bobss396

I recently learned that a former club member Mike McCauley has passed away. He built older NASCAR modifieds and did a nice job with them. Someone said that his health had been in a decline for a while.

I have a hate-hate relationship with resin bodies. I did a '64 Fairlane stock car recently from Big Donkey Resins. I should have used a kit body. Flintstone's stuff is often extra thick, you need that Dremel to thin it out. I only buy resin at shows where I can pick my poison.

I use white glue, pulls apart easily enough. I have used 2-sided tape too.

Vacu-forming one is probably the answer. Make up a simple smooth wood buck and give it a go. You could try sanding the kit piece thinner, but they get fragile fast. And you'd be polishing it forever.

Looks like my stepmother, but 1/2 as ugly...

My 1st stock car ride was in a '72 Torino with a 429 under the hood, finished 8th at Riverhead with it in '82. I ran it about a dozen times after with the worst finish being 8th and the best was 2nd twice. The car was re-skinned in '83 with a Montego body, similar to the resin piece here.

I have to go look... I have a bunch of '40 Ford kits. AMT, many. I know I have a Lindberg and a few Revell ones. I prefer the AMT ones over any of them. I have one started as a box-art blue one from the OG box top.

This is probably my favorite kit of all time, like giving Picasso a blank canvas.

One guy in my club, he has been making the most intricate parts for years. Transmissions with working shifters, opened gas tank doors, working sun visors, carburetors that look real. Some of the best coil-over suspension I have ever seen. He did make some rims on a lathe, but most is truly hand-made using saws, files and drills. I have seen him drill a .006" hole in some parts. I used to take some BLAH_BLAH_BLAH_BLAH at shows for parts I made in the machine shop. Then I started seeing others doing them. There was a company, MAS out of Michigan, Mark Smakl. He was quite the innovator in the aftermarket world. His PE parts were great, I'm glad to have stocked up on them. IIRC, he sold the company and I saw the new owner once at a show, then he vanished. Scale Repros is a great aluminum parts vendor for distributors, valve cover breathers, injector stacks, etc. I used to have a lot of machine shop access at work, I still have CAD drawings and some DXF files on my designs. I made up a neat replacement for rear springs on AMT and Monogram stock car kits. My buddies with the CNC shops are either retired or moved out of state. I do have a Bridgeport mill, I need to get a small engine lathe soon. I have a Micro Mark drill press with a vise and XY table that has proved to be invaluable. I'll say that having the ability to machine parts up is still scratch building. It only comes out with parts that are parallel, round and square over things that have obviously been done with a file and sanding sticks. As a kid, we built roll cages out of the plastic trees and with some skill, they came out good enough. The only thing we really needed was a small round file. Now we can buy Evergreen and K&S tubing which is more realistic. That is what going to extremes in the hobby is all about.

I have a guy in the club that buys up collections. He just got one in from a man who passed away, 2 bin boxes of built-ups. Not glue bombs, most are nicely built. He sells them at shows and does well with them.

Plastruct has some interesting shapes that nobody... including most hobby shops... has. Their 1/8" square stock with a center hole is a good one. They have some 1/2 round that is good for tow truck bumpers. They used to have clear yellow and red rod.

Someone in my club uses black masking tape, he said he has had the roll forever. Maybe Ace Hardware has it? I'll have to look,

I like to use square stock too. It sits prouder than 1/2 round and it can be shaped easier. I use something like .030 to .040 square to make new rain gutters. On the old AMT kits, some of it is usually almost totally gone on one side or both.

Old car glove-box booklets told how to set the valve lash... on today's cars, they warn not to drink the battery water...

On all of my glass, I separate the back and front pieces. Then I make up "stop" blocks to nest both pieces and side pieces as applicable. This keeps it from skating around especially when doing the final install with whatever I use to hold it in place.

My aunt had a maroon '65 LTD 4-door, an awesome car. I forget if the top was black or a darker maroon. The car later got rear-ended and was destroyed, hit so hard that the back doors popped open and had to be torched off so it could be stored before disposal.

I save old wheel backs that go unused on some builds for a guide. Most of the time I can find one that fits. Metal washers as well. When I had lathe access, that was a breeze. I like the Micromark centering gauge. I will have to get one.

There is one shop that has been open for a long time, since it is 25 miles each way, I only went there for the 1st time earlier in the year. The owner is 78 and he was talking about packing it in at age 80. He has military kits, car kits, lots of paint. No car detail parts. One club member goes there often, he said that the shop has lately been closed more than open, the old guy is having health issues.

The round stock approach seems to be the way to go. I have plenty of plastic stock, around 80 different shapes and sizes. One car I did, I used clear acetate, .015" thick and made a "nest" so it dropped straight in. This was on side glass. Now glass is one if the 1st things I address during a build. Also wise as noted to do an interior/dash fit check along with the glass. I have seen too many guys get to final assembly, painted and foiled body... and the glass looks awful.

Eh.. not so fast on the 1303 Krylon clear over decals. Since my post I had a bad experience with it over kit stock car decals. It reacted with one on the roof, I had to strip the whole car and do it over.

I was a kit vendor and was supposed to have some help, which showed up late just before the awards were given out. I had wanted to walk around and take some pictures and browse the other sellers.

I usually modify something in my junkyard or make it from scratch.

Very nice work and worth the effort. Glass-fit has always been an issue with me. So far I have massaged the glass to fit up better. I usually split the onesie into 2 parts, easier to tackle. You took it to the next level.

Sad but true. Unless they have a big-ticket lines like RC cars and trains, how much do they make on a model kit? What is the mark-up, 100%? One shop I mentioned has a finger in many pies, fantasy figures, books and games. I never see more than a few people in the store at any given time. How they carry such a vast inventory escapes me. I know some NNL East vendors who sell on eBay out the back door, although they do have physical storefronts.

The thing is, the hobby is undergoing a revolution. Really the first significant thing since the slush-cast resin days. Which was pretty crude in some instances. Look at all the casters that have come and gone since 1995. This is when I got back into the hobby. Cleaning up a bad resin body was real work. Just getting rid of the mold release was not always easy. I still have some questionable resin pieces that reek of diesel. 3D printing is still evolving and will improve. There will be a day that we will all have a printer at home and with the push of a button and a mouse click, we will have parts almost in real-time, ready to prime and paint. Maybe they will be made in our choice of color. My main crab with the process, I don't think all the parts makers actually use them. Things like distributor wire holes could be a few thousands larger. The material is hard to drill and is brittle. Wheel axle holes are real odd sized. I have some with a .110" diameter hole, a little sloppy for .093" tubing and too small to use .125" stock on. I will have to go out to my mill and carefully open these holes up. I have a few tunnel ram intakes with carburetors, some of them are quite under-scale, more like 1/32 that 1/25. One guy I talk to says that scaling is a black art and I believe him.