Elmer Fudd

Yep, there's enough to make 2 now. Gathering up all the pieces can sometimes take awhile but it looks like you did well in the hunt!

Okay, here's mine...

That's nice work so far! Am gonna get my head shot off but that is a Holley carburetor in the 1st pic and i cannot remember such a factory install on a street Pontiac engine after 1964. DISCLAIMER! i am not perfect! Hoping that the air cleaner will hide the MPC error!

Not sure if it's doable but after the strip and the gold painted, maybe you could spin them in a drill motor and dry-brush the silver on similar to the way the factory cut the face after the gold was on.

Pretty muggy today but the paint flew anyhow. Four sets of wheelbacks done. Four sets of halfshafts. Four plus three pairs of brake rotors. Gonna have to dig a little deeper and find some workable ungrooved fronts to match those ungrooved rears. That or break up some more unbuilts.

455 Rocket!

Too each his own!

By quoting me and including a trigger word like 'extreme' you endeavored to provoke a response. So i'll give you one. Are you going to tell ANY of the companies running heated lye parts cleaners that their business model is extreme? Or are they smarter than you?

That works for me. Good Luck!

Maybe you can advise the stumped people here (including me) about the advantage of cutting up 3 kits to take the place of the old MPC Charger 500 kit.

One last remark and i'm outta here..........Lye, as a cleaner of styrene and other non-aluminum metals works better with HEAT. This was learned at my employer where the parts cleaners had a somewhat weakened lye solution but were controlled to about 120°. An outside company came in and changed the solution every month, whether it was used or not. What a waste. One winter i dropped in a set of connecting rods from a real engine and forgot about them for a couple weeks or so. When i fished them out of the tank they looked like BRAND NEW~! Right now the Rubbermaid container of Super Clean is sitting on the picnic table in the sun but when it gets cold in the house i'll float the Rubbermaid in the kitchen sinkful of hot water. Or put it in kitchen oven at WARM, maybe 100°. The difference in effectiveness is dramatic

Super Clean will not eat thru catalyzed urethane but if it can get under the edges it will eat out all the undercoat and the urethane will come off in a big sheet. It's takes a good month to do that on a model car body. You can try scratching thru your topcoat and see if the lye (oven cleaner or whatever) will eat the undercoat.

If you're keeping it wet with oven cleaner and getting no action you'll have to try ELO or something similar. You do NOT soak in ELO. It will ruin the plastic. Brush it on and when it softens the paint wipe it off with a rag or paper towel. Then i wash off the residue with Dawn. That stuff is about $200/gallon but you buy it in half pint cans for 10-15$ per can. It's saved my ass several times. For everything else i use Super Clean.

Purple Power, Super Clean, LA's Totally Awesome (Dollar Store), Easy-Off Oven Cleaner are all LYE (sodium hydroxide) products. Don't get it in your eyes or other mucus membranes. It's a strong base, the pH opposite of acid. You can make your own from crystal drain cleaners. Remember, always add the lye to water, NOT WATER TO LYE. A strong lye cleaner will take off 98% of hobby and hardware store enamels and lacquers. The other 2% require a dedicated model car stripper. I use Testors ELO / Easy Lift off. That works on everything except automotive lacquers which have dug in to the plastic.

Today's little project was grilles and starters. Everyone holds on to small parts like this, don't they? And the (almost) finished products: The grilles need the turn signal lenses painted semi-transparent white. That will take some experimentation. And the starters need a bit of detail. The grilles might look shiny in the sun but they're a nice semi-gloss like dullish injection-molded black plastic. The starters are significantly glossier. MPC plated the grilles in these kits. Guess they thought they needed a little more bling. Or maybe there was room on the tree for more chromed pieces.

don't lie.

More engine pieces today. First had to make sure it was all gonna fit together. These are nearly all used parts so some of mating surfaces had too much prior glue on them. First order was to get the right sheen on the belts. Real belts are not 100% flat black. The pulleys can now be painted by hand. Then there was an attempt to paint the Delcotrons without the usual go-to silver spray. Duplicolor Aluminum High Heat was too shiny. Matte Clear knocked off too much of the shine. So it was back to the hunt for the T191 Duplicolor Ultra Silver which seems to be just right for transmission cases, aluminized exhausts and alternators. After the only existing can of that was found we were able to finish up and move on to other tasks. That is all for today!

Got paint on the manifolds today. After the primer was on it was apparent that one manifold was no good so with a burst of ambition i located a replacement and got it caught up with the others. The worst part was smoothing out the parting lines all the way around the pieces. Then i couldn't find the go-to for the cast iron look. But there was a can of Duplicolor Cast Iron engine paint on the shelf. It didn't look right after it was sprayed so back to the hunt for the go-to. It was hard to find because the cap was gone but i ultimately captured it. Looks like the camera wasn't paying attention to what i was focusing on.

lazy

I always ran PF-35s. They changed the part number a few years back to something like 1048, who knows why. But someone probably got a bonus for it.?

Thanks!

Rats.

Huh?

Obviously

Are they on some readily available *aftermarket* sheets?