Pete J.

Sorry guys - All time ugliest car on the planet- Just no rime nor reason to the design belongs hands down to Pontiac. I just can not see a bunch of stylists standing around this beast saying "Wow, now that is a great design!" What were they thinking!

Love the area 51 referances in the decals. For those who don't follow such things, dreamland is the FAA name for the restricted airspace over area 51 and Janet airlines is the no markings shuttle service from McCarran airport. Groomlake race way EEG and Los Alamos as sponsers, great fun. Loved seeing it.

Well, lets start out with a tie. I'm in for real on this one. A lot of things just look right, like the reflections in the hub caps, the exhaust staining on the door just to mention a couple. If ya got me Harry, ya got me with this one!

I also took a computer course back in1967. Worked on a Phillco 2000 that was the size of a room. Fortran was the language, punch cards were the input device. Graduated to a TRS-80 in the 70's, then a TR-4A with a cassette drive. Don't know how many laptop/desktop/portables I have had but I remember 286/386/486/P5's. The funiest part of all this was, I remember a professor standing at the podium on the first day of class in '67 saying "Within 10 years, paper will be obsolete!" Boy did he have that wrong.

This was a fun one to watch! It was real easy to look up. After voting(yes, I voted first) just google pink pig. There is only one in the world and this was a photo from the Porsche museum. It was also used in a Porsche ad. http://www.google.com/imgres?q=porsche+pink+pig&hl=en&sa=X&biw=1344&bih=697&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=webyp8Mo0hsjcM:&imgrefurl=http://www.toadhallbook.com/book.cfm%3FGI%3D2%26CI%3D10&docid=H4iAmRutCr-PAM&imgurl=http://www.toadhallbook.com/images/Porsche/WebPB0924.jpg&w=249&h=200&ei=7RwHT72FCuiOsQKFysyRCQ&zoom=1 Thanks for the fun Harry. One of my favorite marques.

I concur! I think if a contest is going to have a catagory called "modified" die cast, then at a minimum there should be a requirement for a list of modifications. Idealy, it would be a before and after photo, with discription. As you stated, I think most judges are not experts on what is availible in diecast, so knowing what has been done would be the challenge. There are some very nice diecast out there, but generally, they just are not up to the standard of a comparably priced plastic kit IMHO. Taking a diecast to the level done here is a challenge. Very nice.

I have only done one die cast and it was an absolute bear! Mark is right on the money with the comments about disassembly. The model I did was an MGB GT. I broke every piece of side molding and window frame getting it off and drilling out the heated stubs of plastic without breaking the part was a really chore. When it came to striping the parts, that was also a challenge. Some of the stuff they plate these models with is not to be believed. Then once the body was stipped, there were file markes as deep as the Grand Canyon all over it. Just the metal prepwork took weeks. Yea, I suppose anyone can polish a diecast, but it takes a real modeler to take it back to a kit and then make a decient finished product. As far as the contest, a story book like you did here would have gone a long way toward helping dispell the attitudes. Any time you do that with either diecast or plastic you do yourself and the judges a favor in showing the work. A good three ring binder with photos can make the differance. Great model! keep after it and I am sure the model world will come arround.

Ah, the one and only pink pig! Yep, it's real! Look at the wear on the tires.

LOL, actually the center is a piece from the center of the wheel rims. Unlike anything else from BMW it was only a couple of bucks at the dealer. On the other hand the chunk of aluminum cost me $10 from the scrap yard. Cutting the convex shape to support it, was the real challenge. Pete

Our family tradition is for each of us to select a Christmas ornament the reflects a subject that is in some way special for us this year. My son purchased the first car that he has to pay for and he got a rather nice late model 328i BMW. After hunting high and low for such a Christmas ornament and not finding one, I decided to fire up the Sherline and make one. Well that turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Cutting a dome inside of a ring without a computer driven machine involved some mental gymnastics and some long forgotten math skills. Any way, here is the result. Merrry Christmas to all!! I hope all your modeling dreams come true! Pete Johnson

Here are the basics of rattle can painting. http://www.tamiyausa.com/articles/feature.php?article-id=35

My inspiration has always been the competition and I have been blessed to live in SoCal with some really great builders. Many of them have become best friends over the years. Some are no longer building because of age and others are really just hitting their prime. Most are just as intersting in their daily lives as they are in their building careers. Frankly the list is long and I am sure to leave many out, but here are some of the people who have given me inspiration over the years. First and probably the most influential was my paint mentor and hobby shop owner who inspired me to get back into the hobby, Jessie Hermosilla(sorry but I could never spell his last name right). Jessie is probably not well know to most, but he spent many years in the automotive paint business and forgot more about paint than many of us will ever know. I met him 20 years ago when he owned a small hobby shop and he was quick to answer all my question, critique my work and encourage me. Thanks Jessie. Next on the list are two people I met at my first contest, Harry Cotrill and Paul Barrena. These were two of the friendliest guys you could ever meet at a contest, and two people who I could count on to always take home some hardware if not best of show honors. They were always willing to share and discuss technique. My best story with these two was one year we decided to build identical models using the same paint and enter them in box stock to challenge ourselves and the judges to find the differances. 1,2,3 finish and a lot of cursing from the judging staff. Life long friends, both. I have also been very lucky to belong to San Diego Model Car Club. As a group, they have been a crazy group of car model nuts but by chance they also happen to have several well know builders as members over the years. Those that most people would recognize are Drew Heirwater, Darryl Gassaway, Skip Samples and may others that have passed through the club house doors. These are the guys who give me my monthly dose of inspiration. If you are not a member of at least one club, you would do yourself a favor by joining one. Just seeing what others do would keep you going through even the darkest days of a build. The other great experience in my modeling life was the now defunked Tamiya/con. I was lucky enough to meet and befriend some of the best model builders on the west coast if not in the world and traveled with them and became great friends. Mark Jones, Steve Keck, Ernie Gee, Dale King, Mark Cuevas, Mark Taylor just to mention a few. All of them top notch competion who become fast friends. I have also been luck to meet and befriend several members of the manufacturing community, whom I can now call my friends. First and formost is Matthew Wells of Scale Motorsport. He has introduced me to a whole world of building I did not know existed. Thank you Matthew. Last but not least are my friends from Tamiya USA, Rich Poulsen and Fred Medel. They have allowed me to build for them and know a bit of the inside of a major model manufacture. Great experiences. In looking at this list, I realize that it looks a bit like a namedroppers paradise for modeler, but I have truely had a rich bag of friends in this hobby and am thankful for all of them. The last name I would like to add is off course our host, Gregg Hutchings. He and I have had many long discussions about the hobby and I hope all of you appreciate him as I do, for all he does for the hobby. Thanks Gregg

Ahh, just a high end Fiat! :lol:

A small piece of history for you. The correct name is A/N fittings. They came from an attempt to standardize the fittings used on military aircraft in the early 50's. A/N stands for Army/Navy. There was no Air Force yet.

How can you forget Back to the Future. Doc Brown had a lot of models for demonstration purposes. Ok, they were windup cars and trains, but they were models.

Christian is quite right about red being the culprit. Reds are generally quite translucent and the amount of paint that you get on the model will cause the shade to change. This is not always a funtion of the number of coats. Most people are not aware of the roll distance from model to spray nozzle plays. On most rattle cans if you reduce the distance that you hold the can from the body from 7" to 6" you decrease the area of the spray pattern by about 40% and thus almost double the amount of paint you are laying down per pass. Most people have a tendancy to get closer to smaller parts when they spray and that changes the density of the red. A lot of builders will build a jig that holds both the body and the hood with the hood about a quarter of an inch above where it goes on the body. This way thay get an even spray on the parts as they are being coated at the same time. Also, never ever use gray primer as a base for red or yellow. Always use white or other complimentary color(Ferrari uses orange primer on some colors). Gray will absolutely kill reds and yellows.

Just because you can afford one, doen't mean you can drive one! On top of that, with the money these guys have, they all probably have monumental egos and competative drives. That is a recipe for disaster if I ever heard one.

Ah, grasshopper, everything teaches us something. Follow it through and you will be a better modeler for it, reguardless of how it looks when you are done.

ooooowwww!

Wow, I'm suprised that is still out there! Wrote that artical a long time ago. Glad it is still helping folks!

I have and use both. The gravity feed I use when I am doing a small amount of painting such as alcad with a few parts. The siphon feed is better for two purposes. One, if you are doing a lot of the same color, you can get large bottles so you do not have to stop and refill. Two, you can have multiple colors mixed and ready to go. I keep one bottle with thinner. A quick blast of thinner and you are ready to go with the next color, but be careful following intense colors like blacks and reds with whites or yellows. A through cleaning is called for, but if I am doing camofages or similar candies, it really saves time.

I am certianly not implying that you are bloodthirsty, but I really started to appricate F1 in the early 60's and I remember following the sport and hearing about my heros meeting an early death and it almost turned me away from F1. I was especially hard hit when Jimmy Clark went into the trees in a F2 race. He was a supurb driver and had the accident happend on a modern circut, he probably would still be with us. It was indeed a time of iron men. When I see the movie Gran Prix, there is a scene with a drivers meeting and all the F1 drivers of the era are there. Many of them did not live much longer after that. Frankly the cars of that era were also death traps. Can you imagine driving a race car without seatbelts because you wanted to be thrown clear in the event of an accident. Brave to the point of foolheartyness, but I still admire them. I just don't want to see a return of that kind of racing but I am glad it was a part of the history.

Bluntly, it isn't worth anything until you have a buyer. The trick with an auction like ebay is set a starting point low enough to get peple interested but not to low to get less out of it than it is worth to you. General rule, what would you pay for it an start it at about 20% less, hoping that you get at least two buyers who are willing to get in a fight over it. All the time, you are rolling the dice. You really don't get to set the price.

With all respect, I disagree. That period was certianly exceptional and I loved seeing the races but frankly it was an endevor with excessive risk . The changing of the tracks was started by the drivers in self defence. We lost so many great drivers because of the risk, Von Trips, Rodrgues, Clark, Peterson, Donohoue and many others. The revised venues turned it from a gadatorial combat with the spectators as part of the fodder to something a little more like football(both American and European style). It remains a sport that lets great drivers and teams rise to the top without all the bloodshed.

Watching San Palo as I type this. Other comments to the contrary, I find it most interesting. The cars are arguably the most sophisiticated on the planet. The technology they use actually gets translated into our daily drivers and performace cars. Yes, money plays a big role, but it is fun to see what money can buy. The rules get a little screwy as they try to adjust the racers to be more competative, but they all play with the same rules. To me the best part is the interesting variety of tracks. No roundy round racing for me, thank you!