Art Anderson

Larger scale models (1/20 and larger) have always seemed to be very much a niche market sort of thing. Monogram's 1/8 scale model cars had a short fling with real popularity from 1963 (when the Big T was first produced) until the Big Jaguar (XKE) which came out in the summer of 1964, and then the popularity of those models waned seriously, even though Monogram did a few more over the years. The same was pretty similar with 1/12 scale models--when first offered, they sold pretty well, but none of them seemed to stay in production for more than the occasional reissue ever after. I submit that it's been the sheer size of those--not many kids back in those days had the $$ (upwards of $15 for the first run of the Jaguar, for example), and very few modelers had the shelf space to display more than one or two of them. It's probably still very much the case, size-wise even today. Art

Even the original issue kit had at least some issues with sink marks--but the exaggerated sinkers we see today are more the result of the current styrene blends in use, as opposed to 42 years ago. Art

Somehow I rather doubt, however, that the Viper used as the Pace Car at Indianapolis in 1992 will be repo'd and crushed. Having seen that car (#6 of the prototypes) side-by-side with the later GTS coupe (a production versin), those original prototypes were pretty ugly--rippled bodywork, mis-fitted panels, even vac-formed clear plastic headlight covers! Oh well. Art

I think you're "comparing apples to oranges" here. For starters, the difference between 1/24 and 1/25 scales is approximately 4%, not all that much, unless one compares like parts in each scale one to the other. Aircraft drop tanks do tend to be large--for example, the most popular drop tank for a "belly tank" streamliner was a 500-gallon unit, used as a "ferry" tank on planes such as the P-38 Lightning and B-17 Flying Fortresses to give them the range to fly non-stop across the Atlantic from Newfoundland Canada to the UK in WW-II. Even the drop tanks used on early jet fighters are quite large, albeit not as "fat" as most WW-II auxiliary fuel tanks. Art

I second that! I've come to use Google Advanced Search, type in the year, make and model of car, then click on "images"--IF there is an image online, it will show up, and a great many of those images are more than large enough to help out in determining the colors of the various parts and components. Don't just stop with the first one, keep on looking, as you may find discrepancies which can lead you to ask questions. One good source for answers is the website for Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) which has a huge set of forums, including individual make and model forums. To post a question, you will have to join the forums with a user name and password, but that's free of charge. Art

You should be able to use them on styrene still. I knew several modelers back in hte 80's when those paints first came out who were doing just that. They are a lacquer base, so a good automotive lacquer primer should be used, and with some colors a silver, gold or white automotive lacquer as a "ground base color". In my experience, however, these paints come out with a very flat finish, as they were meant to be sprayed on the inside of Lexan (polycarbonate) body shells for RC cars, and adhesion was/is more important than a shine, so your favorite clear gloss will come into play as well. Art

Suggest you avoid using newspaper though--as overspray can soak the paper just enough to release the printing ink which if the newspaper touches anywhere on the white paint, can transfer right to that white painted surface. A safer paper to use would be the same paper you use in your printer, clean with no printing on either side of it. Art

I've done "engine turning" (also used to be called "damascening") on model cars before, but way back in my "Indy Car" building days (My last Indy car model was under construction right at 30 years ago as of today!), and as Bill Engwer states, those old-fashioned "pencil" typewriter erasers were the only thing I found that would work. Those erasers had, instead of graphite "lead", a rod of fairly soft eraser rubber which was impregnated with fine abrasive grit. The trouble was, however, that the rubber "tip" I could get when running that eraser in a pencil sharpener could not easily be sharpened down to less than perhaps .060", and then not precisely. I wound up "hardening" the rubber with old-fashioned thin viscosity CA glue, then carefully shaping the tip with an Xacto knife and VERY tediously making a flat, hopefully true end to it. The sections (I cut off 1/2" lengths of the eraser "pencils", then drilled out the broad end for inserting lengths of 1/8" music wire (spring steel), inserted that into the broad end, securing that with CA glue. These "tools" (I made over a dozen of them for each of the three Watson roadsters and a nearly total scratchbuild of a Watson USAC dirt track Champ car) were chucked into my variable speed Dremel, which in turn was clamped into a rather imprecise Dremel drill press. The material I used for the firewalls and instrument panels was thin aluminum sheet--actually used "Offset Printing" masters from our church, where my Mom was the secretary--used a small offset printer to publish the church newsletter and Sunday worship bulletins, so this was "free" material. After a bit of practice, I was able to get a reasonably accurate, even set of turnings, but they were larger than exact scale, as most real engine turning is done with mandrels ranging from 1/2" (.020" in 1/25 scale) up to perhaps 1 1/2" or .060" in our scale. The smallest I was able to achieve this way was perhaps .080" or thereabouts, which was a bit large, but the effect was good enough to help my Dirt Champ Car win the "Best Scratchbuilt" award at the IPMS Nationals at Indianapolis in 1985. The problem with trying this on BMF is simply the thin, delicate nature of Bare Metal Foil. Of course, it goes without saying that probably the sort of typing eraser I was able to find back then (and that was problematic, given the advent of "White-Out" liquid eraser and the white "correction tape" that followed very quickly--and of course today, who even uses an old-fashioned typewriter with a woven silk ribbon? I have used steel wool to "dress" BMF, back when I did a number of scale aircraft models, and wanted to replicate a factory fresh all-metal airplane or two, but that was laying a straight "brushed" pattern across the foil, to suggest the rolling marks found on brand new aircraft aluminum of years past, but I would wonder if steel wool could be used on a mandrel anywhere near small enough to create a damascened pattern on BMF without simply tearing the foil apart on the sheet. As for those round tools with short glass fibers, I cannot imagine finding any of those nearly small enough to do realistic engine-turned patterns on a 1/25 scale model, and the problem of simply tearing up the foil would still be a hurdle to overcome. At NNLE a couple of years ago, some aftermarket outfit was selling decal sets for the Revell Kurtis midgets, some of which had bright gold numbers having a swirled, almost prismatic look to them that was quite realistic. Those were done to replicate the once-very popular gold leaf graphics and numbers on a lot of racecars, which had it's swirled, almost damascened appearance achieved by the signpainter using ordinary cotton balls to lightly scuff the actual gold leaf in rotary, swirled patterns, but those swirls were a good 2-3" in diameter back then. Art

In all this, it's often difficult to realize that for most people, LSR cars are actually rather obscure--sure, people know pretty much that there are guys out there who strive to go faster on land than anyone else before them--but that's very much where it ends for many. Now, had the LSR been in contention every year or so, instead of now seemingly decades between challenges, there's just not a lot of publicity surrounding this type of car, and when a new one crops up, not a lot of press interest either. I suspect that translates into projected rather poor sales for a new model kit of one. Art

As for the ICM kits, I wonder what all the unrest/upheaval in Ukraine (where ICM is located) will have on their production of model kits? Art

Yeah, those "FOOL" aftermarket hubcaps for Model T's and Model A's back in the 1960's were aggravating. Those happened simply because Ford Motor Company back in the 50's and early 60's simply refused to authorize or even license anything in a reproduction part that carried the Ford script. Art

Consider this: Every issue of this AMT kit is from the very same tooling, as done way back in 1987-88. While a model company might add something new in the way of smaller parts, or "delete" a part here or there (by gating off the runners to that/those parts, the basic kit tooling almost never changes. There was one change in the kit, however--I believe for the first reissue, and that was to eliminate the "molded-in" inside rear view mirror from the windshield--that after a chorus of complaints and the demise of a good many JoHan '62 Olds F85 kits, which windshield fit the Nova very nicely and didn't have that faux pas with the rear view mirror. Art

Not exactly "household" per se', but I do have a small stash of a certain type of office item that's gonna find use as part of a model before too long. Art

DTR's kits are merely the AMT Dirt Track Modified cars packaged under their own name. Art

Tobias was a builder of tube-framed dirt track race cars in the East back in the 60's and 70's, sort of the "AJ Watson" or "Frank Kurtis" of that type of dirt track racing. Art

One of the beauties of our language is the sheer flexibility of it--I suspect largely fostered and influenced by one Noah Webster (remember him? The man who created and codified "Webster's Dictionary of the American Language"?). In many ways, Webster freed us from many of the straight-laced norms of standard English, as written and spoken in the UK in his time (right after the end of our American Revolution. Our American adaptation of English has allowed us to not only create new words with almost anarchic abandon, but also to create new uses for words, seemingly with every generation coming along. Oh well! Art

I've "polished" the primer on every model car I've built since the first Micromesh polishing kits were marketed by Tom & Linda Gaffney (LMG Enterprises), back about 1980 or thereabouts. For "polishing" primer (I still prefer using automotive acrylic lacquer primer) I use a Micromesh 6000-grit polishing cloth with water--think of it as wet-sanding primer in scale. My philosophy? The smoother the plastic surface, the smoother the primer, the smoother my paintjobs come out, meaning a lot less polishing after the finish coats are applied. Art

Revell's Buttera T kits were tooled in the early-mid 1970's. The IRS in those kits is Jaguar E-type, which is what John Buttera used to create his '26 T street rod. As for dimensions, yes the chassis length was Model T based, and thus were pretty close to the standard 100" wheelbase of the Model T. Just to flesh this out a bit, Ford cars got successively longer after the demise of Model T production in 1927: 1928-31 Model A Fords had a 102" wheelbase, the '32 Ford went to 106", while the 1934-40 Ford rolled on 112". As for the stock tread width, that never changed on Ford cars from 1903-48: 56". With that in mind, it's quite possible to adapt most suspension setups, either stock or aftermarket, from any accurately scaled 1/25 scale kit of a Ford car from Model T through 1948 and have the wheels fit within the fenders, of course understanding that the widest tire Ford ever used on a stock production car in the years prior to the 1949 model year was 6 inches (6:00-16 tires were standard at Ford from 1936-48). Only the chassis/body/wheelbase lengths changed. Art

The AMT "Modified Stockers" were based on Tobias chassis from about 1975--the chassis are pretty much the same, only the body shells differed. Art

As it relates to automobiles, I'm pretty sure Ford Motor Company has a copyright to the name "Model T". Copyrights can go a whole lot longer than say a patent. Art

Motor City Resin Casters made (and may still make) a resin body for the 1948 Plymouth 4dr sedan. That car was pretty much exactly the same from Chrysler's resumption of civilian automobile production in the late summer of 1945 (my dad bought one of the first postwar Plymouths to arrive here in town) until the introduction of the 1949 Plymouths in the fall of 1948. Art

Johnson just relabled Future to better fit it into their line of liquid household supplies--same stuff as always. Art

Not to mention consistently accurate, straight strip stock anywhere from .005" to .250"?

In all this, sitting here in the quiet privacy of my own home, I keep coming back to what's really the fun, the challenge for me in this hobby: I can find something wrong, incorrectly dimensioned or just plain omitted from just about any of the several hundred kits in my "ready stash" (there's a lot more stored off-site). And yet, for me the challenge of correcting what I see as wrong, adding back what I see as missing is a tremendous part of the fun (as well as a lot of frustration) in any model I build--and that goes back a good 40-50 years now. Of course I'd like nothing better than to open a box to find a perfectly accurate model car kit (particularly if it's a subject that really trips my trigger) but after I pinch myself, I realize that more than likely I (or somebody else) will find at least a little niggle here or there. For me, a big part of the fun (and a challenge I accept readily BTW) of building any model car kit is spotting those problems (hopefully small and readily correctible) and then tackling the job of correcting them to the point that once built most people who see the finished car just assume that's the way the kit was molded/produced. BTW, I am not saying this to merely "gloss over" any kit with truly glaring errors!) However, with many kits, it can be like that cartoon lady "Maxine", who sits at the bar staring at her drink: "Some folks say my glass is half full, others tell me it's half empty--but either way, there's still room for more wine" (or did she really mean to say "whine"?). Art

Of course, this all depends on just what one needs styrene stock FOR. Sheet stock, of course has a multitude of uses, but unless one has the very precise saws with which to cut that into the myriad of small, thin strips to accurate dimensions, a large stock of sheet material is little more than that, a large stock of sheet material. It all depends, does it not, on what kind and type of projects a particular modeler has in mind, or so it would seem. (I tend to go to my two plastic storage boxes and dig though perhaps a hundred different Evergreen polybags to find that one size thin strip stock that will let me get to where I want to be on a project. Art