peteski

Caswell Plating has a wide range of small electroplating kits for hobbyists (and lots of supplies for larger jobs too).

Maybe then like SfanGoch suspects, those could be cheap Chinese knockoffs (or a similar product line). (I added the "Chinese" part).

Thanks!

That smells kind of fishy if you ask me.

ABS is a type of styrene plastic. Organic solvent based paints stick to it very well with no scuffing (again as long as the surface is clean). Some automotive models are also molded in ABS, as are model trains (and I had no problem painting either).

That is why there is a "documented replica" class in the model contest my club puts on. You provide photographic documentation of the prototype car you modeled and it is judged (among other things) on how close to the prototype car your model is. The ill-fitting hood would actually earn you points!

Now this thread is getting really BLAHSKI_BLAHSKI_BLAHSKI silly! EDIT: and I've edited nuthin'

YUCK! I always wondered what were they thinking when they approved this vehicle for production. The more contemporary frog-eyed Nissan Juke seems to be in the same category as Aztek.

Yes, that kit has amazing amount of detail. I also have one of the large tour buses Revell made few years back. Again, lots of well-made parts. One of the reasons I haven't even started either one is that I have no place to display them.

Harry, the MRI machine is so loud because it is pounding you with a very strong magnetic field. You are basically sitting right in a center of a very powerful electromagnet. Probably much more powerful than the ones which pick up entire cars in junk yards. When they turn on the current, it the windings make that loud noise. They had you remove all metal objects before going into the tube, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging (very interesting read).

Don, this forum is family-friendly and it has an auto-censoring feature which changes any words in the post which are on its "naughty" words list into BLAH_BLAH. So, nobody edited your post except for the forum software itself.

Even a sewer manhole cover is made in India?! This country is in a deep (sewer) hole!

Are you calling it a midget?! It is a cute "baby Corvair".

Those look just like Archer rivet decals. Micro-mark often resells products from other companies (often charging a markup). Archer has a wide selection of 3-D decals besides rivets. They sell things like weld lines and raised numbers too.

Why do we need to sand plastic? I good wash should work really well to get it prepped for paint. Of course if there are flaws or flash, that needs to be sanded off and smoothed, but no need to sand the entire body. I have never sanded the entire plastic body before painting (but I do give them a really good wash in dishwasher detergent without any hand moisturizers in it). Organic solvent based paints (even the mild plastic-compatible ones) have plenty of "tooth" to bond really well to bare un-sanded plastic. But if the plastic gun is made of some slippery solvent-resistant plastic, then I guess the only good option I see is to sandblast it. I have a badger Air-Eraser (wuth aluminum-oxide abrasive powder) for jobs like that. Then there is a adhesion-promoter which comes in a spray can. It is designed to be sprayed on plastic car parts (like a flexible bumper cover) before painting it with the final color.

That is so wicked cool! If that is 0 scale, the Shapeways model probably cost a pretty penny! I rode on that train years ago when they were still running all-steam. What an experience! On the way down the conductor asked for volunteers to operate the car's handbrake, so I stepped forward. I had a blast! The car is not coupled to the locomotive (I was told for safety reasons). Gravity simply keeps it tightly pushed against the locomotive. The game the conductor has me play was to operate the handbrake in such a way to keep the car's buffer separated from the loco's buffer by few inches. It was tough at first, but then I got a hang of it. Yes those locos have a slanted boiler since they always operate on a steep incline. Here is a photo of a real one: For additional info click here.

Well then, that explains the artsy-type photo with a shallow depth of field. Still, it just doesn't look right to me.

Government is ok - it is the stupid clueless government that irks us, right? That makes no sense to me. If a 2004 truck was sold with out cat. converter and they require one now, shouldn't it be grandfathered? Or do they expect owners of ever such truck to have a cat. converter retrofitted at their own expense? That is weird.

I remember these. It is just so cute!

Looks pretty good. Is it 1:24 or 1:25 scale? Who made the kit?

Something about this photo looks Photoshopped to me. For one, there is no shadow on the street. Then I don't know how far this guy can bounce over the cobblestones without the pogo-stick getting wedged in a gap between them.

I also use those Scotchbrite pads instead of steel wool (I don't own a gun). As far as the bluing goes, I suspect that it is a fairly hard coating (harder than the metal used in steel wool). That is why steel wool will clean the rust off but not touch bluing. But Scotchbrite pads are some sort of non-woven plastic fiber coated with fine abrasive material. I suspect that the abrasive material (aluminum oxide maybe?) is harder than the bluing, so it abrades it.

Well Skip, you and Jimmy are true artists - most of the modelers are just ham-fisted butchers who love to take shortcuts. After years of working with the leaf stuff you guys have the technique mastered. For me, as the ham-fisted modeler, the BMF stuff works just fine. But there's nothing wrong with someone doing their model chrome using silver leaf technique. I build models to have fun. I don't enjoy polishing the paint jobs, so I don't. Looking at Jimmy's tutorial I can see that I wouldn't enjoy spending the time on doing silver-leaf, so I won't. Yes, I can tell even without trying it myself - Jimmy's excellent photo-tutorial already told me what I needed to know for making my decision. But if that is something you or Jimmy enjoy doing - all the power to you. I don't think that any posts on this thread were putting the silver-leaf-techinque down. At least know that I wasn't - I was simply saying that is is not for me.

As new generations come of age, things change. We're just getting old. I remember saying to myself that the battle was lost when in the '90s I started seeing pedestrian 4-door Japanese or German sedans souped-up to look and sound like race cars! Lowered suspension, beer-can exhaust, etc. High-performance 4-door sedan? Gimme a break! At least some car companies recently brought back some real muscle cars and made them look like the real muscle cars from the '60s. But they probably doing it just to cater to the older generation (with money).

Someone mentioned this earlier in the thread and I agree with him. I don't mind lots of photos and long drawn out threads on a build but what makes me pass on a thread is all the oohs and aahs, posted after every update by the builder. Good example is the Army Vega Funny Car thread. It documents a truly mind-blowing build. The details are stunning and the photographic contents is amazing. I could actually learn about how the real Funny Cars are built (since I'm not familiar with those), if I could read through the 200+ pages of posts. I try, but after about 10 pages I just get discouraged and go elsewhere. Why? Because for every build update with photos there are about a dozen posts of oohs and aahs about the update and about the model. While I agree that the build is incredible, the ratio of the actual updates to praising posts is way too low. If most of the praises were deleted, that thread would actually be readable. I'm not saying here that the modeler is not very skilled or that the model is nothing but incredible - just the signal-to-noise ration in that thread is just too high for me to read it. I suspect I wouldn't have as big of a problem with it if I followed it from the beginning, but when I joined this forum, that thread was already well underway. I also don't see any good solutions to this, unless maybe the forum could introduce a "like" rating for a post. That way instead of the posts praising the update, members could simply "like" that post. The total "like" count could be shown in the post's header.