peteski

Unfortunately I suspect AI is already in your life without you even realizing it. It will be very interesting how things turn out in the next 10 years or so, or even sooner.

For over 30 years I have been using a bare-bones basic food dehydrator. On the bottom it has a 40W heating element and it has adjustable ventilation slots on the bottom and top. It doesn't even have power switch - you plug it in to turn it on. It has served me quite well. I have a cooking thermometer for monitoring its temperature and i have the vents adjusted for around 110-120 deg. F. No need for fancy adjustments. It came with multiple stacking hoops with food drying surfaces which I had to remove to create a single large space inside for drying car bodies. You say that it doesn't get very warm. Have you taken a temperature reading inside? 110 deg. F is not *ALL* that warm, and it is perfect for drying paint on plastic parts. As for it being very small, you must have seen how big (or small) its box was.

Been on eBay since 1999 and sold (in the past) and buy there. It is a huge company and it is safe to use (just like amazon is, since eBay is slowly turning into amazon-like marketplace rather than an auction site). But with tens of millions of transactions there bound to be a small fraction of problematic ones. With few thousands of purchases I made there I might have had a problem or two (don't remember the specifics) but overall I think Bay is as safe as any other online company. I also only use PayPal. I'm also not a fan of some of their more recent "features", but they are the largest marketplace of that kind after all, with the largest audience in the world. BTW, there is a sticky eBay thread for this type of discussion in the General section

Yes, it is important to use hard cutting surface, and glass or ceramic tile is the old standby. However those are so hard that they quickly dull the cutting blade. I used to use them at first, but then I started using a piece of 1/16" thick or similar sheet aluminum as the cutting surface. It is hard enough to prevent the photoetched item being cut from distorting, yet it is soft enough not to appreciably dull the cutting blade. Works really well.

Well if someone scans the small-scale images (bitmap or raster format) then convert them (trace them) into vector graphic format, then they can be resized without any quality degradation. I design most of my decal artwork in vector format. Vectorizing the bitmap graphics is a time consuming process. I suspect that in a near future AI-based auto-tracing processes will make this task easier and quicker. I still do mine manually.

I'm almost certain that the original run had that tree plated. Even looking at that tree parts, it holds parts which would customarily be plated. Yes, there weren't many plated (or polished aluminum, or stainless steel parts on 1:1 Fiero, and the wheels were aluminum mags, but having those parts plated makes painting them easier. The wheel faces were very shiny bare turned aluminum with a clear coat, while all the recessed areas were black. On a plated model wheel you just spray the entire wheel black (like Testors flat black), and right after the paint is dry you wipe the rim's surface with a paper towel or a piece of rag moistened with paint thinner. That will remove the paint from the smooth plated surface, leaving rest of the wheel black (just like the 1:1 rims). Nice and easy. If you find the plating too shiny, you can spray it with a flat clear. If they are ribbed, the same can be done for rocker arm covers. If those items are unpainted plastic, they have to be dealt with other, not as easy ways.

The tree with wheels is not plated? The are really downgrading their kits. For a while Revell AG had their decals printed by Cartograph (Italian company making top-quality decals). Looks like that's not the case either,.

Funny! What was old is new again. Lights which were tied to steering were popular in higher end cars early in the 20th Century, and also in the '60s Citroen DS21 also had that feature. There were probably others too. But back then they used mechanical linkages tying them to the steering linkages where I suspect yours are driven by servo motors controlled by one of dozen of on-board computers. Sounds like they are performing a selftest/calibration when you start the car.

Assuming custom-made decals? Not sure about "best", but this might be helpful:

As my last post indicated I'm not a fan of all that technology in cars, but more and more even low-end new cars include all sorts of high-tech stuff in them. Pretty soon there will be no escape. Sure, you can get a vintage used car, but maintaining them will get more and more difficult.

In marked spots only? I see that you're already violating the rules!

But just look at all the fancy bells and whistles in new cars (they are even Internet-connected). All those creature comfort features and fancy electronics we just can't live without while driving. And it is all very expensive! It's mind boggling.

How about mask and paint using satin black paint. If ordering, your best bet for a fresh sheet (black likely doesn't sell well in hobby stores) is to order it directly from BMF.

If the polish is silicone-based, even traces of it left on the surface (after sanding) will likely cause fisheyes in the next coat of paint. But solvents mentioned earlier should be able to remove any traces. If it was not silicone-based then no worries. I believe that Novus is silicone-free.

As I see it, regardless of how it is stored, stuff like that has a finite shelf life. I had a small full (never used) bottle from Scale Finishes fully hardened in that bottle. I waited too long my modeling project.

Probably because that post seems ambiguous (at least to me). The subject line also doesn't seem to indicate clearly that it is a "wanted" post.

While I love the original chrome BEM, I wouldn't recommend the black version. Not sure about the adhesive (there was a bad batch of all BMFs made during the COVID pandemic - yours might be from that period), but if its application is to depict rubber window gaskets, it is way too shiny for that, and the black coating could rub off during burnishing.

Sorry DAVID - that was a honest slip of a finger on the keyboard. I again thank you for the information, and I'm very sorry for repeating myself. I'll go stand in the corner for the rest of the day.

it is.

Thanks Davis, that was a rhetorical question as I design and print my own decals using Alps printer.

There is no denying that LED lighting (especially efficient white LEDs) have (mostly in a positive way) totally changed the world's lighting (they are now everywhere), they are not infallible. I see many examples of failing LED-based lights. Usually though it is not the LEDs themselves but their electronic power supplies. Most common failure mode is rapid flashing, but I have seen many traffic light fixtures where entire stings of individual LEDs in the lens are dark, and similar problem with car taillights.

Um, isn't that metadata (EXIF or similar) also present in photos uploaded to this site, so what's the difference? Anybody can extract it here or on Photobucket. If you are worried,it is up to you to disable storing that information on your end, when taking the photos.

It is true that the days of posting "modem safe" sized images are long gone, but it is not about the transfer rate, but about the hosting disk space. With the default size of photos from modern cameras getting out of control large, and hundreds of participating in *FREE* forums like this one, uploading all those large images, something will eventually have to give. Either become for-fee forums, or run out of image storage space. Why do you insist in maximum resolution when the image will just be viewed on a computer monitor? How much detail do you want to show, just because you can? Forum software displays photos in posts in a size to fit the browser window. How many people viewing your photo will actually expand it to view it in its full 24 Megapixel glory, especially since many view the forum on tiny smart phone screens? What a waste.

Bitmap (a photo/picture) stored in a pdf format is a bit unusual as it's not a native format for bitmap. I'm curious how you ended up with that file. A quick and dirty way to get that picture stored in a forum acceptable format would be to open the pdf on your computer then take a screen capture and save it in a JPG or PNG format.

That certainly is a valid solution to the space utilization issue, but since the images are remote they might not be available in the future. Whenever possible I prefer hosting small images along with messages on the same forum site.