Bernard Kron

Thank you, everyone. I'm flattered by the kudos from some builders whose work I genuinely admire!

Nice proportions. The channel job makes it look tough and close coupled. With the top of the grille shell in line with the cowl it'll be pretty sweet.

LOL!!!!

But they were teleporting living beings on Star Trek! And I keep missing your last post...

I've often thought about the replication model for teleportation. It implies that the "original" needs to be destroyed... And there's the little problem of data degradation...

So far there hasn't been much ,discussion regarding the original question, - what really IS the deal with ignoring capitalization, punctuation, reasonable grammar, correct word-usage and spell-check? The deal is that it's a social statement, a form of rebellion, that has become the current slang or idiom among an increasingly large number of people expressing themselves in text. Personally, I think it's a bad thing because I believe It eliminates some useful tools of expression and severely limits the options people have for introducing nuance and precision into what they're trying to say. I find it instructive to see how we got here from the days almost 3/4 of a century ago when elementary school systems still taught rigorous grammar and spelling as basic skills (do they still or is it simply being ignored?). By the 1950s and 1960s the job of getting the overwhelming majority of Armican society to achieve basic literacy had largely been accomplished. As a result it became fashionable, starting in the better suburbs in America, for schools to eliminate the distinction between those students who, either through social or genetic good fortune, were better adapted to learning, and those who were less so. It was a distinction that was thought to be (and often was) fundamentally elitist and undemocratic. Eventually education became restructured around this notion. Many outcomes occurred, one of which was the emphasis on narrow specialization in the skills we use to get through life. Education became increasingly vocationally oriented. Those who were gifted in the areas needed to evolve the technologies of our society, notably computation and communication technologies, often found themselves to be less interested , and sometimes less capable, in the "humanities". This included spelling, grammar, and the basics of good writing. Starting with the "sputnik generation" they were encouraged to focus on the areas they were best at and largely ignore the rest. As time and generations moved forward the other areas simply fell away. Meanwhile the more learning challenged were encouraged to find employment better adapted to what was rapidly becoming a systematically under-educated class; employment that didn't require the skills they found more challenging to acquire, and which, quite often, they were no longer being offered. Up until the last 20 years, in many cases they were well enough compensated that these educational deficiencies really didn't matter. That expanding under-class was the "market" for the technocracy. The intersection between the original concept of educational "democratization", really educational populism, and a technocratic class that is increasingly specialized has resulted in forms of communications that are best adapted to a lowest-common-denominator approach to both design and content. Think about auto-fill, for example, or spell-checkers and the problem of homonyms (words with different meanings and gramatical function but which sound the same), or the tiny restricted virtual keyboards on the screens of cell phones. All this reenforces a dumbing down of communication and a radical simplification of content. The outcome is formalization and repetition. Eventually it changes the way we are able to think as we lose the mental tools to do otherwise. Ultimately we feel threatened by those that may still tolerate, or even demand, more complexity in the things they say and the manner in which they say it. They constitute an elite class and are to be resisted. What better way than unstructured, unpunctuated, and phonetically ad-hoc paragraphs?

I've never liked the grile either, but the interesting thing is that the overall presence of the car on the road is so strong that the grille actually makes sense "in the flesh". Not obvious in photos is how low the overall height of the car is, unusually so for a modern sedan. More in line with radical 70's cars like the Aston Martin Lagonda (up there among the Anti-Swoopy cars of the origami school). So the corny, toothy "grin" is in keeping with the agressiveness of the thing. But I would have preferred something more subdued to go with the car's graceful lines.

The Fisker Karma is extraordinarily impressive - and agressively swoopy - when seen "in the metal". Too bad the company is struggling and in near bankruptcy. They spent some $1.3 billion including $193 million of US taxpayer's funds and just now received an offer from a German investment firm to be bought out for $25 million. They are in the process of laying off 75% of their staff. But, as I say, a drop dead gorgeous car when seen on the road!

Very interesting to do a web search on it. There are inconsistencies in dates, spelling and attributions in the Franklin Mint article that give it away, but you have to be watching for them. Any articles to be found on the web are uncredited direct quotes from the Franklin Mint article itself! A classic InterWeb Meme. I almost fell for it (if you were there I briefly had posted a summary of the Franklin Mint article, then suspected a rat and blanked it out). There is no movie The Clearing Cloud and Guy De La Roche is a 1950's fashion designer (or a 13th century French count...). There is a cosmetic firm called La Roche-Posay based in the epinomous town in France which makes skin preparations based on the mineral waters found there... etc., etc. Great fun!

Another lovely story... The TDF Ferraris are my own personal emotional touchstones so if I had the means I would find a way to spend stoopid money on one. Perhaps not quite that stoopid (although it's strictly a matter of proportion) but pretty stoopid. Seduction comes in many forms... even the ghost of Olivier Gendebien. But you might recall that in the mid seventies we were in the jaws of an infllationary recession and business was bad after the boom that ended in '72. Only 10 years earlier a middle class home in a proper American suburb sold for 10K, about the price of a Rolls Royce, and your typical Ferrari went for around 8K. So that 15K minimum was already up there, And once we got past the oil crises we were off to the races once again, ending in the 80's collector car bubble. And now, through the power of compounding we are where we are as we finish up the current mini-boom... Now where's that stoopid money I left lying around?...

That's a nice reminiscense. The video does a good job of taking the edge off of the "holy cow" price and serves to remind us, as does your comment, that great cars can make emotional connections that transcend mere money. The record-breaking figure obscures the fact that the family did decide to donate the proceeds to the original owner's favorite charities.

When I saw this I was (only mildly) surprised. While these have always been relatively highly regarded and were intentionally rare, even at the time they were first made, it is, after all, a production Ferrari with a production body (even if it is a variant of which only 10 were made). But records are made to be broken and generally they are set at or near market peaks and are more a question of circumstance and opportunity, rather than any relative calculation on the part of potential buyers. Indeed. most record breakers, whether they are paintings, jewels, or automobiles, are "brand name" acquisitions far more often than they are truly exceptional rarities. Which begs the question of what would be the current auction price (charity or otherwise) of an all orginal, red, Ferrari GTO. Perhaps these can no longer trade in the open market... Addendum: It occured to me after I wrote this that the 275 GTB/NART spiders are far more rare than the 250 GTO, some 36 Series 1 GTOs having been produced, with an additional three Series 2 with the less recognizable body. Also, the NART spiders are distinctly more modern, civilized and drivable cars with open bodywork so one can be seen and appreciated in one's new multi million dollar acquisition. So, from this perspective it is perhaps especially well specified to attract record breaking bags of dough! By 1967 one-off carozzerria bodywork was becoming nearly extinct on expensive sportscars and it took special initiatives like Chinetti's to create exceptional rarities like this one for today's wealthy to pursue.

These are all beautiful cars, and consistently among my favorites, but I fear "swoopy" is getting pretty vague now...

Small Tribute to Jacques Saoutchik, King of Luxo-Swoop on either side of WWII: 1938 Hispano-Suiza H6C Xenia Coupe 1949 Delahaye Type 175 1954 Pegaso Z102B 1948 Saoutchik Cadillac Series 62 Three Position Convertible

Proto-swoop: 1932 Bucciali Fleche d'Or: 1935 Voisin C28 Aerosport Coupe 1934 Voisin C27 Aerosport Coupe

A small tribute to Frank Costin, the king of 50's aero-swoop (and designer of the plywood chassied Marcos GT shown above): His most famous car, the Le Mans fairing Lotus Eleven in it's most elaborated form - the special Monza bubble-top package piloted by Stirling Moss: The fabulous Costin Maserati 450S: The beautful brute - The Lister Jaguar "Knobbly": And the final elaboration for Le Mans:

In general your paint will never look better than the worst coat so I tend to wet sand with 2000 grit as I go, starting with the final primer coat after bodywork. If at all possible I let the paint cure between coats for several days so it's nice and hard. Once I begin with the color coats I use 2000 grit (wet) to knock down any grain that may have been greated, then a set of 6 polishing cloths I have that start at 3200 and go to 12000. I have used the polishing cloths both wet and dry and find that they are more agressive dry, so I tend to do the early coats dry, then switching to using them wet with the final coats when I want to avoid removing too much paint. The trick of putting a drop of liquid detergent in your sanding water already mentioned works well for me. It helps float away the sanding residue and avoid any random scratches. In general the less paint the better. The more thin the paint appears the more real the car looks in scale. So not burning through you layers is a key issue. If my paint is starting to look really shiny and deep I will stop using the coarser grits. The holy grail is not to polishing at all. Enamel paint in my experience gets you closer to this ideal than lacquer. I have no experience with automotive urethanes because I'm still a rattle can guy. I'm still dependent on polishing but dream of the day that I will pull one off that doesn't need it! I have seen staggeringly beautiful unpolished model paint jobs and IMHO they are superior to any polished ones, however nice.

As seems to be becoming my habit lately, I've taken this car back into the studio for the apparently now obligatory TRJ-style black background shots. Here they are: Thanx for lookin', B.

Thanx for the enormously kind comments, everyone! It's much appreciated! Thanx Curt! There was one of these Studes in my early life, too. My parents had a friend who worked for the United Nations. He was French. The UN paid very poorly but the percs were amazing. He got 6 weeks vacation every summer and they paid to have his car shipped back to France each year. Insane! Needless to say, despite their relative poverty stateside, once in the home country, especially so near to WWII, cruising around in such an amazing US automobile was quite the status symbol! I never forgot that car. It was all black with little gold V8 emblems and red upholstery. And yeah, the Parts Pac Caddy is the bomb! Superb detail, classy speed parts and instant Old Skool for your build. I think I've already used an easy half dozen in various builds. Looking forward to seeing the '25 RPU!

I did exactly the same thing several months back. I had planned it for some time. Comcast was regularly raising my fees and we would do a little dance every 6 months where they would take me up to the stratosphere, I would call them, they would give me a massive promotional discount for 6 months, and then rasie me back up, I would call them they would give me a massive... Your get the idea. Eventually it became a massive PITA. It must have been for both of us because one day I called and - guess what - no discount! As I said, I had seen it coming. Comcast was becoming more and more vertically integrated, buying up media properties (culminating with buying NBC Universal from GE) and generally acting like the dominant monopoly they are. Meanwhile, there were more and more channels of less and less viewable content. I had connected my computer to my television and was increasingly getting my media directly off the internet. When I pulled the plug on cable I was ready. My final challenges were finding ways to watch F1 and a full season of Pro Tour level bicycle racing. Once I got these squared away I was good to go. I already had all my news, general entertainment, music and movie options taken care of. I can't say it's smooth and easy or that it hasn't been without some sacrifice in video quality in some cases, but it is clearly the future. Highly controlled motorsports like F1 and NASCAR will present a particular ,challenge. You can watch F1 in real time on Eurosport via re-broadcasts over the internet. The 24 Hours of LeMans are also available that way, which is how I watched it this year. I'm not into NASCAR any more, so that's now off my radar. Many of the Speed shows like Hot Rod TV, My Classic Car and Gearz can be found on YouTube. If you are willing to pay actual real money you can watch almost anything you get over cable over the internet, in HD, with virtually no exceptions. But paying can add up quickly and get you back to the $100.00 per month that premium cable can cost you, so you have to be careful. The internet probably revived the model car world, thanks to the forums like this one, by turning it into a global hobby. The same will be true of video media in general. It's still early days, but at $150.00/month for 200+ channels of repetitive garbage the handwriting is on the wall. Comcast can't save it by lowering prices, either. ESPN wants something on the order of $4.50 per customer per month from the cable companies, whether you watch it or not. Even the over the air networks like CBS want a monthly spiff for their content. Meanwhile the variety and depth of media avaialble over the internet, often free to the viewer, just keeps expanding. When I walked into my local Comcast office to return my equipment, and told the rep I was mainly watching the internet now, behind the counter she just rolled her eyes to let me know she'd been hearing that all day long. In general connectivity is too expensive, too redundant, and subject to too many monopoly practices. Expect to see a massive shake out among the broadcast networks, movie networks, ISP providers and land line and cell phone companies and to see WiFi and high speed internet commoditized and eventually become a regulated utility, like water and sewage. But that will take time and meanwhile we'll each make our small decisions along the way!

Wow Rob, you really have a knack for integrating your models into natural surroundings. Those sundown pictures, in particular, are very striking and must have been a challenge to get right. Cool pics (of cool models, of course!).

Craftmanship, realism, color, texture, history, scale.... Thanx for this!

Sanitary!

This period of American automobile design was the most "liberated"; the variety of design philosophies was staggering and the competition fierce. Partially it was because there were still enough brands and independent corporations to make competing worthwhile, partially it was the postwar recovery boom and the sense of relief in the air after emerging from 20 years of war, desperation and economic strife, and partially it was at the end of the unregulated era in the auto industry before everyone overplayed their hand and today's legislative regime began to take hold. IMHO it was a unique time that conspired to make these cars magical. For myself, my paint and foil skills are just arriving at the point where I can begin to consider tackling these beasts. Your "Class of" collections, with the skills and insight that go with them, are an inspiration. I especially enjoy the resourcefulness you show to overcome the foibles and inaccuracies of the material you start from. And the interiors are always a treat! Thanx for sharing!

Now that is a cool pic of an excellent (cool?) build! Bravo!