chasracer

Thanks to everyone that offered some help here. I was able to sell the collection to a couple of buyers.

When I paint 1:1 cars, Wax & Grease remover is my number one friend. I was wondering if anyone used it on model plastic and if there were any issues doing so?

Thanks but was looking for a model car type site.

I have a small Tamiya collection of 1/20 F-1 and some sports car kits that I need to sell. Looking for a decent site to list them on. Thank you!

I have looked and there are a number of online stores. What is your favorite or one that you have had good service and model availability from?

First full scale event was a Santana show. Used to catch some young thing and her band in local watering holes - her name was Pat Benatar - quite a while before she hit it big.

Friend of mine back in the early 70's was a neighbor of the Wood Brothers. Back when David was driving the #21 for them, according to my friend - he insisted that the Wood Brothers install a cigarette lighter on the dash. During caution flags, it wasn't uncommon to see David smoking a cigarette. I honestly have never been able to confirm the story, maybe someone else could?

Myself. I am working on a '55 Chevy 210, building the car for drag racing. I am slowly getting rid of bits and pieces that I do not want anymore in an attempt to keep my garage space somewhat under control. (That might be me just dreaming though.) So on the a-arms, I had tried to sell them through various channels with no luck and while I could purchase a new set of mounting arms, I decided that if I could not get rid of them, I would just remove the mounting arms and junk the rest of it. Instead of trying to beat out 65 year old bushings, I broke out my plasma cutter. I got things hooked up, found an old piece of wood panel to do the cutting on and proceeded to try and cut the ends off of the a-arms. I have only used this plasma cutter twice before and it worked just fine. Today, no such luck. I could get an arc, but it would just stick to the work and I had to keep breaking it loose. I tried several times, but all I did was ruin the tip. So I replaced the tip with a spare. I then start checking voltages as this is a 220v cutter. Everything looked good. Then I pulled the plasma cutter out of the welding cart and started messing with the setup dials, trying different amperage, and varying the rate of cut - nothing worked. I was sitting there trying to figure out what could be wrong with a brand new piece of equipment when I noticed that I had not connected the air line to the cutter! Sometimes, I am my own worst enemy.

I only have one HL near me and I get there maybe once or twice a year. The last time they had a fairly full isle on one side with various car/plane/ship models, supplies and small amount of paint. My regular hobby shop used to have just about any model car kitted (recent issues) but now has cut that down to 2 small mid-height shelf areas. One worker told me the higher price of the kits just stagnated the sales so they reduced and blew out what they could. R/C stuff in cars and airplanes is probably the most active from the looks of the inventory now.

I am looking for some decent but inexpensive references for the earlier days of NASCAR. I have visited the museum at Darlington Speedway taking pictures which certainly helps but you can only get so close to the cars. If anyone knows of anything - books or maybe documentaries I would appreciate it. I am not really looking too much at duplicating any particular race car but I like the 1955-1966 era of the sport.

Did you try running the software as an Administrator? Right click the icon and select "Run as Administrator".

Took out 3 trees in the front of my property - one that was about an 80 foot white pine and went across the main road entering the subdivision. Lucky that I had some neighbors to help - three chainsaws going and we got it off the road in about an hour but my old back is killing me.

My wife on her work days, will turn on GMA (Good Morning America). Last year as most of you can remember I am sure, they were roasting any guy that so much as asked a woman out for a date and swearing that every one of them was a sexual predator. So what's on GMA this morning? Oh just tips for women that will be wearing a open front gown or dress without a bra and how to apply makeup so that it gives the appearance of a deeper cleavage. How the hell do you have it both ways? Complete and total hypocrites.

Lucky I guess? I don't know why, but you would simply think that a piece of rubber bonded to metal sitting between two pieces of metal would last a lot longer. It just sits there in my view so I guess there is something going on that rips them apart.

Roadrunner - believe me, you are not alone. I can plan, I can save, I can figure it out to the last nickel and I can guarantee that something will come out of nowhere to blow it to pieces. It gets old and very frustrating. And yes, it's my fault - hell it isn't anyone else's issue. and as the French Proverb goes... "Praise the God of all, drink the wine, and let the world be the world."

Ahhh, a thread that I could take a liking too. How about a Chrysler PT Cruiser with just 66000 miles on it and the lower a-arm bushings are completely shot already? I mean maybe I could see it at 100,000 but 66k sure does seem like a short life to me. Checked the dealer cost at around $800 for both sides (left is a bit worse than right side). Car overall is in good condition so guess I have to bite the bullet as the car is a pain to drive on any road with minor roughness to it. And on top of that, I just had to replace my laptop after having mine stolen at the Jacksonville airport!

All the above track sets are now sold. I have a good selection of track available, most of it is like new. Straight sections, various curves, loop sections, power/controller connection, crossovers, squeeze and a hairpin section. Also have a good selection of fence rails and elevation supports.

I have put up a few race track sets on my website for sale. I will also be adding some track packages (straights, curves, etc), surplus cars and other pieces. I am open to possible trades for 1/20 Tamiya F-1, Sports Cars, etc. Also in the market for serious real drag race car parts & components. Tell me what you have and maybe we can do some business. www.rutherfordms.com/store/

Hmmm, I haven't seen it yet but I am rather sure that people who are for the most part interested in the history of that time period are probably going to be the larger part of its audience. I am sure there are historical issues with the movie, there always are but your younger crowd for the most part isn't going to spend the cash to see it. As far as movie reviews go, most of the time if the review is awful - I really end up liking it and just the opposite usually happens too. I was very fortunate to have a good friend at work that was a Marine aviator during WWII in the Pacific Theater. He was the gunner on a TDB but got chewed out regularly for not strafing on the way out of a dive. The reason he didn't was that he was constantly passing out from the g-force but his pilot took pity on him and would drop back to the rear of formation to let him do a "gun check" - that kind of saved his ass. My friend's name was Charles Lewis, of Buckingham County, Virginia. May he rest in peace and know that a lot of us say "Thank You".

Modlbldr & AFX Thanks so much for taking a chance with a rookie - hope to trade again the future. Charlie

Last week I sorta jumped into it with a few trades here. I appreciate all of those that trusted me and traded with me. I am looking forward to the different kits that will be showing up soon. I actually started building model cars when I was about 6-7, I remember my first model was a 1958 Chevy Impala that had a body made in multiple pieces. I finished it but it was just white plastic, chrome and clear plus the warped sides were lopsided from trying to glue them to the upper body. My next kit was a 1957 Chevy that had a one piece body (I learn quickly) but had opening doors, hood and trunk - it turned out better but I was probably in over my head on that one with the hinges and stuff. My Father was a prepared food salesman operating his own distributorship of the products in Virginia. We had a small rental house in Richmond and he enclosed the small side porch with plastic to keep the rain out and that became his "warehouse". At 6 years of age I went to work making $.10 a week keeping the warehouse swept and cleaned up. I saved up most of those dimes to purchase more model cars down at the local grocery store. I also started using a little bit of paint but didn't get the whole cleaning the brush routine until I ruined a couple of new brushes. From that time until I was about 12 or so, I built kits pretty regularly. I had moved to the point of swapping parts between kits, had a huge plastic bag of spare parts (wish I still had that!) and starting doing some minor detail (plug wires with black thread). At 12 I was starting to get involved with 1:1 cars and really began my lifelong association with them and racing them. My Father purchased an old '62 Ford for me to work on - just to keep me away from mom's Chevy. With my focus shifted I stopped building model cars. Real cars, girls and going to drag races was far more fun and took up most of my time and resources. I married young after starting what I did not realize at the time was a 40 year corporate career beginning at the phone company. I have four children and when they were in their childhood to mid teen years, I hardly had a dime to do anything else. No car stuff, no racing - just being a father running from one after-school event to another one. Somewhere around the time they were all teenagers and no longer spoke to me, I picked up modeling again. I built a hand full of car kits, then got into German Armor for a bit and then moved into building 12th Scale electric racing cars. My detailing skills from the modeling really helped with the paint and signage on the clear plastic bodies - which you paint from inside but it also helped me build chassis that were very light. To make weight, I would have to secure coinage to the chassis with double sided tape - nice thing is that I could put the weight were I needed it. I did the electric car thing for a number of years and really enjoyed it then one day on the way home from work I went a different route and passed a '66 Chevelle that was setup for drag racing and was for sale. That's an entirely different story but except for collecting a few kits I haven't built anything really in 30 years other than helping a couple of the grandkids put together a Snap Kit. So, I still drag race today with my three sons - my daughter lives in Florida so I only see her maybe once a year now. We have four race cars with a 5th one in the works - all of them are in the 5 second and quicker range in the 1/8th mile. Even with building a new car, I find that my retirement years now have a lot of dead time in the evenings so I have decided to break out a few kits this winter and see what happens. I build for my own pleasure as most of this stuff will be tossed in the trash when I am gone. I don't expect anything great in my skillset to improve but I do hope that I can still build a kit that has a little bit of detail and represents the subject material.

No, I think you missed the point to this car - lowering costs. For one, the body will be the SAME for every car on the track - yep we're back to headlight decals and the car name across the top of the windshield. The chassis and body will be provided by a supplier and the body/chassis will meet strict measurement rules. No more need to bother with wind tunnel testing and massaging a piece of sheet metal just so - not going to happen. Modifications to the body/chassis will not be tolerated. Engines are already pretty identical - if the name wasn't on the valve cover you wouldn't know which engine it was and now the talk is about Hybrids. Not sure about the wheel deal, I think they will stay with the metal rims but they will no longer be 15" units. And as someone mentioned, you have now eliminated building a chassis, building bodies, painters (all cars are covered in wraps), fabricators (wiring harnesses and electrical components will be the same, all plumping will be identical) , wrecked cars will go back for recycling to the suppliers. That's a lot of jobs that are going to be gone - forever gone. I hope the boys and girls that are employed with this stuff now are taking a serious look around for work in the near future - it's time to move on. This will be the final nail in the NASCAR coffin - it's been coming for quite some amount of time now. People are not attending the events, the next television contracts are going to be horrible and NASCAR continues to think that they are putting on a great show. I live near one of the last, best short tracks still in operation. Last fall, friends of mine walked up to the gate with about 20-25 minutes to go before the green flag for the Saturday night, Cup race - paid $25 for an adult ticket and walked in. They could sit anywhere they wanted to - the reserved seating was roughly only 60-65% full. This was the event that decided the final group standing for a shot at the championship last year and literally no one was there. People say that NASCAR will survive in spite of itself - I don't believe that. To my knowledge there is not one team on the circuit now that has one single sponsorship package. All of them have multiple sponsors and some have sponsors that only do 8-12 races. Money wise, the situation is getting worse every year for the teams and their survival. Remember when NASCAR sold the teams on the whole charter arrangement? The idea was that owning the charter was akin to owning a business that could be sold. The problem now is that the charters are sort of worthless. Let's say Richard Childress says that's enough and his charters are for sale - who steps up in the current financial climate and makes that purchase? And finally, this is mid-October. NASCAR has yet to announce any of the multi-tiered sponsors for 2020 as Monster Energy Drink ends their sponsorship November 17, 2019.