Spex84

Wicked Looking forward to seeing more! I love the wheel/tire package.

Fantastic stuff! I'm impressed by the windshield frame, it really sets off the curves of the car. Watching this project progress has been very inspirational.

Looks sinister! Any thoughts on color?

Thanks for the recommendations Chris! I have a list of stuff to do, and not enough time to do it I can add those things to the list. Grilles are tricky--the 3D printing service I use doesn't produce prints fine enough to truly capture fine grille bars. Photo-etch is probably still the best option for those. That's why the '50 Meteor bar works well; it's a very chunky piece. I don't own one of the Galaxie Ltd Chevies unfortunately. I'd read that the front corners of the body were maybe too angular. What feature of the kit grille is incorrect?

I recently received some parts and have been spraying some primer on them...excited to start incorporating them into various projects! First up, a '50 Meteor grille bar and some tractor seats...

Pile-on greed and Ebay Global Shipping have pretty much killed Ebay shopping for me. I much prefer to buy kits from other modelers or outlets that offer reasonable shipping and sane kit prices. A lot of Ebay stuff is moonshot-priced..."Well, somewhere out there, someone is probably willing to pay $400 for these dusty 90s Wal Mart kits; I can wait". I recently scored some glue bombs, parts, and unbuilt kits for $20. And I sadly missed out on a garage sale of $5 MPC muscle car built-ups in '70s boxes...which apparently sell for $80-180 on Ebay depending on condition. They're out there...it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Well, don't mind if I barge in! Shapeways is a 3D printing service/ E-store that allows content-creators to host their designs in their own individual storefronts on Shapeways' site. Customers can then order parts from those storefronts. Shapeways prints and ships the parts, taking a cut of the proceeds. They do take credit cards! This way, Shapeways can cultivate a wide range of products without having to design everything themselves, and creators can make a little cash without having to print, package, and ship the parts. Win-win. Also, Shapways offers discounts to creators in order to motivate them to buy their own stuff--like I just did, haha. Looks like Impalow is "Impalow's Scale Auto Parts" on Shapeways: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/impalow-s-scale-auto-parts

Where DON'T I find inspiration?? Seriously, absolutely everything is so inspiring. Movies, car magazines, spending time outdoors, manual labor (gets the brain wandering!), books, car forums, random research for unrelated stuff...firearms, vintage machinery, landscapes, fashion photography, video games and concept art, science fiction novels, National Geographic, deep sea creatures, trees and flowers, you name it! I bookmark car magazines with little paper slips with notes written on them. This only works if I review the collection from time to time, and sadly I've mostly ignored them in favor of the internet. I assemble reference and inspiration images and notes into "moodboards" that convey the details and general feeling of the idea. Some of these become models or completed artwork; often they just sit until I'm ready to look at them again. This helps to distill a lot of vaguely related imagery into something with a definite direction. I keep a list of "parts notes" that records all the little things I notice about kit parts that fit other kits, might work in a new configuration, etc. Caffeine. Lots of it. Just this morning I spent some time looking photos of: The Brubaker Box kit car, Maserati Boomerang interior and wheels, 70s concept cars, Cyberpunk neon-drenched city scenes, utilitarian Russian sub-machine guns, punk fashion, electric cars with a "skateboard" style frame, prosthetic limbs, and race car diffusers. I'm hoping to put it all together into a finished artwork. We'll see. I often lose interest when the caffeine wears off. Sometimes the toughest thing is not finding inspiration, but managing it-- for me, at least, the firehose of ideas generally results in a big puddle.

Saw this the other day. Way cool. I admire this guy's opinion that owners of objects should be allowed to repair them. The anti-establishment core of my being cheers when I see those parts getting turned back into a functional car in defiance of planned obsolescence. I love the shot in the basement, headlamp glowing amid shadowy outlines of racks upon racks of parts "Am I obsessed?" When I weigh personal freedom against "Our Intellectual Property is being infringed upon" or "the vehicle may experience a mechanical failure and cause injury or death"....I'm gonna pick freedom, thanks. This is some seriously cyberpunk stuff. Imagine telling hot-rodders of the 1950s that in the future, the most radical, dangerous (from a corporate perspective) mechanics will be restoring electric cars to factory stock.

Lindberg '53 Ford convertible pace car might count...I haven't built the single example in my stash, but it appears to be a darn nice kit. Whitewall tire inserts, good detail, body shapes seem to be accurate, separate chrome side trim that fits into recesses in the body a la Revell's '55 Chevy convertible--seems to have a lot more going for it than would appear at first glance. At one point, around 10 years ago, I visited a hobby shop that was clearing them out for 3 bucks a pop. They had waist-high stacks of 'em! I wish I'd bought a ton as trading material. Will its value "increase significantly over time"? I don't know--it's not an especially desirable subject, but with Revell's recent troubles I bet it already has. Lindberg '34 pickup might count too. Un-interesting box art and general ubiquity seems to have kept prices reasonable...but it's the classic AMT kit inside, a lot of fun to build and full of possibilities even if it's not up to modern kit standards.

That's an impressive paint job!! Great engine detailing, too. So if everything is paint, no decals, how did you create the water-drop effects on the hood/roof panels? That's pretty neat.

Thanks for the photos Craig. Can't wait to see those parts appearing on your projects! Some more parts have been added recently: (The intake with carbs was by request; it makes alignment easier by having the carbs and scoops pre-attached.)

So would you say these models have your......Seal of Approval? I'll show myself out.

It's clear to me that these kits were probably obtained through estate sales etc, and the seller is just clearing them out one by one, placing them on the diorama base for sales purposes. I wouldn't pay more than 50 cents for 'em. While I agree that these absolutely merit glue-bomb status (yikes!!), if you look at them from the perspective of say, a 9-year-old, they're really cool. In particular, I like the aqua/yellow and green 4x4 truck conversions. The green one in particular has fun proportions. With higher degree of execution, it would be a neat piece. The thing that sorta weirds me is the extremely shaky paintjobs--as a kid, I think I had better hand-eye coordination than I do now. What I lacked was construction skills. I kind of wonder if these were a father-son collaboration. Dad arranged the parts according to son's wishes, and the kid (too young to be able to paint well) got the honor of decorating them. If so, that's nothing to sneer at! Pure speculation though.

Great work! I like all of the mods so far; thanks for showing the work involved. I recently built a '29 using the AMT body (I prefer it to the new Revell body) but yeah, it was a lot of work to fit the floor and interior. Win some, lose some! I like what you did with the shock mounts/headlight posts. The kit pieces are definitely a little clunky. Now that you have a nicely cleaned-up AMT '29 you'll be able to build another equally as cool as this one! It's always encouraging to see that it only takes a few careful modifications by an enterprising modeler for the '29 kit to fully express its potential.

This is really neat stuff, and of course the design of the car is incredibly cool. I think Daniel Simon was involved--you might know some of his other work from movies like "Tron:Legacy", "Oblivion" and "Captain America". His work has a distinctive hi-tech futurist aesthetic that is a good match for an autonomous race car. If they can make the racing riveting to watch, then I'll bite. NASCAR does nothing for me; I'd rather watch a 100 year-old car with skinny tires drifting corners with a mad driver, goggles splattered with oil, fighting to keep the car from disaster. That's riveting. 200mph without a hiccup or an error is...yawn. I loved the idea of BattleBots too, was obsessed circa 1998, but never had any interest in the TV hype (lame and goofy) or the builders as celebrities. To me, it was always about the machines and what they could do.

Tom, check out the little toe-step notch under the rear quarter panel trim (above the wheel arch). I love this thing! Creative, unique, and well executed. The taillight treatment and color breakup is really cool. Even without the boat-themed details, it would be a very attractive custom.

That's a beautiful wheel! I'm surprised Shapeways allows it to be printed with such thin spokes. I'm guessing the wheel in the lead photo has received quite a bit of cleanup, right?

"The controls aren't any different than having physical knobs and switches." Actually...from an interface design perspective, touchscreen controls are a completely different animal than physical knobs and buttons. Screens are visual, while knobs and buttons are tactile. Poorly designed tactile controls (ie the fields of identical buttons seen in many cars) aren't much better than a touchscreen, because it's impossible to differentiate between them. But well-designed tactile controls can be used "blind", while the driver's attention remains on the road. The absolute worst vehicle interface design would be one that draws the user's attention from the road, without the user being aware of it. This is possible with tactile controls as well as touchscreens (ever tried to manually locate a radio station with a dial/knob and realize you're just about in the ditch?) but screens tend to have a mesmerizing effect that buttons and knobs do not. BMW's iDrive knob was pretty widely panned at the time for being the worst of both worlds--drivers got frustrated with it, and that frustration took their attention off the road. In short--I hate the way screens look, but I'll grant that a well-designed interface could potentially make use of them. The specific problem I see with the centralized screen is that it guarantees the driver will have to look away from the road to get information, and there is a risk that the driver's attention will "stick" there longer than is safe. What I would like to see is a move away from tech-evangelism towards interfaces that integrate the best of both tactile "retro" controls and modern touch-screen technology, with the intent of making the driver as effective and safe as humanly possible. I know many car companies are already sinking a lot of time into this kind of human-factors driven design work, incorporating research on human cognition, reaction times, sightlines etc etc....and I can't help but wonder if Tesla just disregarded all that stuff in favor of a design that's edgy. *edit* Dan's mention of steering-wheel controls combined with voice controls is a good one--those are both systems that a driver can use without having to look away from the road.

"Just winging it" There's yer problem I've only chopped one of these, and I don't know if it worked yet because it's not finished, but here's what I did, for what it's worth: -removed vent window post. -split the A pillars at the door cut line, cut the windshield header under the drip rail to remove windshield header and part of the A pillars as one piece. -back window cut out entirely. -determined how much vertical chop I wanted and cut strips of tape that width; applied the tape strips to the roof as cutting guides. -chopped the windshield less than the rest of the roof; took the remainder off the top of the header above the windshield (maybe a bit too much, haha). This reduces the "forehead" effect these trucks often get when chopped. -Now the vertical distances were sorted, but the top of the roof was too narrow to fit the bottom/body and had to be quartered and widened. To help with this, I laminated a small square of flat sheet underneath the intersection of the 4 roof quarters. I tried to make sure it wasn't sagging too much at this point, and that the quarters would all line up with A. the pillars and B. each other. Note: the rear quarters were aligned so the door cut lines would remain straight. -styrene stock cut to fill the gaps in the quartered roof, glued in while carefully checking to make sure roof is not sagging. -the hole in the back was enlarged and the rear window re-installed (with no chop). Note: this method makes the top of the windshield unit very fragile, and is prone to sagging. Using a second body means you could have single seams in the roof instead of the double seams seen here--and sagging might be less of an issue because there would be no gap to fill. Body filler is used to re-shape the B pillars/rear cab corners because they're quite misaligned.

I was trying to figure out why the car's color and texture seemed so familiar. Then it hit me: It looks like a dried-up Triggerfish. "Deadliest Catch: LA Auto Show".

Beautiful job on those headers!!

And Boyd's Smoothster, AMBR 1995 winner:

I'm with Casey on this one. What really intrigues me is the cars that "flip-flop". One minute, I think they're visionary. Another, I realize they're garish and ill-proportioned. And then back again. Virgil Exner's designs for Chrysler have this effect on me. As for El Matador, I challenge you to modify a '40 in accordance with the major trends of the day and get a better result. That car resolves with aplomb nearly every problem that WILL inevitably arise. It's head and shoulders above its contemporaries (Les Popo, Mark Mist, etc). It wasn't until I tried to build a scale model full-custom '40 that I realized how full of landmines the process is. And WTF Ace, is that the world's first papier-mache Thunderbird?? Gross

When you drop parts on the floor, they never bounce towards you; instead they bounce away at an impossibly shallow angle under the workbench and into the cobwebs.