Pete J.

I wouldn't buy one. Look at the welds and then compare them with what you see on the real deal. If I wanted something that would go as fast as an Atom, I would want a little more confidance in the fabrications.

It sucks when your garage is too small! I had a discussion with my wife the other day and asked her what the perfect house was. She went on and on about how many bed rooms, bathrooms, and such. She then asked me what my perfect house was. My reply? A fifteen car garage with a loft. Am I asking for too much?

Mark, sound like I am in the minority but I like the 5 spoke better. A little more for the eye to follow.

Ok, I had my fun with the movie comment, so here is the real deal. I have easily spent over $1,000 on a finished kit. It really isn't that hard and I am sure most of you would appreciate the end result. I have also purchased thousands of dollars on tools. Not hard to do when you buy from Sherline! With few exceptions none of this was done by walking into a show room and ploping a hand full of $100 bills on the table. It is all done a little at a time. My work bench is full of special purpose tools that don't get used frequently, but when they are, it is the only thing that will do the job. I have stacks of raw materials, plastic, brass and aluminum waiting to hit the lathe. Boxes of paint and other finishing products fill every nook and cranny of the shop. The cost of the kit and the aftermarket bits are just a starting point. I really enjoy my hobby, but the stuff I have to do the job has been accumulated over 30 years, including the hundreds of kits I have stacked on the shelf. Overall cost? Doesn't really matter. I didn't buy it all at once, just a little at a time. Value in peace of mind and pride in a job well done, immeasurable. If cost is a major factor in your life, get what will give you the most happyness for the buck. Don't buy something just because it is cheap.

I refuse to spend more than the cost of a movie! Lets see, a movie is about $15 for an hour and a half and the average model takes about 50 hours to complete. Thats about $500. Really, that is pretty cheap considering other past times.

It cost more to import it!

It is all brass so it solders togeather well. I used a silver based solder from radio shack. They seem to be the only ones I can find that have a really fine gauge solder. Everyone else seems to think you want to do plumbing.

This was a bit of a challenge. I wanted a realistic hot rod front axle. I don't own a mill.....yet, so getting a real curve with the grooved I-beam look was going to be a challenge. After reviewing the options I took a page out of Mark Jones play book and did it in layers. Here are the layers. They are slightly rough because they have not been cleaned up yet. The small round things are the end bearings. Ok, back to the bench. Here it is all soldered up. The round aluminum pieces are jigs I used to make sure that the bearings are soldered on parallel and at 90 degrees to the ground. They are aluminum so solder didn't stick to them.

I absolutely love the 166 kit. I have two of them, unbuilt. Are you adding the Tamiya upgrades? I will be following this build with interest. Pete

Thanks for the comments guys! I am back at the bench on this one. Front axle need to be redone. Dominik, it is 1:24. Just having fun building something differant from my usual fare.

I've already posted these on the black knight thread but here are some of the highlights. Head lights aluminum and brass turnings The radiator brass with an aluminum cap. The head lights mount on the sides of this with pins. Gas tank. Turned aluminum with brass straps and turned aluminum rivets(I bought the rivets) rear end. Turned solid axles and brass springs. Diff is the kit part Rear end done and assembled. The brake lights are brass tubing filled with red epoxy. Interior brass and aluminum steering wheel and column. Gage bezels are cut from brass tubing on a lathe Engine - turned cylinders, brass side and inlet cover, turned intake with brass screen cover. Semi done. I still have to make a good front axle.

Now why in the heck didn't I think of that!!! Great idea. I just cut the clamping ends at an angle. This would have been so much easier. This was worth reading through the whole thing to find!

Johann- First of all thank you for your interest. I am always interested in aviation books because flying is my first love. Having said that I have a lot of problems with engine as it came in the kit. Honestly I had no intention of making this an accurate replica of the real thing and took a lot of liberties with it. Bluntly, Tom Daniels also took far more liberties than I and as such left me with little opportunity to bring it up to an accurate representation of the real thing. First off, I suspect that it is a 1:72 scale engine out of an aircraft kit. The real engine is about 65" inches long, almost 5 1/2 feet. Scaled out, that would mean that the engine should be close to 2.7" long in 1:24 scale. This model engine is nowhere near that length. It is just under an inch long. This would make sense for a 1:72 scale On top of that it has a lot of peculiarities specific to aircraft engines of the era that would make it very unsuitable for an automotive engine without a lot of modifications. First it that the intake air runs through the crankcase to warm the air. This is an anti-icing measure that robs power from the engine. I modified the engine with a side mount intake that would theoreticaly go into the pair of updraft carbs just to give it some semblance of reality. Second the valve system is top mounted for ease of maintenance as was the custom of the period. This also helps with the compression release access used to start the engine by “hand propping it”. Something you just couldn't do with and engine of this size with a crank. There had to be a starter somewhere on this piece and there is no provision for starter anywhere on the model. Building an accurate valve train was just a waste of time in my estimation. As far as the dual magneto/plugs this is something that is almost exclusively used on 4 cycle aircraft engines. Dual ignition has two purposes. First and foremost is to provide a backup in the event of the failure of one system. It matters a whole lot more in an aircraft if the electrical system poops out than on a car. It also improves combustion marginally but that can also be achieved with better plug location on a single plug engine and would not be considered worth the additional weight and complication on a hot rod. So, for those who are interested in seeing an accurate portrale of a Mercedes D III engine, this is not the place to look. This engine is so bastardized to begin with that I felt compelled to improve it visually and ignore the original engine. Perhaps someday I will have the urge to build the real thing, but today is not that day. This engine is more about improving my skills as a miniature metal worker and making something that looks good. Artistry was much higher on the priorities than accuracy for this build.

Oh, by the way, I have decided that the "Darth Vader" references are way off base. It is much closer to the Rick Moranes character of "Dark Helmet" from Space balls!

Ok, this build hit that point in time that it needed to be done and it wasn't finished. The timing was the San Diego Model Car Club February meeting. As I think I mentioned this needed to be done as it was a club single kit build. The option was to take in a bunch of parts or assemble what I had. I chose to assemble what I had completed. First photo is the interior. I am quite happy how it all came together. The gage bezels are cut from brass tubing on the lathe. I believe I showed photos of the steering wheel earlier. Here are a couple of shots of the rear end. All things considered I think it is quite nicely integrated. Here is a side shot. This is the first time you can see parts not added. The front end is missing steering and drag links. This gives you a better shot of the front. Now, here is the deal. Even though it is more or less done, I am going to continue to fabricate a new front end that is period correct with all the functional parts. As that comes along, I will continue to post photos. The disassembly and reconstruction may take a while. In fact I was even thinking of striping it down and making frame rails and just adding the parts off the this one. We shall see. As I said, I am not really happy with this as it sits.

C Coming down the final stretch with this one. Engine is wired and ready to go. I have the body to finish up and polish out. The interior is done. I have some gages to get on board and some touchup work to do and we are off to the races. This shows how the exhaust fits. Perhaps it makes a little more sense when you see it in the chassis. Here is the engine, wired up and done and test fit into the chassis.

I was rummaging around in my parts box and found all three sets of springs that I have made for this kit and thought you might like to see them. They are in order from the kit part in the back (the ugly red plastic piece) to the final iteration in the foreground. The engine is coming along. The crankcase is done and cylinders glued on. I have also added the exhaust. It is a little weird, but that goes with the whole build. After doing some research on the engine it looks like Tom Daniel’s may have scavenged it from a 1/35th scale Fokker aircraft kit. The real deal would be much larger in relation to the car as designed, so artistic license has been invoked in all aspects of the engine build.

Kevin- .015" for the thickness. No, I didn't use a wire brush but I considered it early on. My process is a bit more cobbled together. When you get the brass sheet, clean it with acetone. Most brass sheet has a coating on it and if you anneal it without cleaning it, you get a real nasty surface that is hard to polish. Next step is to anneal the brass. Heat it cherry red and quench it water. I know, I thought that was the process for hardening it but apparently for nonferrous metals that is how you do it. Then you have to reflatten it. I made myself a small “rolling pin” out of aluminum and use a piece of ¾” MDF as a rolling surface. If you have not done this before, a little practice and you will get it down. The annealing will dull the surface of the brass but that is a good thing. I then marked my cut lines with a diamond scribe to get the width I wanted and using a straightedge and a utility knife scored my way through to cut the sheet. I reflattend it and marked my lengths out and cut them. Next I found the center of each leaf and scribed it so I knew where to bend it and where to line them up to solder them. The next step was to prep the surface. I did that with needle files and sanding sticks. Once I had them down to a decent gloss with fine scratches, I put a final polish on them with a fabric wheel in my Dremel and some fine jeweler’s rouge. Then I bent each one with a bending jig. A dowel would do the same thing. I was careful to bend them on the center marks I had made before. Then I lined up all the center marks and soldered them together. After they were soldered, I dressed the edges with needle files to square them and took the file marks out with a sanding stick and then gave them a quick shot with the buffing wheel.

You are right, it does have a bit of a Darth Vader look to it. However I am a bit of a war history buff and this was more of a conversion to another WW 1 flying ace who transitioned into WW 2. Here is a little information on him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Ritter_von_Schleich

Randy - It just keeps getting better! Thanks for the inspiration. Pete

Correct me if I am wrong Mark but what you are doing is the same process as photoetcheing but instead of using a photo mask with photo resist you are using a vinyl masking product that you cut with a knife. You are making some really nice parts with this. Is there much clean up? Could you put up a raw piece?

And people wonder why others move to southern California. Inspite of the other issues of living here, I haven't scooped a single shovel full of snow in 25 years , but I still keep the snow shovel in the garage just to remind me why I am here when other things get not so nice!

Just a bit of a side note. After looking at the photo I posted of the springs, I decided that I didn't like them very much. This was one of the first pieces of brass that I made and I have learned a lot building this model, so I made a new set. To my eye the arc is much more pleasing and the springs are much cleaner and a better polish. Now having said that, I am going to give away a little secret. Almost every piece of brass I have done for this model has been redone at least once. In the case of the springs, this is the third set, but then that is the pleasure of leaning new things. Enjoy what you build, even when things go wrong!

There are a lot of things that can impact the final result of painting. The major ones are manufacture and type of paint, viscosity of paint, air pressure, needle setting, distance from the airbrush to the model, temperature and humidity. To go into detail on how to set up each one for you specific brush and compressor would take entirely too much space and is futile to begin with. Each of these factors interacts with the rest and thus you cannot say that one is at fault. Thinning is the most common issue. Having said that, it is really up to you to adjust each one and see what the final outcome is. What I did and still do, is keep a journal. I track each of the factors and when I get a great result I mark it for future use. I also note bad results and what I did to correct it. Because each airbrush is slightly different, I have three, giving you my settings is unlikely to work completely. The best thing you can do is get a scrap body and start painting and writing. You will very quickly learn the eccentricities of you brush and how to deal with them. No body picks up an airbrush and gets perfect results the first time. FYI, here is an article I wrote for Tamiya many years ago for using rattle cans. It contains a lot of useful information that you can translate into airbrush speak. http://www.tamiyausa.com/articles/feature.php?article-id=35 Good luck and start spraying.

I agree with thinning it more. When it goes into your airbrush it should be about the consistency of whole milk. Very few paints are designed to go into you airbrush straight out of the bottle.