peteski

No explanation needed here. Being a hoarder sometimes pays off.

I figured out where mu confusion came from by looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKee_Foods McKee Foods Corporation is a privately held and family owned American snack food and granola manufacturer headquartered in Collegedale, Tennessee.[3] The corporation is the maker of the Little Debbie Snacks, Sunbelt Bakery granola and cereal, Heartland Brands, and Drake's Cakes. Years ago I remembered seeing Drakes Cakes and Hostess products together (as if made by the same company) further down in the Wikipedia entry I also found: Drake's is a baking company in Wayne, New Jersey, United States. Originally an independent company, Hostess owned Drake's from 1998 to 2012; McKee Foods acquired the Drake's line when Hostess liquidated in bankruptcy in 2012. The Drake's brand distributes snack cakes such as Ring Dings, Yodels, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, Sunny Doodles, Funny Bones, and coffee cake. So at one point Hostess and Drakes were the same company, That is why I thought Hostess and McKee were under one umbrella. Note that some items mentioned here (like Funny Bones or Ring Dings) are made by Drakes (under McKee control), not Hostess. We haven't really mentioned Drakes by name until now.

Not much. Looks like you just re-sampled the original into much higher resoluton. I took the image you cleaned up, touched it up a bit and resampled it. Yes, it is jaggy, but I could still do a decent job manually tracing it. Human brain can do a good job filling the missing info when you are tracing. This is good application for layers. You can trace on a layer over the bitmap, and then be able to instantly switch between making the bitmap visible or hidden as you are tracing. That helps to manually shape the letters so they look good to your eyes.

You can insert bitmaps into .CDR drawing, and you can edit them too. But that just opens up the bitmap in PhotoPaint. I only use that feaure when I want to resample (change dpi) a bitmap I resized in the .CDR drawing. I find layers indispensable, especially when i manually trace bitmaps. You can see that in the screen capture I posted earlier. I place the bitmaps I'll trace in a layer I call "Bitmaps" and I lock that layer. That layer is under the layer I create the artwork. Think of layers as a stack of transparencies on which you can draw, make them visible/invisible printable/non-printable and you can lock them to prevent editing. Layers also come in very handy for when I make decal artwork for Alps. I place the various spot colors I'll have to print on separate layers.

Auto-tracing foremost needs fairly high resolution bitmap. Then you usually end up with either rough rounded outlines of the traced objects, or if you change the settings, you end up with very jagged outline with thousands of line segments, I have never found a happy medium where the outline would tightly follow the traced graphic, and no have too many line segments (control points). I tried auto tracing, then cleaning up the traced vectors by removing bunch of control points, but now I find it easier to just manually create a rough outline around the item I'm tracing, then mess around with that outline. It takes me less time to manually trace than to auto trace and clean up the result. I've been thinking of your project. How large will the printed version of that sign you posted earlier be? 2-3"? You might be able to get away with just cleaning up the bitmaps and just printing them. Of course redoing it in a vector format will result in a crisper printout and one that can be easily manipulated without losing any quality.

Then why not revive one of those older threads? No? And what you mean by "interest". How many things can one say about parts being sold on eBay. Guess what? "Parted out kits are being sold on eBay". In the end most of those threads turn into b-i-t-c-h sessions about how people would rather see complete kits for sale instead of parts, or how much more expensive it would be to get all the individual parts to end up with a completer kit. But selling parts has become a niche on eBay, with some sellers having reasonable prices, with other trying to fleece the buyers.

The door handles were screaming "AMC" to me.

While I do not disagree that in everyday life people do not neatly arranged seat belts that way, but I seem to recall that I saw, multiple times, lap belts arranged in "X" pattern on seats in cars displayed in cars shows or cruise nights. So if you model a car at a car show, it is ok to model seat belts neatly arranged in the seat.

Ah, yet another one of "these" threads. Funny how the same subject (selling parted out kits on eBay) pops up regularly here.

No kidding! I realize that we are forced by the news media and social media to eat, breath, taste, hear, and see COVID-19 stuff, but let's not get this thread locked. I come to this forum to escape the COVID-19 overload. Discussing COVID-19 in a model car forum *IRKS* me.

On my workbench? none. I keep all my paints in a custom built drawer cabinet. I never counter them all, but there are few hundred different bottles and cans. That entire cabinet is just for paints and thinners.

They started as, and are mainly geared to model railroaders. But they started producing a line automotive colors too. And many model RR paints are useful for in other hobbies. http://trucolorpaint.com/

If you want to deal with bitmaps (like cleaning them up, flattening perspective, converting to black/white, etc. Corel PhotoPaint is pretty good). What you show above will take quite few hours of work to vectorize manually. Corel also includes auto-tracing program, but in my years of working with Corel I never got it to work to my satisfaction. I always end up tracing manually.

That's the spirit! Vectors are more fun! With that many years of using CAD, you're half way home using Corel Draw. You understand drafting and 2D drawing. That is sort of what Corel Draw is (of course you can also mix bitmaps and vectors in the Corel drawing). As for using photos to create 3D models (manually) you might want to look into SketchUp. It was originally developed for Google to crowd-source converting Google Earth images of buildings into 3D CAD drawings. I dabbled with SketchUp few years ago, but didn't get very far (I didn't spend much time on it - too many other projects).

As a matter of fact I do. Well, not a dispenser but a technique. I have a small container (about 1 oz.) with a flat lid. Just something convenient to hold in my hand. The lid is about 1.5" in diameter. I cover it with a piece of wide plain old masking tape. My epoxy comes in separate metal tubes. I squeeze about a small pea size amount of the resin and hardener on one side of the lid, making sure they do not touch. I mark the tape next to each puddle with R (resin) and H (hardener) using fine tip marker. Then I use this setup like an artist would use his oil paint palette: When I need to mix a tiny amount of glue I take a fresh round wooden toothpick and scoop about a grain of rice size of resin, then deposit it on an unused edge of the "palette". I twirl the toothpick flat against the surface to clean of as much of epoxy as possible from the toothpick. Then with that toothpick I scoop the same size dollop of hardener, and then place it next to the dollop of resin and start mixing them thoroughly. I now have a tiny bit of mixed epoxy, ready for use. I then use the toothpick I used for mixing, and apply the epoxy to wherever it is going to be used. If I'm fast enough, I can then take a bit of a paper towel and wipe the leftover epoxy from the toothpick to get it ready for the next batch. If not, I just take a fresh toothpick and repeat this process on another unused part of my "palette". That way I can mix 5 or 6 dollops of epoxy before I fill the "palette". Once I have no more clean spots on it, I simply peel the tape off the lid and repeat the whole process. Once you do this few times, you'll get the hang of it as far as how much of the liquids to initially dispense onto the "palette". This way I end up with a very little waste, and measuring tiny amounts of the resin and hardener is easy using a toothpick. If you are off portioning the ingredients, you can just scoop off a little to the side. I always start with resin. If I started with hardener, then used the same toothpick for resin, I might contaminate the remaining larger pool of resin with hardener. With such a small amount it probably wouldn't be harmful, but I'm not taking any chances. I suppose you could create a larger palette with a disposable surface, but I find my little one handy to handle.

If you want a more positive joint use a glue with some body to it (like 5-minute epoxy). It hardens by chemical reaction, so it will flow around the joined parts and harden.

In Corel Draw you don't define the drawing's resolution like you would in a bitmap editor (like PhotoPaint). Remember: vector graphics. I use inches (rulers in decimal, not fraction). The printer's dpi is not even being considered. No need to worry about it. If some object in Corel is 1" wide, it will print out that exact size on any printer connected to that computer. Same with an object which is 0.01" wide. That's why Corel Draw is so handy. Remember: WYSIWYG. Plus, you are working with vector-based objects, so again dpi is not relevant. I do have a handy way to get an approximate visual of what the printer will actually print. I select some object (or multiple objects, or even the entire drawing), then export it as PNG file. Then in the PNG export dialog box I select 1:1 scale and custom dpi of whatever my printer is capable of. Also remember to uncheck anti-aliasing. Next I usually don't even save the PNG file to view it, I just look at the preview box (scroll and zoom in and out) to see exactly what the printer will put on paper. PNG is a bitmap format , so each pixel in the PNG file corresponds to a dot printer would put down on paper.

No offense taken. I have one of the South Eastern Finecast MG TF kits. While it looks to be well cast, it will be quite a bit more difficult to put together than a typical plastic kit. The multi-piece body will require some "massaging".

Ray, here is an example of decal artwork I'm working on. Like Dave mentioned, I start off with a font that is close, convert the letters to curves, then reshape them while keeping working copies. And when you work with text then you can easily control every aspect like letter and word spacing, justification, etc. You can even adjust each letter's locations. And of course once you convert text to curves, you have total control of each character's shape and location. This screen capture also shows that I use scans of decals and photos of the real car when I create the artwork. First I edit the scans or photos in Corel Photo Paint to fix distortion and perspective. I use the layers feature in Corel to import those photos or scans into a layer I call Bitmap. I then lock that layer and draw my artwork over that locked layer. Kind of like tracing something using drafting film. What you see is my scratchpad file. Once the various pieces of artwork are completed, I copy them to another file which will be the printable version of the artwork. Example of what Dave mentioned is the "Plains, Ga." text. I found that font Verdana was pretty close to the truck lettering. That is the black text. Then I converted text to curves and modified each letter to be as close as the actual truck lettering as possible. The pink and light green version are intermediate copies (I kept them in case I wanted to go back to one of them). The gray color is the final version of that text (which I will copy to the printable decal artwork file).

Alps print head is 600dpi. The pseudo "2400 dpi" resolution is just marketing "feature", because Alps 5000 and 5500 can control the size of the printed dots. The only printing mode where this is utilized is full color printing in VPhoto mode. But the dots themselves are still spaced at 600dpi. And even in VPhoto mode, Alps full color print quality sucks compared to any of today ink jet printers. The bottom that the thinnest line Alps can print is 0.0017" thick, where a true 2400 dpi printer could print line as fine as 0.0004" thick. But because Alps is a thermal transfer printer, the printed dots are very sharp, where ink jet or laser dots have a fuzzy "aura" around them (due to ink or toner scatter). So a 600 dpi image which only uses solid colors will look sharper printed on Alps than on other printers. But is is still 600 dpi. I owned Alps printers for over 15 years, and have done quite a bit of printing and experimenting with them. Another thing to consider is that the Alps print head is quite fragile, and the most common failure is print head damage. And of course there is now only one place in the world (in Japan) that has the proper facilities and equipment to replace and re-calibrate them. And it is a pricey repair, and pricey shipping cost. BTW, I recommend that you stay away from alps-printer.com . It is a Chinese company that swaps parts to fix those printers, and they often sell printers with damaged head as "fully operational". I have seen several complains about them on the Alps online groups.

Yes, I agree that it is really well done model. I agree with Dan about the mesh. Benito, what was your technique for curving it?

While it is unlikely I'll buy one of these, I'm interested in it and in your build, and I'm glad that the model of this type of vehicle was produced by a model company

I"m one of those anal guys. Searching the forum is a valid way to find answers. Plus Casey posted a link to the topical thread - he did the work for you. Why repeat over, and over, and over, and over again, something that has already been covered. Why reinvent the proverbial wheel? Right?

OK, I sit corrected. Let me get some money from the nearby ATM machine.

If making functional lights for a model, blue LED would emit deep blue light. To emulate the LED lights of a real car, one would need to use white LEDs of high enough color temperature (bluish white). Something like 5000-7000K would give that bluish white glow.