Snake45

And here's a '95 ZR1 promo I found either at the local toy show or a flea market, I forget which. As you can see, it was filthy. I disassembled it for cleaning and Snake-Fu, and discovered it was painted this color, not molded in it, and it appears to be a factory paint job. I did some research and couldn't find any mention of painted '95 promos. Suspecting it might be rare, I just cleaned it up and put it back together without any additional Snake-Fu in case it's semi-valuable.

Here's a '94 promo I rescued from a flea market, cleaned up, and laid some Snake-Fu on.

Great score, Karl! Some really nice stuff in there!

Very clean build, very sharp! The paint color looks much better here than it did in the WIP thead. Well done and model on!

I'm good on decals but thanks for the offer. I bought two or three of these things when they were cheap at Walmart just for the trailers and Radir wheels. The ones on it are pretty well set into the finish--OB must have used a setting solution of some sort. But they still covered the door lines (a modeling pet peeve of mine). Yesterday I sliced through those lines and hit them with Solvaset, and they look 100% better now. Not gonna try to polish out the white spatter, just gonna clearcoat the whole hot mess and polish that out. As I said, the white spatter is almost invisible to the naked eye in 3D but shows up much larger in the pics for some mysterious reason.

Our local weatherpeople got embarrassed by such a situation about 20 years ago. Apparently they've sworn to NEVER let it happen again. Now, every time there's even a chance of snow coming, they predict Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon, sending people out scrambling for milk, bread, and snow shovels. Once in a great while the snow will be as bad as they call for (almost never worse), but usually it's not nearly as bad, Thank The Lord. One local guy likes to call a snowstorm a "major winter player" and works that into the conversation as often as possible. It also seems that they don't like to say the word "snow" in a snow forecast more than once. After first reference, it's usually referred to as "the white stuff." I like to imagine that somewhere, some cocaine addict is getting excited by the forecast until he realizes it's just snow.

As we celebrate mediocrity all the boys upstairs want to see How much you'll pay for what you used to get for free.... --The Late Great Tom Petty, "The Last DJ"

Pretty cool! Drive on!

That's what I thought, too, when I bought it. It's not as nice when closely examined. The finish is very orange-peeled/pebbled, though very finely. Looks like OB painted the read part first, then laid on the white in the Tim Boyd two-tone fade technique. The white covered the red pretty well (very little if any "bleed"), but there are tiny white spatters over almost all of the red. These aren't immediately obvious to the naked eye but are apparent on close look. The white spatters actually show up more prominently in pics than in real life for some reason--you can really see them above. In disassembling the thing, I had to scrape some small glue boogers off here and there, especially where the windscreens were glued on (as you can see above). I'll have to carefully touch these areas up with brushed red before I can start trying to smooth out the orange peel with several layers of clear lacquer.

Sand the driveshaft hump on top of the chassis flat until you can start to see light coming through the plastic. Then start sanding the inside sides of the interior tub channel, especially where it widens out at the front, again until you can just start to see light. At that point the interior tub should fit flat to the floor, or darn close to it. The chassis will tuck up into the body and the whole car will have a very nice little rake. I was going to re-drill the front axle locating holes, but now that won't be necessary at all--it's perfect as is. I DO need to make some rear inner fender walls, though, or you can see straight through the thing at the wheels in the back. BTW, here's the built F500 I've started with. You can see how high the front end sits. Last pics taken immediately before I disassembled it. By tomorrow I hope to have the body "rescued" enough to start laying clear lacquer on it by Wednesday or Thursday.

I've been thinning Folk Art craft acrylics with 91% alcohol (in very small quantities) for a while now with good results, Drying time is vastly reduced. But so far I've only used the stuff for small touchup brushwork and such, nothing big.

Discovery Channel and its associates are at or near the top of my Hate list lately. I like many of their shows, but the new Discovery + is too much. They used to have all their back episodes available online (through my cable provider). Now you have to be a subscriber to see anything more than the current season. Subscriptions start at $4.95/mo, for which you still have to watch all the commercials. If you want commercial-free, that's $20/mo (more than HBO and Cinemax). But the worst is that now, about 20% or more of time on their airing shows, they're showing those annoying inset ads for Discovery + covering the bottom 20% of the screen. I SO miss the days when the program you were watching filled the whole screen with no ads or promos running at the bottom. (This goes for all channels, both broadcast and cable.)

Got a tip for you, Tom: I just disassembled the F500 I bought and discovered that interference between the chassis and the interior tub in the driveshaft hump area keeps the body from sitting as low on the chassis as it should. I spent about 15-20 minutes filing on the top of the hump on the chassis, and the channel in the underside of the tub, and now have the tub sitting flat on the chassis, and the body sitting much lower. Give it a try--I think you'll like the results.

Here it is. Overall not bad looking, but a lotta little things to fix. Glue boogers on the windscreens is just the most obvious (luckily, I have spares), and the too-high front end. I've already disassembled it (held together with HUGE gobs of some kind of rubbery goo--Gorilla Glue?) and started. Should be fun!

Doesn't do a thing for me. There's a restored '66 Cuda in my area painted this color. Everything about the car is magnificent except the color, which nearly turns my stomach.

The kit I was looking for back in September was found a few weeks ago using Method #2. It's now Projekt JunkNova (see WIP thread) and is actually nearing completion.

I paint the area black, then sort of dry-brush over it with a suitable shade of brown until I've achieved a satisfactory effect. If going for a lighter shade of wood, I'd substitute a medium brown for the initial coat of black, then dry-brush with the lighter brown.

Very nice, very clean build! Model on!

Very interesting and kinda cool! Just yesterday I picked up a cleanly built Fireball 500 at the toy show; should make a good rescue project.

I wouldn't.

Your hood is perfectly correct for a '68 SS396. The '68 SS350 used the same hood as the '67 SS (350 or 396) All Camaro used that hood in '69. The non-factory paint gives you a perfect excuse to upgrade the wheels and tires, hint hint. Day Two! Drive on!

Sweet! I just got a similar '68 there.

Local toy show. Picked up a cleanly built Fireball 500 Barris Cuda which should respond nicely to Snake-Fu. Always kinda wanted one of these but not enough to actually build one. Now I'll have one on the shelf for minimal effort.

Local toy show day--scored TWO 1/24 diecasts for $5! Yellow Maisto Porsche Boxter, seems to be a '96, and blue BWW Z4, might be around a 2004 or 2005. I couldn't remember if I had these or not but if I do, I'm pretty sure I don't have them in these colors. Couldn't turn them down at that price. On the way home, stopped at the last Rite Aid in my area and scored a Welly ZL1 Camaro. Dunno what year it is. I might or might not already have one of these, too, but if I do, it's not in Banana Yellow like this one is. Three new diecasts, three easy Snake-Fu projects, for a grand total of $15! Can't beat that! ETA: Didn't look in all my boxes, but I did check pics on my computer. I do have a Z4 but it's silver so that's different. And I do have a Boxter, but it has an up-top (this one is topless), is a different shade of yellow (the new one is lighter), and some of the body details look different--probably a different year.

I couldn't be more proud! Looks like you did the mods on the Rally Green one, too. If this build comes out as well as that one did, it too should be spectacular. Drive on!