Pete J.

Tim, amazing bit of work on the whole intake set up! I was going back to the bench to do some work and saw this. It is now a tossup if I take this as inspiration or realization that this is so far beyond me that I just quit! ? I really need to get back to the bench just to cut some metal!

Best Bond ever? Yes but I liked him best in Indian Jones and the last crusade. That wry caustic humor that he did so well, very well played. He will be missed.

This is the Philco radio I remember. Lots of them around when I was a kid.(pre TV).

A good quality tool like the one above can get quite expensive, in the high $200 range and may be more that what we need for modeling. Starrett makes a very precise protractor that can also be used for under $75. I got one for working on my benchtop mill and lathe. Very nice tool for the money. By the way, when working on the small scales that we do, precision is everything. Good measuring tools will save a ton of frustration. Don't be afraid to spend the money for quality when it comes to measuring tools.

IMCTH did three kits. This one, a mustang and Bf-109. Got the other two, perhaps I will get around to them one day!?

Yup, thing was the size of a house. Back then there were only a few companies making mainframes. Philco was one of them. I suspect that this was a hold over from WWII when they were a huge government contractor for electronics. Just did a quick search for the Philco 2000. It was the first highly transistorized high speed computer. They were also the leading manufacture of transistor radios at the time. Pretty much took Texas Instruments baby and ran with it.

Not true! Your watch has far more computing power. I took my first course in programing in 1967. We used a Philco 2000. One of the most advanced computers at the time. We could only run rudimentary calculations using programs written on punch card, batch processed over night. A hundred cards(lines of code) was a huge program. I recall my instructor starting the class with this line. Computers are not smart. They are 3 year old idiots who can think really really fast and only do precisely what you tell them. The computers that were used for the space program were for telemetry only. They were an outgrowth of computers that the Army developed to compute artillery trajectory tables. There was no CAD. The design and construction was all done with pencils on paper and blueprints.

I'm an ex Air Force pilot so yes, I build aircraft. I have also owned more than a few sportscars(240Z, 911, MR2) and some hot hatches so yes I build auto subjects. It is always a matter of what look interesting in my stash at the moment. A trend? Well if you call doing this for 60+ years, yup, it's a trend.?

Can you imagine the stack of blueprints that made up the Saturn V, LEM, and crew module?. I wonder if they were ever digitized or if they are rotting away in a crate in some warehouse. ?

Drafting was one of the first classes I took in College in the 60's. Learned all this at a drafting table. Too bad they don't teach drafting the old fashion way anymore. Now days it is just "plug it " into the computer and print it out. Computers are ruining our minds. Making it too easy. ?

In his book, Master Modeler S. Tamiya mentions the concept of scale effect particularly when it comes to auto models. I will have to paraphrase it because I didn't mark it in the book, but here it is. Model cars, if made to correct scale width, look to narrow. This is because we are use to viewing 1:1 vehicles with our eyes at about the same level as the car. This makes them seem much wider than if we viewed them from a position of high above which is how we look at models. We stand over the top of them and look down. Created to scale autos look to narrow. Tamiya adjusts for this and slightly widens them. There are other "perspective" issues that model manufactures use to make the model look more "realistic" to our eyes.

I can speak to some of this. In many cases the model company uses locally available vehicles as templates. If they are Japanese companies, they use Japanese examples. In many cases the motorcycles sold in the model makers country of origin are different, sometimes significantly different than the model sold in your country. This is particularly the case with Japanese bikes. JDM bikes, like their cars have significant variations from those vehicles sold elsewhere in the world. On top of that, even though a vehicle may have the same name, they may have to meet different legal standards around the world. So I guess what I am saying, without knowing the origin of the vehicle that the model manufacture used, saying something is definitively "wrong" is not possible.

They tried several different configurations, none of which improved the looks.

Yea, I have a 30 minute limit in searching for it, then I give up. Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me and I do a google image search. This time is gave me hundreds of small white sedans. ? None of which was this. I used a different method and found it, but disqualify myself if I do image searching. Somewhere I recall that that is "against the rules", so no ata boy for me! By the way, I found a panel version of this! Only slightly less ugly. I give them credit, they were really trying hard to make this work.

Well, technically I was on the road and I did see this. Wife and some of her friends decided to take a balloon ride in SoCal Wine country. Great scenery to look at. I also caught a nice shot of a balloon and the moon!

Already have my room reserved!

It is most definitely flipped. The lettering on the tires is a dead give away. That is one of the first things I did was flip it back so I could see who the tire manufacturer was and that started me down the right road of an American car. Not a lot of cars used BF Goodrich tires in the day.

The Hasegawa Tri tools are two different sets. The TP-3 set is much more robust than the TP-4 set. I can't imagine bending the tool and the differing shapes give a lot of options for getting into tight spaces. The TP-4 set is, as you suggested very thin and does not handle any aggressive cutting. It is a "Pull stoke" only tool. Any attempt to push it and it will bend and become useless. Having said that, it is an incredible tool in certain circumstances because of its extremely fine teeth and very thin blade. You also need to be careful for that same reason. It will cut you rather easily. They can be used for very precise cuts. I recently cut a aircraft canopy lengthwise. I laid down a piece for Dynamo label maker tape as a guide and the blade worked wonderfully. They are a handy addition and when you need them, they are about the only thing that will work.

Looks like a useful tool. I took the opposite approach with mine. I bought a sheet of 20" square sheet of adhesive backed magnetic pad(think refrigerator magnet material) and stuck it to a piece of 3/4" high quality ply wood(MDF would also work) and use that. This way my steel machinists squares will stick to it. I bought the thickest material with the strongest pull. It works very well. By the way, once the material is on the plywood, I ran it through a table saw to make a smaller one and to square up the edges.

Yes, this is definitely not a cohesive design. It looks like he took a Sawzall to the roof just behind the B pillar and grafted a hatch back on it then filled in the parts that stuck out. Also the rear view is particularly ugly. The Firebird tail lights really look like an after thought. At least the nose was done well if not pretty. Looks more like a shade tree mechanic with Sawzall and a bunch of parts, not an Italian design house job.

Interesting. When you were asking about a razor saw, I thought you were talking about the large tool. These are really detail saws. Much smaller. You got the thickest of the Hasegawa/Tri-tool sets. They make a TP-1 and 2 set as well. The thinnest set is very thin and is usable on the pull stroke only. If you try to cut on the push stroke it will bind and bend almost immediately, but it is great for cuts that you want to put back together like opening doors and hoods. I used a set recently to cut a 1:48th Tamiya F-16 fuselage in half length wise. Very tedious but they did the job very cleanly. I have had all three sets for well over 20 years and use them for very fine work. The set you got is pretty solid and doesn't require any special handling. Oh and by the way, I am still on the first set twenty years later. Like any tool, treat them well and they will last a lifetime.

I gave this some additional thought and came up with a kit that I could build for the rest of my life(I'm 70). By the way, I've already built two of them. That kit would be the Tamiya 935/934 1:12 scale. The last one I build was on the bench for 4 years. There is so much you can do with this kit. There are also a ton of variants that it could be modified into not to mention all the different liveries. Of course this is a bit of a cheat, because at 70, I probably don't have a lot of builds left in me, but this could keep me busy for a while. ?

Here is my bible. https://www.amazon.com/Tabletop-Machining-Joe-Martin/dp/0966543300 Joe Martin was the founder of Sherline tools. Anytime anyone I know buys a lathe or mill, I make sure they buy one of these. Understand that the book uses Sherline equipment for illustration but that doesn't interfere with the information. He covers you from the first chips to major projects. Well worth the money.

Thanks for the comments. I did like the base, but ran into a problem with it later. Because of all the white metal in the engine and oil and gas tanks, the landing gear started to sag under the pressure of all that weight. I had to straighten the gear and redesign the base with two more struts just inside of the gear mounts. The customer was still pleased with it.