Pete J.

Interesting point that I never though of. A little research indicates that lock and load is correct. It is a foreshortening of lock the magazine in place and load a round in the chamber. Also the earliest use of the term is apparently by John Wayne in "The Sands of Iwo Jima" and he does reverse it as load and lock.

I agree with the other posters on BMF and would add a couple of bits. First is that BMF is metal foil and will stretch a little like any metal. This is important to consider when doing such things as windscreen frames and wheel arches. If you start on the inside and use your finger to carefully rub along the arch, you can works the foil around to the outside and it will look very smooth and wrinkle free. You get wrinkles when the foil is wider than the area you are covering and it is trying to shrink to fit the area Once you get the piece stretched in place then you can burnish it down. Be careful and work it slowly and you won't have a problem. Another interesting thing I picked up a bit ago is that BMF likes to be cut best with a curved blade that is pushed rather than pulled. I use a scalpel because they are very sharp and the blades are far cheaper than x-acto blades. Here is the video that I got these tips from. It is about aircraft but it applies to models in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHJmxKKxsew I think you may find it interesting.

Ok Randy, now your getting carried away! The slave cylinder is just nuts!

Not sure I will post that one here as it is an 1:24 scale aircraft. Doesn't really fit but I will start a thread on the IPMS sight

I think you will find them interesting. Several of the sets are just the graining on a clear carrier film so you can choose the base color. If you wanted to, you could easily vary that color to make the grain more subtle and choose your type of wood, such as a dark brown for walnut or a very light color for maple. I got the "plywood" set, as I am doing large plywood panels. Going to be very interesting. Good Luck!

I just got a set of these for another project and they are pretty spectacular. I haven't used them yet and I need to conserve them as the project is quite large. I got them from Last Cavalry. http://shop.lastcavalry.com/brands/Uschi-van-der-Rosten.html Great service and reasonable price! They shipped the next day.

I guessing he is talking about the door opener arm that connects to the door. If that is true, I always reinforced mine with a good sized piece of plywood. Never felt the aluminum door panels were strong enough to stand up to stress.

Oh! You are doing a Mark I. Great. Love the Weslake engine. Dan Gurney was one of the automotive geniuses of the period!

Randy, I totally missed the posts earlier this week. Glad to see you are back at it. Love the works but one mild word of caution. The "catalog" is for a Mark I with the 289. There were changes with the 427 that go beyond the engine though what you have done to this point is spot on. I only wish this was my build! Maybe someday with your work to inspire me.

Those d### 10 year old temptresses camped out in front of the grocery stores. I can't seem to get by them without dropping $20 on Thin Mints!! Got a freezer full of them, but I just know I will run out before next year!

That's what I'm thinking!

Ok, maybe one of you Geeks out there can explain this to me, because I am just plain baffled. Every time my internet provider announces a "new, faster" internet service at an additional premium cost, if I don't upgrade to the new service, it seems as if my internet slows down! I sometimes feel that I need to upgrade to stay at the same speed.

There are a lot of ways to add shadows to the panel lines and other parts. This is also a good one.

I have to agree with most of what is said before me about "scale finishes". Yes, I remember having a broken side mirror on my 72 240Z about a year after it was new. I bought a new one and had a cheap badger airbrush at the time and I sprayed it with factory paint and was really pleased with myself in that I got the same orange peel finish that my car had. Having said that if you go to a showroom today you will not find the orange peel that the older cars had because they use an electrostatic painting method now that gives a very nice finish, so newer car models should have a very smooth and glossy finish. Having said that, it now comes down to scale. Several people have mentioned the fact that as you scale the finish down, the imperfections scale down as well and at some point become invisible to the naked eye. When I am judging at a contest I rarely get my eyes any closer that 8" to 12". If you scale that up to 1:24 scale that means in a 1:1 I would be viewing the car from 16 to 24 feet away. If you think about what imperfections you would see in the real deal at that distance, you will realize that you would probably not see any of the standard imperfections. Thus a "Perfect paint job". Now, for the other side. The "honey dipped" models. I see far too many models on the table with paint that is way too thick and it destroys the surface detail. This is not a perfect paint job and although it is very glossy, it doesn't look right. That "right look" is really what we all should strive for. Something that to the eye looks like the real deal shrunk down to a scale model. That raises several points. The first one is that surface detail such as panel lines, logos, and other trim pieces should have sharp crisp detail. Too much paint dulls all of these, especially panel lines. The edge of each side of a panel line should be crisp and sharp because at scale distance that is what they look like. Yes, close up they are generally rounded sheet metal, but that is not what you see at 16' to 24'. One of the issues with paint on models is that it tends to bead up at the edges. The only way to get truly crisp panel lines is to sand them flat with a good sanding stick. This is difficult because it is easy to sand through the paint but it is something the best modeler have the skill to do. While on the subject of panel lines, at scale distance, panel lines will be very distinctive because of the shadows. By the time you get a model together, the panel lines are so shallow that you get almost no shadow effect at all. There for to make them "look" right they should be darkened. Notice I said darkened. I have seen modeler who will use a rapidograph pen to black out the lines and they look way to dark. Personally, I prefer to pre shade the lines. This is a process that I spray all the lines with black and then sand away the overspray from the body so that only the panel line show black. This is done before you spray the color and clear if you use that. You should then spray the color as thin as you can and still cover the body evenly. The panel lines with show though as darker, especially if you are using red, yellow or white. Then clear over that with just enough paint to allow you to sand it out without cutting through. The most important part of painting models is to use the minimum amount of paint and sand everything level before you polish it out. That is my story, and I am sticking to it.

I am truly lucky to live about 5 miles from the actual museum. Any time I am feeling a bit cocky or full of myself, I stop by for a solid dose of humble. It works very well. I am trying to raise a little money in our local club to hold our meeting there one evening. It is not expensive. If you ever get to Southern California, it is worth the time to see it in person.

Johnny Carson, being from Omaha, had a Nebraska accent. Being from the other side of the state, I can pick it out, though it is very faint. The two that really get my attention is the Baltimore(pronounced Balmur) and New England. The Baltimore is quite hard to pin down because it has more to do with inflection than anything and New England is a lot to do with cadence. Love to hear both.

Depends on what part of the country you are from. Personally I like colloquialisms. It allows you to connect with others from the same area instantly. For instance, the south would not be the same without y'all and depending on how it is said, you can determine the state almost instantly. A Texas y'all is much different from a Georgia y'all. Don't kill the language with uniformity. By the way, my Vermont grandmother did the warsh. My Nebraska grandmother did the wash.

I prefer a local brew - Stone Oaked Arrogant Bastard. Lets see if the autoeditor takes offense.

Back to Gallagher on this one. If a building is a completed structure, why do we not call them builts?

Mark, glad to hear you are refurbishing it. Hopefully you will bring it by the club meeting in March. I would like to see it, but can't make tonight's meeting.

"Horrific" -- I am so sick and tired of newscasters over use of this word. They use it for everything from a hangnail to a massacre in Syria. Yes, mass or brutal killings is horrific, but an accident on the freeway that tied up traffic for an hour can hardly be classified as "causing horror or shock". Well maybe if you had to go to the bathroom and are stuck in the traffic.