply and found that it was 23/32". That works out to a single ply in each sheet less. Saves the mill a little bit of material, but ruined a perfectly good project. Since then the router bit makers have made bits(properly labeled) 1/32" undersized to accommodate this. Interestingly when I asked the lumber dealer about it, he said it was because the factory had purchased new equipment from overseas and it was all "metric". Yea......... sounds like BS to me.

How much is way too much? I spent a reasonable amount on my Sherline and consider it a reasonable investment because it is reasonably robust, very precise and there are a ton of options including a rotary table(indexible)for making round things. I also have a lot of accessories to make things, like slitting saws, ball mill ends, very small mill ends, fly cutters, sensitive drilling attachments and bunch of other stuff. The basic mill is about $800. A package so you can do something is about $1,100. I have probably spent another $1,000 on other accessories over the last year to do things I want to do. If you want a professional tool that will do things in such a way that you don't get frustrated and put it in a closet and forget about it, then you need to step up and pay for a good one. You can also often find them on eBay if you don't mind getting a used machine. Buying quality is never cheap, but it is a lot less costly than buying cheap and discovering your mistake and buying quality. There are no such things as mistakes. There are only lessons. The lessons will continue until they are learned.

I saw some snow on TV last night. Does that count?

I keep looking at this thing and I think I have come to the conclusion that it would not be all that difficult to make this car palatable. To me, the thing that stands out the most is that odd angle on the rear wheel arch. If you fix that, it is not so bad. Perhaps clean up the rear roofline and you might have a presentable car.

And I thought it was Up, du, tree, foor. Dumb jet jock anyhow!

I grew up in Nebraska on the western boarder and remember the steam engines going through town. I remember the big boys going out of Cheyenne when I visited my uncle at the yard. He was a Yard master for years. It is great to see that they are restoring one. The Challenger is great to see run also. What I don't get is why they had to take the one from LA. They have one sitting in Holiday park in Cheyenne and it is only a couple of miles. Seems kind of a long way to go. Perhaps this one is in better shape. Last time I saw the one in Cheyenne it was looking pretty decrepit .

Got to go with the crowd on this one Model. The front bumper seam just looks out of wack for the real deal, but with Fiat's history of fine quality control who knows.

Combine this with a resistance soldering unit and you can do parts that are almost on top of each other once you get the hang of it.

No, sorry, but I was there primarily for the GT 40. There were a lot of really nice cars in the shop at the time.

Well I finally figured out how to up load stuff to youtube and this is the one thing I thought I should share first. I shot this quite a while ago, but it is still good stuff! Crank up your sound and enjoy!

The Bertone designs were most definitely unique. Some good and some not so much! This is probably the most "not so much" of the bunch. 5th gear did a show from Bertone last week and I had forgotten some of their better designs. The Lancia Stratos, Lamborghini Countach and Miura and the Alfa Giulia GTC just to name a few. They moved into a angular mode in the 60's and that is when the X-19, Gen 1 MR2 and this beast were designed. The Stratos and Countach were of the same linage but they worked. The X-19 and MR2 weren't offensive but this beast was just horrible. Full width of the spectrum. I suppose when you are doing cutting edge design work you will get both because they were working without bounds. At the time some would have called this leading the pack. Unfortunately it was a dead end street and that is easy to see with 20/20 hindsight. At the time it was not so easy to look forward. Of course we could use a little of that spirit, if not direct design in todays world of shapeless lumps. Heck, 90% of the cars you see on the streets today look like the evolution of a bar of very used soap!

"I'm comfortable with tools! Been using them for years." That is when that sort of stuff happens. I am 64 and just got bit by a drill. First thing my dad taught me was to unplug a power tool when I was doing something to it. Last week I got complacent with a drill. After all how bad can a drill be? I was changing a bit and holding the drill in an awkward position when my left hand hit the trigger just as I had a good grip on the chuck key. The key grabbed the cord and my hand all in one nasty bundle. No blood, but a badly sprained thumb and a lot of bruising. My Dad always said, "There are no mistakes, only lessons. The lessons will continue until they are learned". Or in my case relearned. Every tool can bite you if you let it.

I was the exec at a military processing station(AKA)induct you into your chosen military service and had three names stick out when they came through. The first was pronounced Absidee and spelled(no kidding) Abcde. The second was a young lady, well person, who joined the Marines who had legally(as in went before a judge) changed her last name to Belladonna. My all time favorite and I would have loved to be at boot camp to watch this one, was a young native American whose family naming tradition was very traditional and his last name was ........wait for it....... Every body talks about Rodger. I actually felt sorry for him. I can just imagine the DI having a go at that one.

I tried that and ran into the problem that they mask their phone number so it shows as "Private" on caller ID. You can't block that even with the automatic feature. Compound that with the fact that they use multiple phone numbers and I have been unsuccessful in blocking them, so I moved on to giving them a financial reason to stop calling. If I waste enough of their time they will realize that it is not productive to call.