DaytonaTim

Thanks David for the codes. I will have to make a trip to the ole PPG store and see if I can get some mixed up. I am planning on going to the NNL East here in a couple of weeks, so I hope to have it atleast painted before then. I have been thinking about just making a tonnue (SP??) cover for the cockpit area, it would help make it more presentable come NNL East time. It would be nice to get some actual leather like material to make it out of, I just don't know if I can find anything thin enough to make look to scale. If I cannot, I will have to model something up in the computer and print it out at a later date. Well, I did somemore wet sanding.....on the wife's new furnature again..... There was not much visual difference between the first and second sanding so I did not bother with any pics. There was a big difference in the feel though, it started smoothing out realy nice. This morning I shot it with some "high build" primer, from the auto parts store. I layed on on kind of thick because I am planning on sanding about 70% of it off. This should really start to pull the roughness out of the surface and start making it much more smooth Here are some pics of the body in primer. I have not sanded the primer any at all yet. You can see that the most work needs to be done around the edges of the car. It might be a good idea to glue or tape the hood, trunk and doors in place to help make sure I do not sand off, or round off, any edges. We will see......

Well, like I said earlier, I got the first dry 200 grit sanding job done. I did it while watching the NIT finals. This body has very few hard lines to it so it was pretty easy to sand while watching TV at the same time. Though....I did get some mean looks fromt the wife......I was sitting on our new couch while sanding.........!!!!! here are some pics of the the finished job......some of the parts kind of look like they are made out of wood......kind of a neat effect This material sands very easily and it takes no time at all to knock the "rough stuff off".

Is there any other color to paint a british racing car???... Yes, I think that would be the best color for it. I cannot say I am a big AM fan either. I guess I came to this car because of the Carrol Shelby connection. I am a big time shelby fan!!

The technology is actally already there......we just need to wait for the price to come down. The next resolution level printers cost about 4 to 5 times more than the one we are currently using. When the price moves down, as it always does in technology, we at TDR will have an even larger parts library ready to go. We already have over 100 kits available for the larger scale guys and we are working on even more. Thanks for the good words and hang in there, the time will come. David, thanks for the info. I will drop them an email when the time comes. Did you model the AM shown in your post? If so.....nice....very nice!! Well I sat down and watched the NIT championship game lastnight and at the same time did the 1st (200 grit) sanding on all the body panels. Things are looking good with only about 1.5 hours of work. I will post up some pics later today

Hey Bill, I don't know if you remember me, we met a couple of years ago at the Toledo model show. I was the one that brought the 1/12th scale Quad-Al. I remember a Jag D type you did a few years back.....it was a work of art. Oh, I just noticed you had a pic posted of the D type, in your response......it is even better than I remembered. I know exactly what you are saying, I love the race cars of the 50's too. The ones that were designed to be aerodynamic by artist....not engineers. Cars really seemed to lose a lot of styling come the mid 60's Well I did some quick scribing on the panel lines, what few there are. Since all of the doors, hood, and trunk are separate there are no lines to do around these. This should keep them visible during the finishing work. I only made the body .040" thick so I have to be carefull and not go too deep. I don't want to separate the parts.

Hello I usually post in the "Big Boys" forum but I am going to try my hand at one of the smaller scale models this time. Hopefully I can get my 10 thumbs to work on this small stuff. I made the computer model for this car about 3 years ago. My intentions were to print it out in 1/18th scale so I could add it to my diecast collection. Three years ago nobody made a 1/18th scale version of this car. But......now Shelby Collectables makes it.....so I just bought a diecast version and put it up in the collecton. So I printed out this 1/24th scale version as a test print and I am going to try and finish it out as a curbside kit. The surface finish from the rapid prototype machine is about equal to a sheet of 180 to 200 grit sand paper, so I have some finishing out to do on the body. At first I will do a quick sanding of the body using some 180 grit paper, dry. This is just to knock off the "big stuff". Then I will do another pass with 400 paper, wet, to get the model nice and smooth. I will then hit it with one or two coats of high build primer and then do my final wet sanding with about 600 grit paper. The first thing I will do is make the panel lines a little deeper though. I don't want to loose them when I start to sand the body. Well, enough talk, here are some pictures of what I am starting with.

Hey Moparfan, I like your avitar. I had a friend of mine that had a superbird back in the early 80's. I will never forget what he said one day, he commented that "It is amazing how many people stop street racing at 130 MPH......" That was one fast car!! Hey, has anybody ever used those aluminium brazing rods. The reason I ask is that I was thinking of building the frame for the allison trike out of alluminium rod and polishing it out. Does anybody have any experiance with these rods??? If I could get a polished alluminium frame for this thing it would really look sweet.

Hey Guys, I bought one of those Dremel drill presses. The ones you mount your normal dremel tool to. I have started using it to drill out all the holes for the bolts in all my rapid prototype parts. I hold the model part in two hands and move it toward the drill bit, instead of using the drill press in its normal fashion. Since I have started using this technique I have not busted out the side of any hole I have drilled and believe me I have drilled out some very delicate holes.

I have never seen an Allison in a real trike, but I did see a picture of an allison in a motorcycle once!!!!! It was an old black and white pic and it looked like it might have been right after the war. No, this trike thing will be all my design. I am trying to approach it as if someone hit the lottery and bought out an army surplus store or something like that. We will see, ideas change all the time. SJordan, there is nothing fancy about the finish. Most of it is Walmart chrome paint and clear coats. I found that the clearcoat is what really makes the difference. To get that "cast metal" finish I just shot the parts with chrome paint then hit it with a flat clearcoat. If I wanted the part to be shiny then I used the gloss clear coat. I did use ModelMasters metalizer paints for the darker shades of metal though but I used the same WallyWorld clear coats on them to get the cast finish. Oh, I did use some BMF on the distributor covers. Well sort of, I used some furnace aluminium tape. Kind of the poor mans BMF for 1/8th scale stuff. It worked great, for $10 you can buy a life times supply at Walmart. Tim

LOL....an 1/8 scale Quad Al would need its own zipcode!!!! But it sure would be nice. Well, we got about 6 inches of snow today and it is still putting it down......looks like I may get some more modeling in this weekend!!! I may get the drive train finished, if I am lucky. I will just have to try and duck all the Honey-do-jobs!!

It has been a while since I have posted, so I figure I had better update the pictures. I have the Alison finished now. All I can say is WOW. It is a model by it's self. I never counted all the bolts in this baby but I know it has to be pushing 400 bolts though. This thing is not your average american V8, there are a lot of parts in this engine and they all fold back and interweave around each other. I have posted up some assembly instruction pictures in the TDRcatalog.com Allison listing if anybody is interested in seeing how this thing goes together. Well enough talk, here are some pictures.

That is cool that the R/M valve covers fit. That makes getting the bling easier!! If you have one of the original R/M Jag blocks laying around in that junk box too, dig it out and show the difference in the detail level. The first time I saw the R/M Jag block I was surprized to see just how much they left out. It really is a brick!! Since this build will have an open engine compartment you will readily see the sides of the block, so the block details should really up the reality level some. Looking good!

Hey....looking good JB!! Great "greasy" finishing job on the stands!! They look like the real thing setting under your rod. Just to let everybody know, I now have the assembly instructions posted in the TDRcatalog.com website. Here is a link http://www.tdrcatalog.com/servlet/the-23/Engine-and-Jack-Stands/Detail Just click on the link in the text writeup to see the instructions for the jackstands. I tested these stands a while back. If my memory is right I think I put 5 pounds on 1 jackstand. It did not break but that was all the farther I pushed it

The only thing we can offer in the 1/24 and 1/25 scale range are car bodies. The affordable 3d printing technology that we use leaves a rough sand cast finish on everything, so if we attemped to print out....say a carb in 1/24th scale the tiny details would be washed out by the rough finish. Some day the cost of the high end 3D printers will come down and we will be able to print just about anything out. Right now those high end printers can easily cost more than $100,000. So, until that day, we have to stick to larger parts. 1/8 and 1/12th work pretty good but any smaller than that and we can only do the bodies. Also, all our computer models are manually created. We do not do any scanning. It would be pretty tough to pick up some of the deep details we model in, with a scanner.

All of our rapid prototype parts have to fit inside a build envelope of 8"x10"x8" high. The build size is not usually a problem until we start to do bodies larger than 1/12th scale. Then we really have to slice-and-dice them to get them printed.

The 1/16th scale Miss "E" is $96.00 plus $6.50 S&H You can see all the kits offered at TDRcatalog.com

There are two main drawbacks that keep us from offering RP bodies in 8th scale. The first is the cost. If you want a good estimate of what it would cost to produce a body in 8th scale just take the 1/16th scale price and multiply it by a factor of 8 and you will be in the starting neighborhood. Then you have to add onto that the cost of the additional labor to slice the body up into about 6 to 8 parts. This is necessary to get the body parts small enough to fit inside the printer. Then when the kit arrives at your house you would have to glue the parts all together keep everything aligned and square and then you would have to start finishing out the body. But we are looking into other avenues to bring 1/8th scale bodies to everybody........it just takes time.

Just wanted to let every body know that this body is now available in both 1/25th and 1/24th scale at our website TDRcatalog.com

Thanks Sam. I am trying something a little different.....for me that is. I am shooting the model with ModelMasters aluminium paint and then hitting it with flat clear. I think it really make the surface have that cast aluminium look. Well, I finally got a few hours in to work on the Allison Trike this weekend. That is what 9 inches of snow will do for you. I got some sparkplugs from Dan, at SMC, to put in the Allison. I decided to use the ones for the 1950's cars since they were the longest ones. Boy, I was really impressed with the fine detail that was captured in them. The really worked out well. Don't forget, you need 24 plugs for the Allison since it is 2 plugs per cylinder. I am going the cheap route on this one in using the heads of stickpins to simulate the smaller bolts and using tacks that I grid the flats on to simulate the larger bolts. My eyes can hardly see the differance.....that may change if I ever get around to getting that pair of glasses that I need. The white styrene rods you see on the heads are my attempt to scratch build the tubing that carries the ignition wire for the inside sparkplugs. I will have to build another set for the wires for the outside cylinders too. The nut you see in one or two of the pics is a test to see if it would be the right size for the attachment nut for the rod.....I think it is a little too big. I may have to visit the hardware store again. I am going to try and assemble each head completely before attaching it to the block. I think it will be easier to work on it this way because once the cylinders and heads are attached to the block the whole assembly become quite top heavy and unstable. The one thing I am going to have to look at, before putting the cylinder/head assembly on the block, is how all this is going to work with the drive shaft for the cams. I will be sure and leave the valve covers unattached so if I have to grind away part of distributor mount I can. This would allow me to slip the cam driveshaft down through the top of the head and into the receiver on the blower housing assembly. This is all necessary because the angle of the cam driveshaft is different than the assembly angle of the head/cylinder assembly, which is 30 degrees. So if anybody is working on their Allison right now just be aware of this and if you need a better explanation of it just PM me. Also, I have started working on the 11 inch rearend that I will be using for the trike. One word of warning on the 11 inch rear. The disk brake setup is just too big to fit inside the TDR 16 inch rims. I will soon have to work up some 18 inch rims and tires to work with this rear. Well.....enough with the talk here are some pics of where I am right now.

Thanks IRA. We are just a bunch of modelers making models of things that excite us and that we think others will like too. Well, I finally found a little time today to work on the Allison trike. I finished out the block for the Allison but thought I would try something a little different. I wanted to see if I could get that "machined surface" look on part of the block where the cylinder jugs mate up to the block. So I pulled out the ole aluminium furnace tape, that a poor mans bare metal foil I guess, and applied it to the final surface. You wont see a lot of this surface when the cylinders are on, but the little that you do see should provide a good contrast of surface texture and I hope it spices it up a little. Here a few pics

Here are some pictures of an actual tire-wheels setup that I worked up. It is hard to spot, but there is actually a slight bulge and flatspot on the tire to simulate an actual tire with weight on it. Also, I kept the seam where the two rim cylinders meet, toward the the backside of the assembly. I figured that is will be less likely to be seen there.

Hey Harry. Usually our kits take 2 runs to complete all the parts. So we usually print out 25 or 30 parts at a time. Also, if you PM me your address, I can send you some free samples of this material. Then you can get a feel for how it works. Tim

Well, I decided to end the Allison build up thread and start a new thread for this trike buildup. I figured this would be the best thing to do because I will be working on all the mechanical parts at the same time. My plan here is to build a trike that is constructed completely of parts from TDR Innovations. The engine, tranny, 11 inch rear, and tires/wheels are all available now at "TDRcatalog.com". If any new parts are created that might be of use to others I will upload them to the catalog too. The basic theme for this build is to build a trike that uses as many P51 Mustang parts as possible. The Allison is a given but I will also try and use the P51 landing gear struts as the front forks and I want to find a way to work in a small belley tank or two. Maybe in the form of fenders. I also plan on using some cockpit items too. The stick to steer with and the seat are very likely items. I also want to use some of the front fuselage skin too, as a front fairing and certainly the front propeller spinner. If I can find a way to work the nose of the plane into the fairing I have got to come up with some nose art too. Maybe something like a biker chick striking a clasic noseart pose with the words "Surplus Sally" underneath. All the parts finished out well. I kept the heads and cylinder sleeves a little on the rough side to increase the realism some, and keep with the "Rat Rod" look too. I am really impressed with the details that came out in the heads, they really have a lot of features in them. I finished out the oilpan and valvecovers to a high degree. I wanted these three items to shine a lot. Anyway, I have some parts finished out and I thought I would include them here because the pictures say it better than I can with words.

Well the mailman finally brought the Allison today. This baby is big.....really big......but I was able to keep the weight down, read that as cost down, by really taking some extra time to hollow out all the parts that I could. I weighed all the parts and it only tips the scale at 19 oz!! Here are some pictures of the raw kit as delivered from the rapid prototype service. Oh, one note. The first picture shows the intake manifold and 2 Carter AFB carburators from the TDR 426 Hemi comparted to just the carburetor of the Allison. The Allison carb is bigger than the intake and carbs of the Hemi!!!! But that is the size of carb you need when you are feeding a blown 1710 cubic inch motor!! I told you this thing was big!!

If other sources do not pan out for you Tim, I may be able to help in the near future. I have just finished the modeling of the Allison V-12 engine for TDR Innovations and plan on starting my next major design project soon. This next project will be a 427 side oiler with toploader 4 speed tranny. Though we usually design for the 8th scale world, I should be able to take it down to 1/12th scale with little problem. With the holidays coming it is hard for me to give a guestimate on the date of production but I would say it will probably be ready for distribution around Feb of 2010. We really need some good large scale Ford motors. Tim