OldNYJim

I had no idea we were supposed to get a permit to drive in other countries (unless that’s a weird rule that only applies to Canadians, which I’m sure it isn’t…) Huh! (And whoops)

The thing is, with Facebook and Youtube - its not easy to search and find a useful piece of information like it is on a regular forum. Good luck finding a useful reference post after a month on a Facebook group. But this place - I'm constantly searching for info and finding results from maybe 15 years back that are still relevant and useful. I hope this forum never goes away - even if Youtube / Facebook / TikTok / whatever are much more the mainstream place to meet online discuss things right now...but remember, so was Myspace at one point...

Oh, well, excuse me for mentioning it then ?‍♂️

That intake setup would be an awesome add on to any of the Revell 32 Fords with the Small Block Ford engines

Interesting! I checked my stash of these and not a ‘Miata’ among them…I had no idea there was an ACTUAL Miata kit! Thanks for the info - I need to find one now!

Nice scratchbuilding! That's really beautiful work!

Clever! So much masterful work to enjoy in this thread!

This is awesome!! Great start!!

This one includes a hardtop AND is a Miata...what is the 'Miata version'?

That’s interesting - did you use the Deuce frame from the ‘29 kit or the Model A frame? Can’t quite tell from the pic…

I just found a bunch of stuff at the 1:1 swap meet for a buck up…

Oh, and in case the BMV is watching…YES it will be street legal and wearing it’s plate…

I’ll be interested to hear some ideas on this too - I’ve been wanting to open the doors on a droptop Beetle, but if you open the doors then suddenly you have a four piece body with nothing connecting the pieces

Thanks so much fellas! Correct! I just couldn’t get it to hold in position the correct way up using Elmers so I hoped nobody would notice ?. That reminds me I need to pin that thing… In the meantime…spent most of the week getting the body straight and perfect as I could - many MANY rounds of sanding and primering. Something I like for those final little pinpricks and scratches that you need to fix is this Vallejo plastic putty - dries quick and does a good job of fixing anything you need fixing that wouldn’t call for Bondo. I thinned some with water and fixed some flaws on the chassis and for final tweaks on the body: The cowl vents didn’t make it…they clogged up constantly when I primed the body and were a real pain for only a little gain so I filled those somewhere down the line…need to experiment with them more on future builds… Eventually tho, I got to this: (Actually, I think I still did a little more wetsanding and tweaking after this shot too, but I got tired of photographing the body in primer ?) Then, shot all of the outside facing parts of everything with Tamiya white as a base: I’m going to try a military modeler trick of simulating some additional shadows and depth to the inside of things like the hood and the inner trunk by leaving them in gray primer, to give some very subtle color variations to the (fairly thin) yellow paint. Speaking of which, this is my main color palette for this build: Going with the Createx yellow as it’s the brightest, purest yellow I’ve found and it really pops…the pearl yellow will be for the seat inserts, the orange for the block, red for the roll cage and lettering on the doors and black for the stripes. Oh, and clear yellow for some little interior parts like the steering wheel and shift knob and some stuff like that I think. So, after what seems like months of messing with this body…finally got it in color: Plus all the other stuff that attaches to it or goes somewhere inside it: And, this being a showrod, the underside got the same treatment too: In other non-body projects, I cleaned up those big old headers (which scale out to about 2.5-3” pipes at the top ends, so maybe they’re not SUPER out of scale) and added pins to fit them to my 3D printed engine (and to assemble them to each other when I’m doing assembly later): Still need to tweak them some more before paint… And final project for the weekend was printing up some concrete barriers for the display base I’m building for this thing too: I’ll post some pics of the sistercar that I’m working on too…made some decent steps in getting the box-stock (ish) comparison piece ready for paint but it’s not very exciting yet - just a bunch of stuff in primer. Thanks for looking - more soon, soon as I’ve done more!

I’ve been slowly collecting parts to contribute to this thread…but in the meantime I picked up an old mid-80s Scale Auto Enthusiast magazine today and spotted these, somewhat relevant, builds… Love the ‘high tech’ smoothed out truck…even if @tim boyd notes that he didn’t like the paint color at the time…

Hit a local swap meet today - they had a decent number of kits (mostly at standard eBay / retail prices), but I spotted a box of ‘junk’ at one table: Right away I knew I wanted the Tijuana taxi…guy told me it was a George Barris kit…then pulled out some more boxes of ‘junk’…told me he wanted a buck a car “with as many of the pieces as you can find”…ended up with half a Tijuana Taxi and a TD Garbage Truck: A couple of salvageable 40s: And a lot of an Aurora Drop Out bus, plus a T body that he didn’t charge me for: Plus, I found one of my grail kits (but not such a grail that I would’ve paid eBay prices for one right now) - the old AMT XR6 (complete, I think, and $12) And I dropped another eight on these two: Plus found a bunch of late-80s early 90s Scale Auto Enthusiast mags for 50 cents a piece…pretty decent haul of old junk that I dragged home!

I built a couple of Beetles, and they didn’t even include any radiator hoses in the kit!

Ohh - I have a few of their products but never tried this one…thanks for the heads up!!

Looks like a good start to me! I’ve heard those bodies are really well molded

I had an issue like this with my new printer - I had plenty of supports but incomplete prints. When you say "Yachee", do you mean "Lychee"? The slicer app? If so, the solution to my issue was gradually increasing the light-on time in the resin settings in Lychee - I think the issue was that the resin wasn't curing properly on my new machine (although the identical settings had worked great on the machine before). So, my light-on time was I think 1 second, and I ended up at 4 before I started getting normal prints...not sure if that will fix YOUR issue but it helped with mine...

This is a KILLER build - really well done! @JET. - one thing I was really impressed with was the perfect scale flake on that Mooneyes steering wheel - what base did you use on that? It looks great! Awesome build! ??

I hit my local Ollie’s (Merrillville Indiana) to see what they had…bunch of T Depot Hacks, a few Rat Fink trailers, some kinda Wacky Racers kit, the Galaxy kit, a bunch of Hot Wheels Camaros plus one Groove Boss and one Copperhead (both of which followed me home: I was really hoping to find a second Groove Boss, but their kits were scattered all over the store in different places and my wife didn’t have the patience for me to make a second lap…

Thanks for the nice comments everybody! And yeah, I’m a sucker for styrene supplies too - can never have enough raw materials for building stuff! Small update…found a good print file for Chevy bellhousings and 3-speed transmissions…not sure how long those stock parts would last on an overbored blown engine on sticky drag slicks…but that’s how the kit is, and I’m trying to build a detailed-up version of it so there we are… Batch of bellhousings and transmissions fresh off the printer: I printed a few variations for future use, but I was always going with the most stock version. Once I had those bits, I could mock up the new engine…my plan is to use a few of the kit parts (hence scaling the engine to match the kit block) - although there’s definitely plenty of potential to add more detail here: And a quick comparison with the kit part… Meanwhile on the body, I’ve done a couple of coats of primer now, and I’m about far enough along to start wetsanding it to make sure I have a good straight base for the final primer coat and then hopefully some color: I’m mostly finding small imperfections now rather than big ones (although I’m going to give it another round of sanding tomorrow to see where we’re at…) and I want to tweak the cowl a little more but it’s getting closer - not the nightmare it could’ve been after all that cutting and slicing… And finally, the underside is getting the same treatment…I THINK it would be cool to shoot it in body color rather than just plain old black, but I haven’t totally decided yet, but I want it straight and perfect as can be anyway: And that’s all folks for today…got some more parts to work out on the engine so that’ll be next, and then I need to try and find a better stock-Tri 5 rear axle to replace the hollowed out blobby kit piece. More soon, soon as I’ve done more!

This is coming together really nicely Steve - I like the interior colors you picked especially

So, question for people who know better than me - what IS the transmission meant to be in this kit? Is it a stock ‘55 trans, carried over from the earlier versions of this kit?