Pete J.

I got it from my Vermont grandfather. I believe the origin is Scottish as in "A wee dram to ward off the chill". Always heard it in reference to whiskey, which my Grandfather was quite fond of.

Personally, I speak Midwestern with a notable New England accent. I grew up in western Nebraska on the family homestead. My grandfather was the first generation born in the US but had a very strong Swedish accent. My Grandmother was German so my dad had a colorful mix of bits of both languages and boy could he get colorful when things went south. To top that off he was a navy pilot during WWII so color filled his language. My mother was a native "vamanter"(Vermont) so that is were the New England side kicks in. My children speak some other dialect. They were both raise here in California but pick up a bit of east coast from my wife a native of "balamer"(Baltimore). Having spent 9 years as a pilot in the Air Force, I have my own share of color in my language. If a linguist were to try and nail down the local for my kids or me, it would be a serious challenge. The interesting part is that my daughter has been in Baltimore for a couple of years working on her masters and her language is moving that way. So what form of English do I speak? 'merican with bits and pieces from everywhere. Oh, and Oban is my favorite brand of Scotch! A dram or two before bedtime is a perfect tonic for a good nights sleep!

That is why I stock up when I buy. I get the sanding sticks 100 at a time and 20 of each grit of pad that I use. Of course I have learned what I use and so none of it will go to waste. In fact, the last order that I made, I quite ordering tri-grit sanding sticks and orders 3 different single grit sticks, because it occurred to me that I was tossing sticks that one or two grits had worn out and I was wasting them. They do last, but it is sanding medium and they don't last forever.

I am a firm believer in that philosophy! Good to see others who share that approach. Always on the look out. It has been said that what goes around comes around. This time it was my turn. Thanks very much!

In a word yes. Would I do it. No! Some of what you suggest is good, but probably for the wrong reasons. All paints need something to grab ahold of. Some get it by attacking the surface with solvents to get a grip. Others have to have scratches(AKA key) from sanding to lock on. Either way, what ever you do to improve adhesion of the paint is good. That is one of two reasons for primer. All primers dry flat which gives your color coat something to get a good grip on. The other reason for primers is they have a high level of solids(all paint are made up of three things, pigment, binder and solvent). This makes it so you can't see through them. Basic plastic is somewhat translucent and if you just polish it out it still looks like plastic in certain lights regardless of how shinny you get it. Sanding or polishing the surface is a good thing because it removes the surface imperfections and gives you an even surface to lay the paint on. It also gets rid of surface contaminates which may react with your paint. Here is my prep. 1. Wash the plastic with a good grease cutting soap in warm water. This gets rid of anything the manufacture may have left on the surface. 2. Wet sand the surface with a series of finer sanding sticks to get rid of all the mold lines, sink marks and other general unevenness. I generally start with 3200 grit and do a 4000 and 6000. nothing any finer is needed at this point. 3. Clean the surface with 50/50 mix of distilled water and 91% alcohol and a soft microfiber towel. This get rid of all the dust and preps the surface. 4. Prime the surface with a fine white primer(gray if the plastic is white) and let it dry. 5. Wet sand very lightly with a 4000 grit sanding stick. This will show you any high spots or parts that need work. 6. Once you have all the areas worked out, reprime with a very light coat of the original primer and set it aside for a couple of days. 7. Now spray with several very fine coats of color. Don't expect the first couple of coats to cover. If they do, you are putting too much paint on. Once you have the surface covered then set it aside for a couple of day. 8. If you are going to clear coat, then again, light sanding with 4000 grit to get a key for the clear, a light pass with the alcohol water mix and clear it. 9. Now you are ready to polish. This time start with a 4000 grit followed by 6000, 8000, 12000. Then use a little fine or superfine grit polishing compound and you should be fine. This is how I do it. It sounds like a lot of work, but I am finicky about my paint jobs. You can do as much or as little as you want, but eventually you will find a method that works for you.

Did one of these years ago and it was a pig to get it right. Most people don't realize at first glance that the convertible has completely different rear quarters and trunk lid. If I recall right, I had to do a pie cut to get it right. Or you could start with the new 69 Chevelle convertible kit and chop out the parts that you needed. The color looks spot on. A lot of people don't know that Pontiac Carousel Red is the same color and Chevy Hugger orange. Looks great. You got me thinking about doing another one of these.

Mark, is this an old resin kit? Nothing ages like old resin! Thank goodness. Looks like a challenge. It will be fun to watch!

My reading habits are a bit on the diverse side. My last two books are "A higher Calling", a true story about a German and US pilot who met in the skies over Germany and "The Heretics Daughter" a historical novel about the Salem witch trials. My aviation back ground was the basis for my interest in "A Higher Calling". I had heard of the story of chivalry by the German not finishing off a shot to hell B-17 and found the story fascinating. The Heretic's Daughter is a bit more convoluted. I came to it as a result of my sisters digging into our family tree and finding that my grandmother seven times removed was one of the women hung as a witch and this book was about what happened to her and her(my)family told from the point of view of her daughter. My family is descended from the narrator's brother, but it is still a very interesting story when it is your family.

Joel, Sorry if I stated my position in a less than effective way. I was actually trying to side with you and keep it minds open to other points of view. I think you made a good point and I wasn't intentionally headed to the negative side. It just seems every time one of these threads comes up somebody jumps on the "Well that's just stupid!" bike and peddles off into the distance without considering other POV's. Understanding collectors and collections is challenging at best. I found the narrative on the eBay post most informative and see the value to someone who has a room full of "mint in the box" models. We all just need to realize that internet sales are a "world wide" proposition. The seller is obviously a collector and the collector market is obviously who he is going for. I am going to follow that sale, because I am interested to see if it actually goes for that. Would I spend $1,700 on a kit? Yup! Been there, done that. Would I spend $1,700 on that kit. Nope, doesn't appeal to me because I am a builder with a stash, not a collector who builds.

All valid points but here is what it comes down to. Why do you want to buy it? If you are a wealthy collector(I don't think many here are) then you may be willing to pay anything to "complete" your collection. If you are a guy who wants to build a 1911 then it probably doesn't matter if you have an original or a repop. Your going to build it and when you are done, no one will be able to tell what your source was. If you are a resin caster and you can make repops for $30 or $40 a piece, then it may be worth it to make a mold from the original part. A lot of different reasons. It is worth $1,700? Perhaps to someone who doesn't share your motivation, but that doesn't make their motivation any less real or correct. It just makes it different. After all any model is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for or what someone else is willing to part with it for. Interestingly, there was an episode of American Pickers that highlighted a person who had a collection of slot cars. Now by a collection I am not talking about a tub or two of them but a small warehouse full. Literally thousands of them. Some of them went back to the early 1900's. He was looking to sell the entire collection for $1,000,000 and it had been valued at $1,500,000. Anyone interested? No? I thought not. Although many of us have collections(or stashes if you will) not many of us are true collectors. The true collector is concerned about more than we builders are. They are concerned about originality, completeness and condition of boxes, etc. Each of these impacts the ultimate value. As builder, for the most part we just care if all the parts are there and we can build a model out of it. Different POV. If you see something that looks ridiculously over price, try stepping into the other guys shoes and see if you can understand their motivation. It is much more informative and interesting than taking a pot shot at them. Indecently Joel, that looks like how you started this post. Good for you!

All the model polishing kits have micromesh pads and sticks. Here is the direct source. I've been bypassing the "model" polishing kit makers and buying direct for years. They will sell you 1 or 10,000 or a 50' roll. Skip the middle man and get what you need. http://micro-surface.com/index.php/products-by-type/soft-touch-pads.html

One other piece to this is the size of your avatar. I have found that to get it to work size wise a 1"X1" at 100 dpi hits the correct size. Otherwise it is too large. I use Photoshop to reduce it but any photo editing software should work.

Rex, top arrived today and it is a perfect fit! Thanks! I owe you big time. I now have a full kit to build my first car.

Ok, you can't select a needle size based on the solvent you are using. It is not the solvent that determines the size of tip used. It is the size of the pigment grains. A better example would be to talk for a moment about acrylics. Model acrylics tend to have very small pigment size. Acrylic house paint has very large pigment sizes. You would never ever get house paint through the typical airbrush, but both are "Acrylics". Same with Lacquers. The only way to know is to get the paint you want to spray and try it. As to the needle, having an extra needle and tip will never be a bad thing and they are not that pricy. I would suggest get both and try them on the different paints that you use and see how they work. This is like discussing compressor pressure. No one can give you a pat answer. You have to work with what you have and try it until you get what you works for you. By the way, I have four airbrushes and each of them has a different size tip, uses a different pressure and feed system. They all serve a purpose. Not a single one of them does everything I want well, thus multiples. Oh, and two of them have three different needles and tips each. This probably doesn't give you a direct answer to the question you asked, (Is .35 mm or .50 mm big enough or should I go to another airbrush with a larger needle size?) but it is the answer.

Well said! The graininess is due to it not having time to self level. This is solved two ways. 1) add the correct thinner. 2) hold the brush closer to the surface. Both will get the paint to the surface with more solvents still active, however by moving closer, you will also shrink the size of the spray pattern and put more paint on. Thus if you want to lay down thin layers the best solution is to thin the paint for the distance that you normally paint from. A larger needle and tip is nessesary for the size of the grains of pigment. Very fine pigments such as inks need very small needle/tips. Heavier paint such as automotive lacquers have larger grain and need larger needle/tips. Most acrylics also need a larger needle/tip combination. Finding a happy medium that works with most of your paints is the challenge.

Yup!

As a contest judge, the wires do present an issue but not so much from drape. If you google drag engines of the era, you will see two things. Most of the wires coming out of the distributor/magneto have a right angle or elbow style boot and the boots at the spark plug end almost never extend much beyond the valve covers. These two issues give what my friend Drew Hierwarter use to call the tarantula look. Plug wires generally lay close to the engine. There are exceptions but for the most part this is the way they are wired. You have a very nice model here. The paint and metal work are both outstanding!

This is a pic I took off of eBay that I was bidding on. I will see if I can find it in the stash and photograph it.

PM sent. Appreciate it. Thank you!

My guess is we were in competition. The last two I bid on went for $96.22 and $61.70 after shipping and I was in it to the last bid. It is weird, the convertible cover looks like a resin piece to me. If you don't have a use for the original roof, would you be willing to pass it on? As I said, I have the rest of the kit and want to build my first car, a coupe with the 200 CID six.

I don't suppose you would be interested in parting with the top would you?

Ok, this is the mustang kit I am talking about. I have an automatic search on eBay and it comes up maybe once a year and it almost always goes for near $100. Fastbacks are a dime a dozen but the coupe, now that is a rare horse.

I have to say the '69 Mustang coupe/convertible. I wanted a coupe to build stock(my first car in Wimbledon white). I got one and paid a pretty penny for it. The guy that sold it to me negelected to tell me that he had used the top and cast it in resin and included that. The top of course is badly cast and warped. Been trying to get a complete one ever since and always out bid by a bunch!

Ok, this is all a tempest in a teapot! 1:24-1:25 is irrelevant. All that matters is the diameter of the rim and the inside diameter of your tires. I just went out to my stash of old tires and found a dozen that would work. Some a little tighter that others but they would work. Some of them were even 1:20 scale(F1 tires) and would work great if you want some supersized slicks. It is just annoying how some people get so engrossed in "scale" when it comes down to what will fit and to expect a company to list all the available tires that will fit is unrealistic. If you are looking through your stash to find something that will fit, then measuring them isn't that hard.

That is partially it because a 1:24 scale works evenly in the English measuring system(which we use here in 'merica) of feet and inches and 1:25 works evenly in a metric system(that the rest of the world uses) where everything is a function of 10 or 100. The actual increments are relevant only to the final size. All scales are proportion - 1:1 full size, 1:4 quarter scale or 25% etc.