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bobss396

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Everything posted by bobss396

  1. I go through that all too often. I'll lose a part in a matter of a few minutes, I haven't moved off the chair and the part is nowhere to be found. I look in my pants cuffs, in my shoes, shake out my clothes in an open area. Just like some little gremlin came in and took it on me. Years back I lost a steering wheel to a '59 Chevy in my kitchen, looked under and behind EVERYTHING using a flashlight. I had one from a '58 Chevy that I used instead. A steering wheel is pretty big, hard to lose. Of course it was all painted up. A few months later I was remodeling the kitchen and remembered about the steering wheel. I had to take the radiator out in the process, was sure it HAD to be behind it somewhere. I took it apart surgically, NO steering wheel was to be found. File that away with Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Airheart. Bob
  2. I can take an early retirement at 55, but won't have enough to support my lavish (ahem, cough..) lifestyle. I do plan to bail at age 62 or so and get into making machined parts for model cars. All I would need to make is maybe $15-20K a year to keep me happy plus it would give me something to do a few days a week and go to MORE shows. That's the game plan, I do have a product line and CAD drawings for some of the parts. Bob
  3. As a kid, the sign of a sucessful build was how well it rolled and how little glue was on the windows. I'll let them roll now if possible, just enough so that I can "dial in" a car so it won't be a tripod on the contest table. Get a mix of resin wheels, aftermarket tires and scrounged up backing plates and you're lucky if it sits square upon completion. Bob
  4. I have a couple of bikes started and would be interested in some new parts for them. Besides the wheels, what do you have in mind? Bob
  5. Nice job! You did toss in some detail so it is an improvement on an out of box build. I'm not crazy about the chassis under it either, I only bought one of them myself. I agree on the Power Slide decals as the way to go. Bob
  6. I like lacquer products in general. You really can't go wrong with Tamiya acrylic lacquer TS-13 clear. I've used this over Tamiya sprays, also Duplicolor and HOK lacquers. It is not as "hot" as Duplicolor and HOK and lays down very thin and smooth. Bob
  7. Thanks all for the great advice. I have to look the body over good to see if any body work is required, this will be the deciding factor for me. I'm leaning towards the Tamiya bright white if I do paint it, this has always been a user-friendly paint for me. Eventually I have to try out Future, so many people say so many good things about it. Bob
  8. .. instead of painting? Since the body is going to be left white, has anyone polished one out and left it as is? My main concern is yellowing. It is a stock car and will be decaled up. Would a good clear coat keep the white body from turning yellow? Thanks, Bob
  9. I use the Devcon and it doesn't really smell that bad to me, maybe I've burnt out the fine windings on my sniffer? I just use a dot and dot of each, mix it, use it and toss the leftovers. I keep the tubes in their original package so they won't touch, carefully roll them up as I use them and keep the works in a plastic bag. I usually get to the bottom of each tube without them being too much of a mess. The big bottles you describe are for the RC car crowd, definitely a bargain but can you dispense a small dot of each? Bob
  10. Small parts are a good way to break into resin, maybe a hood with a scoop or add a scoop to an existing plastic hood. A bit of advice, if the caster used a mold release compound, use what he says to wash the parts off first. If you sand them first, you can imbed the mold release below the surface which will cause paint problems later on. Bob
  11. I was in there Sunday with the President's Day 50% off coupon. Picked up another AMT '34 Ford coupe for $7.50 and some craft chain that was the right size. The 40% off coupon is always good for a can of their Plastikote primers. Bob
  12. If Bonsai wire is hard to come by, try plain old "floral wire" which is used for keeping dry arrangements together. Bring a piece of tubing and size the wire up accordingly. Bob
  13. Great idea to do the initial louver slitting in a sheet of PE brass. It doesn't have to be much, .200 long x .010 wide slits spaced conveniently apart is fine for a 5" louver. Most of the resistance in louver punching is getting the material to shear or perforate. I drew up a 1:1 louver at work today in CAD, shrunk it down to scale and man is that a small punch and die! Bob
  14. A few NNL Easts ago I had a 1/2 hour conversation with Larry and his louvers and realized who he was much later in the day! They were done in separate brass panels and then grafted into the plastic. I don't recall if someone made the panels for him or he had a press himself. We talked about alloys and thicknesses of brass sheet and he had some loose parts on display. It's really not that hard to make up the punch but it would have to be done out of tool steel. The female die section would be a little harder to do and has to line up with the punch. The female die could be a straight shape through or could be made out of die-quality urethane rubber. Bob
  15. The LIARS monthly meeting is on for Thursday night 2/21 at 7:00-9:30 PM. We're always looking to add new members to the roster, so come on down! Dues are something like $25 for the year and you get the right to wear the signature black LIARS t-shirts and other apparel. The location is: Henrietta Acampora Recreation Center, 39 Montauk Hwy, Blue Point, NY. From North LIE: LIE to exit 62S, Nicholls Rd. Make a left onto Montauk Hwy and take it for approximately ¼ mile. Center is on the left-hand side. From the North Shore: Take Nicholls Rd. south. Make a left onto Montauk Hwy and take it for approximately ¼. Center is on the left-hand side. From South Shore: Take the exit for Nicholls Rd. South. Make a left onto Montauk Hwy and take it for approximately ¼. Center is on the left-hand side.
  16. The link below should be of help to you. I don't know what an MEL is, (Mercury Edsel Lincoln?) but the ones in the link look most like Mercury engines of the era. http://www.edsel.com/pages/edsel58.htm#Engines
  17. I do have LIVE music once in a while. My son has his guitars and drums in the "living room" part of the basement. He'll come down to play and practice almost every time I'm there and he's very good. He plays mostly heavy metal like Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Megadeth, older AC/DC. If he wants to crank up the Marshall amp or get into the drum kit, I have concert quality ear plugs that filter out the bad noise. Bob
  18. I do have a 5-disc CD player, but eventually even that has to be reloaded after a few hours, so if I'm in the modeling groove, I opt for silence. FM radio is horrible, TV (except for the Daytona 500 coming up, yeah!) is too distracting. I build in my finished basement, so I get by with listening to house sounds like the oil burner, water running somewhere, a floor creaking above. Bob
  19. Glad I could help. When I want to glue something onto a painted body, I cut small strips of masking tape and mask around where the part mounts, leaving a small "window" exposed where the part goes. Don't press the tape down tightly, you want it to come off easily. If your grille surround is in already, you can do a couple of tape strips to that for support while it dries. I'll pre-cut a number of 1/8" wide tape strips and have them ready to go before I start something like that. I use mainly Devcon's 5-minute epoxy. Just mix up a tiny buy equal amount of each, let it set up a bit, apply it to where the part is going, not on the part itself. Drop the part in, do your adjusting, add some tape if you need extra support and let it set up. After that, remove the tape strips slowly. I always leave at least one end up as a flap so I can grab it with tweezers. You can use gravity to your advantage, maybe not in this case, but car bodies can be taped to model boxes with the grille up if you want to attach something to the front of the car, and so on. Gravity is free, take advantage of it! Bob
  20. All in all I can't complain about my wife. She has literally bailed me out of a couple of tight spots and been there when I needed her. I always socialize before I get lost in the styrene dungeon, they like that. I can pretty much spend whatever I like, but do keep it within limits (except for the NNL East.. 7.5 weeks away!). She also has advised me on some hotrod builds and talked me out of another flat black paint job. And talk about spending money at the bar, you can do a lot worse things with your money than that! Bob
  21. Everything I build is a contest car, so that narrows down my building style a little. That doesn't mean that I detail out everything and cram it to the max with PE and scratch built parts. I strive for an overall balance in the build. Why go overboard on the engine detail if the interior is on the blah side? Who really cares if I have brake lines running to non-existent wheel cylinders? Not me. I try to make it interesting enough without having a project that I wind up hating, which I have had more than a few of. I try to build in multi-dimensional details that are easy to do. I like to see an engine compartment fluffed out with wires and hoses. Detailing up the battery is a nice touch. Make up a shifter boot out of styrene stock, swipe a bunch of straight pins out of the wife's sewing box to make radiator caps. Bob
  22. Mine used to HATE the hobby with a capital H. She even threw one down the basement stairs one time with a box of parts. Which I thought was the worst thing she could do, payback was a B***H and not really appropriate for this forum, no I didn't hit or even yell at her! Since then, she's softened somewhat after I started bringing home trophies and had cars in the model mags for tha past 9 years in a row. I have cut down on the amount of kits I buy, I'm good to buy maybe 5-6 a year for the past few years. I do blow a fortune on after market parts, but those are not as visible as kits. She is always trying to get me to sell some off, and not for the money. She just thinks that I have TOO many kits, she's right but that's MY hobby. As far as spending time building, she watches these inane "reality" shows on the tube, I prefer to whack plastic. I'll do the wash while downstairs building on a slow Sunday. Bob
  23. I had a bunch of Palmers as a kid and had fun with them. Some had motors which was quite a novelty. The Pyros were what they were, unless you expected too much out of a $0.69 1/32 scale kit with about 12 parts to it. My vote for some of the worst kits ever has to go to the Revell "Unbuildables". These were things that at age 10-12 were impossible to finish. Candidates are: '31 Ford Woody, '56 Ford PU, '57 Nomad, any of the gassers of the era. Problems were things like too fragile parts, parts that had poor symmetry and registration. Bob
  24. Yeah, I tried mineral spirits once in a similar situation, of course it took the lacquer off! Bob
  25. Here ya go, and welcome to the forum. Put the headlight buckets face down on some 2-sided tape on some cardboard stock. Just catch enough of each bucket so it stays put. Line them up so the spreader bar is in the right place. Shim up the spreader bar using some styrene stock, so it can be dropped in easily. My weapon of choice to hold it in place would be 5-minute epoxy. Mix some up, wait until the 3 minute mark (or when it isn't likely to run) place a dab in each recess on the buckets. Drop the spreader bar in place, adjust as needed and let it set up. Once it is dry, gently pull bucket off the tape. Bob
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