Harry Joy

I have an Iwata Power Jet Pro. Love it. My best friend has one, and he talked me into buying one years ago. Yes, it was expensive, but I saved a little. And I sold off part of the stash, and the wedding ring I still had from my first marriage. It was a good trade. I'll have this compressor until I shuffle off this mortal coil, unlike my first wife, and it's more dependable than she ever was.

I have 112 kits in my stash (cars and airplanes). That's about as big as it ever gets, but it tends to stay at about that. Started keeping a stash about 12 or 13 years ago, when kit prices really started to escalate. That's the only reason I ever started one. If I calculated the price of my stash in 2016 dollars it would be scary, but I bought most of them cheap and still do. I rarely pay sticker price, unless it's really danged important to me. Currently, I have 21 kits on display. I cycle them into the trash when they get old. Since I don't keep finished kits in a display cabinet, they inevitably get dirty or damaged. For a very long time, I was finishing about two kits a month, but those were mostly airplanes. Airplane models are terribly easy to break. And also, as I build my skills always tend to advance, and I don't feel nostalgic for most of the old ones. I just cycle them in and out. It's much easier to just keep pics of old ones than it is to try to repair and clean them. And I don't have infinite display space.

One. If I get frustrated or bored with a kit, and start another, that's usually a precursor to the first kit being tossed. On occasion, I'll box one back up and put it back in the closet, but I rarely ever finish those.

I use most every bit of each sheet. It just takes a little planning. And I toss all the usable bits in a small envelope to use later. When I cut a big piece to do a large curved section, so much of it ends up pulled off the backing sheet, I stick the trimming to the edge of my desk and use them for other parts of the kit during the same build session.

Haha! Thanks guys. I'm more of a Chevy guy than Ford, so I can dig that. I drive a lot in my current job, and as soon as I started building this, I started noting every old Ford Ranger I saw on the roads. More often than not, I saw beds awry, missing chrome, bent and abused metal, and all sorts of the things old trucks of every brand display. But I've never been much into weathering. I have a friend who excels at doing beaters, and I love seeing his work, but it's not what I want on the shelf. However..... when I realized where this build was going, I decided to mask my build errors with some "window dressing". My wife however, who asked me to do this kit in the first place, forbade it. She wanted it to look clean. I think if I put a heavily weathered truck on a shelf, she would commence to dusting it every day until it is clean again. I have a Chevy truck in the "to build soon" pile, and hope to get on it before too long. Oddly enough, the truck that inspires me to build the Chevy was a truck belonging to one of my grandfathers. He was a farmer and used the truck around his farm every day for twenty years. But while the paint on it faded, he never let it look like a beater.

You win this thread.

In Oxford, MS of course:

Thank you! I was originally going for sea-foam and forest green, but I'm glad I changed it in the end, even if it meant repainting a good bit. The cream color stands out.

The same silly thing happens in airplane modeling, where builders think aluminum can somehow rust, or smokeless guns can leave black-powder stains. Or better yet, show bare metal scrapes, dings and rivets on airplanes made mainly of wood.

Thank you. Took me a minute to figure out what happened to my thread. There are so many sub-forums, I collapsed several after my first few days on the forum. Completely forgot there was a truck forum.

The fit issues were not inevitable, and not the result of poor molding. The design is a little fiddly though, and that was my issue. I should have taken more care in building the bed and in fitting the cockpit into the cab. The fit issues were my fault.

I started out using Tamiya acrylics, but couldn't get to the colors I really wanted without a lot of mixing, forest green and sea-foam. I did enough mixing on my last build, the 53 Bel Air. I ended up going back to Duplicolor. Deep Jewel Green metallic and Wimbledon white.

Thanks everyone!

This kit was lovely, and the detail very nice, but it fought me. The bed gave me fits; the tailgate did not want to sit right, and the whole bed ended up with a little twist. I could not get the cabin interior to sit right either, and the only way to correct it would have been to remove everything and start over. Long story short, neither the front or the bed sit right on the chassis. So like a true pro, I'm not sharing the pictures that show that.

Well, finally I am driving my 2013 Impala again. For the past three weeks, I've been driving my wife's Toyota Yaris, and a 2016 Chevy Cruze, and a Nissan Sentra. Three weeks ago my engine was running funny, so I took it to Christian Bros Auto, since it was close. They decided to clean my valves, but late in the day said my car had stopped when they finished and test drove it. They thought the battery was dead. It was a Friday and not much happened until Monday, when they called me and said they were pulling the engine out. I told them to stop immediately, and haul my car to the Chevy dealership. After a few days, Chevy told me the Christian Bros guys hydrolocked my engine, which tossed a valve down a cylinder. After two weeks of fighting Christian Bros, they finally replaced the engine. I'll be taking the car to Chevy on Thursday to make sure they didn't jack anything else up. But I finally have my car back.

FYI, if you are buying in bulk, postage might be going down soon.

In all my years wondering about suicide doors, this problem never occurred to me, but once you think about it, it's really obvious!

Digging it. Very cool.

This will rattle your brain a little - Zeppelin covered the song 42 years after it was written. Our discussion of the Zeppelin version is 45 years after they recorded it.

I was friends with this band back in the 90s. They did not do many covers, but I talked them into slipping this into their live act, and they included it as a bonus song on their second CD. Crowds loved it. https://mp3-music-download.com/music/Judge+Nothing/No+Matter+What

I am cursed with such an accent. My family is country through and through, from rural West TN, and everyone in it (except my mom. who has a strong old NC tidal accent) talks like it. But from childhood I have talked like Walter Cronkite. No one in my family can explain it. We didn't have a TV when I was a kid. But I remember being about five years old and my grandmother making fun calling me a Yankee. All my life, folks ask where I'm from. People get it into their head that I'm from the north, the west, the east, whatever. Every time my company moves me to a new store or job in Memphis, I have to explain all over again I'm born and raised here. But when I worked in IL an WI, folks there thought I was from somewhere on the other side of the Midwest. Funny thing is, with my generic accent and all, I recognize accents very well. I used to be able to tell what county in TN you were from, or if you were MS, or AL, or GA or TX. But accents everywhere have changed in my lifetime. Heck, I had friends when I was a teen who talked sorta like me, but when Dukes of Hazzard became a hit, they all started talking like Cooter - and still do. But what I hate more than anything is that the old North Carolina accent is disappearing. I've always loved it, but rarely hear it unless I'm seeing some old documentary on Youtube.

I paint them on the sprue that they come in, then do touch-up when they are removed. Sometimes, I will remove them from sprue, then use a tiny dab of CA to re-glue them to a sprue, with the dab of CA placed where it won't be seen on the finished item. Because you know, they don't just float - even the littlest parts get glued to something. But I don't do this very often, because if the part is that small it often makes no sense to airbrush or spray-bomb them. Glue them where they go, then break out a jar of paint and a small brush.

Still haven't seen it at the B&N in Memphis.

I saw it at my local shop yesterday.

Hmmm... I could go with the cars that made the last 20 years of cars so gawdawful, like the Ford Taurus or Chevy Cavalier. Or I could go with one of the most loathsome cars of the modern era, the Hummer? Nah. My vote goes to: