Art Anderson

Not to mention the sheer thousands of parts, most of them so miniscule as to almost require a microscope and micro-surgery tools to build! Art

I'll second that on the Hobbytown USA in Indianapolis. That is one very nicely stocked hobby shop, and they stock the full line of both Evergeen and Plastruct styrene shapes. Art

"Supplies" such as Evergreen and Plastruct styrene strips, sheets and shapes are very much specialty items, and as such are pretty much out of the realm of what stores such as Michael's, Hobby Lobby or AC Moore are going to stock--given that these stores cater primarily to women "crafters"; model kits and basic supplies being but a sideline (an important sideline for Hobby Lobby of course, but nonetheless not a major department for them). As Bill suggested, online works. If you cannot get to a regular hobby shop carrying these supplies, there is one out there who deals online, Wm. K. Walthers www.walthers.com Walthers will ship directly to you and also guide you to a local shop near you who buys from them. And, they do stock the entire range of Evergreen styrene. Art

If one really thinks about it, were there to be a model car kit, any model car kit, that was completely and totally accurate down to a gnat's whisker what would we complain about, huh? (perhaps that it had so many tiny, thin, almost unworkable parts? Hmmmm.) Art

I shoulda said 1974--after all, I have one of the kits in plain view in my workroom! Art

I used to keep a supply of toothpicks handy. To "dull them", I simply dipped the ends of them into the resin, and then set them aside. When cured out, they had just the tiniest, but smooth, ball end on them. Using such instruments, the quickest way to get rid of those little bubbles in wheel rim edges and lug nut detail, is to simply use such blunted toothpick to "chase" the air bubbles out of where they are being trapped. Simply sliding the end of such a toothpick around the circumference of the wheel rim, down all the way into the edge generally got rid of the problem there, and simply pressing the toothpick into the lug nut details in the mold did the same thing there as well. One of the keys is to do this quickly, before the resin starts to "kick" from liquid to gel to hard solid. Also, heating the molds beforehand only exacerbates this air bubble problem, as the warmer the mold and/or resin is, the faster the resin kicks, starts to cure. If anything, keeping the resin cooler can greatly extend its working time. Art

1973, done from the tooling for the last year Barracuda promotional model from MPC. Art

Nope, not at all. Art

And yet, the International Prostar kit (just as with its predecessor Lonestar!) was created with a TON of information, including CAD files, from Navistar. Art

Harry, To make such a blanket statement without even deigning to say just what kit it is that twisted your crank? I'd have thought you'd be more specific? Art

Well, Of course the plaintiff, attorney, and trial were held in....California. Art

Those were a short series of 1/24 scale curbside kits done in the 1960's (I believe first as slot car bodies--then as complete but fairly simple kits). AMT Corporation teamed up with the Frog model company out of the UK to share some tooling (or at least bagged model kit shots) back and forth, very much the way Airfix worked both directions with MPC-Craftmaster in the same time period. Art

I've simply settled on correcting the tweezers myself! How? Easy--I take a fresh piece of 400-grit Wet or Dry sandpaper and score a straight line on the back side of it with Xacto knife and straightedge. Then I fold the sandpaper "backward" with some CA glue on the back side of the paper--and press it flat. Once the CA is hard, I simply place this double-sided sandpaper between the "points" of a pair of tweezers, pinch them together (but not super-tightly!), and sand both faces of the tweezers until the mating surfaces are paralel. Been using this little trick for more years that I care to remember--works for me every time. Art

Yes, Harry..... In the 'teens (a century ago) wooden "artillery" wheels were almost universally standard among at least American cars--but companies such as Rudge-Whitworth, Buffalo and Dayton Wheel were offering wire wheels as aftermarket (and many automakers included such wheels in their catalogs as optional factory equipment. Now, are you gonna detail the Stutz transaxle (the first generation Stutz cars had their gearboxes mounted to the differential--apparently Harry C. Stutz never heard of "unsprung weight"!). Also the brakes were "external contracting band" brakes, actuated by pull rods which brought a lined, sprint-steel band into solid contact with the outside of the brake drum. Sometime when you get to Indianapolis, you ought to check out the Stutz Office Condiminiums--located in the restored Stutz Factory, which is just off I-65 north of the center of the city. There are always a few restored Stutz automobiles on display in the main floor lobby. Art

Unless the "gluing" surface is really thin (not generally the case with a resin body shell--those tend to be as thick as a regular styrene body shell), I've had great success with CA glue and accelerator in repairing, even modifying resin bodies. One thing about CA glues is, they bond polyurethane resin very tightly, and very strong, and once cured, any glue "bead" showing can be worked down easily with needle files and some 400-grit sandpaper. Art

Bill, Not meaning to belabor the point here, but I've just been looking at my Standard Catalog Of American Cars 1946-1975, which has any number of contemporary photo's of '46-48 Fords, taken from angles low enough to clearly see the relationship of the bottom of the running boards (which were enclosed behind doors extended down and outward to cover them by 1941) to the wheel centerlines. The line of the bottoms of the fenders and the running board/bottom edge of the doors was actually at or slightly ABOVE the centerline of the wheels. Given the wheel diameter of 16", plus the fairly tall 6:00-16 tires, that puts the bottom edge of the bodywork a good 12-13 inches off the pavement. Bearing in mind that the '48 Ford was the final extension of that traditional Ford transverse spring/solid beam front axle suspension system, and still stuck with the then deceased Henry Ford's belief that a Ford car should be able to transverse just about any kind of road presented to it, that does not seem to be at all an excessive ride height. That said, with model car kits, "ride height" can be all over the place, if for no other reason than most American model companies tend to work with kit tires from a rather set library of model car tires, rather than tool up new tires every time they create a new model kit. Now that worked as long as real American cars rolled down the road on 14" or 15" tires, with aspect ratios that did not vary more than perhaps an inch up or down, but that practice also lead to some model cars actually riding too low for scale--for example, EVERY AMT '32-'40 Ford kit comes equipped with 15" late 1950's tires for their stock option, while the Deuce used 18" rims, '34 Fords rolled on 17" wheels, and all 1935-40 Fords wore 16" rubber from the factory. So, that made those model kits actually sit a fair bit lower to the road in their stock form than scale would indicate. Another factor has always been the lack of model car tires ability to "squish" down under the weight of the car, as do real tires--that alone can reduce the curbside ride height of the actual car by upwards of 2" in a lot of cases--but how to correct that? Art

The active ingredient in Bleche White is trisodium phosphate, which is a water-soluble phosphate detergent.. "TSP" is readily available in the cleaning supply section of any supermarket--look for "Spic N Span"--same stuff, same result, and not a particularly dangerous "chemical" either. Art

Not really! Having grown up in the 50's,. cars rode a lot higher than in years later, due to the more severe departure angles needed to clear driveways etc. Art

And yet, if one looks at contemporary pics of any real car of the 1950's, the rocker panels are a good bit higher than what one might see today. Those old soft springs of the 1950's did settle quite a bit in a year or so of daily drivihng! Art (speaking as one who grew up in the 1950's!)

Sorry, but licensing, no matter for what, adds cost to a model car kit. A dime here, a dime there, pretty soon you're talking significant money with a model kit. Art

Exhaust system built! Six pieces of Evergreen 3/32 inch tubing, plus a scratchbuilt muffler, plus some heating with a BIC lighter: Art

It must have been both exciting and frightening (perhaps at the same time) to have been a product manager for a model company back in the 1950's and 60's--pick a winner and you were the company hero--but choose to do a kit subject that was a "turkey" and you'd likely become the "goat"--perhaps preparing a new resume' to attract your next employer. I suspect that the truth really was, even as late as 1960, that nobody in that young plastic model kit industry really knew just what subject(s) would push the "hot button" with modelers--who back then were primarily kids, boys from the age of perhaps 9 or 10 to about 15 or 16 or thereabouts. Of course, model kits of any year's new cars were already known sellers, but what about other automotive subjects? Looking back, subjects beyond what Detroit was showing off every fall (along with a few model kits of older cars that were then "iconic" in the hot rodding and custom car world) must have been, at best, a ###### shoot--their ultimate popularity being about as predictable as a rolling of the dice or pitching pennies against a brick wall out on the sidewalk. Even saying that, I'm pretty sure that many, if not most, new model car subjects sold at least enough to recoup their tooling cost, but there surely were some that simply "laid an egg"--I was told by AMT Corporation managers that their '53 Studebaker Commander Starliner and it's companion, the '63 Avanti sold very poorly when first released circa 1964, enough so that it was a good 10 years before either was reissued--and then again--that tooling sat on the shelves for another dozen or so years. But, alongside that, AMT's original 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop Trophy Series kit remained in continuous production from early 1962 through at least 1996--a run of 34 years and likely several million kits produced over that stretch of time. Other kit subjects turned out to be wildly popular for a few years--based I suppose on the popularity of the real thing, only to fall by the wayside as fascination for the real thing faded away in the public's consciousness. Art

From my perspective: Challenger I was one of the first three "modern-era" 1/25 scale kits brought out in the fall of 1961 (the other two were their '56 Ford F-100, and Ed Roth's "Outlaw". Now, of course, Revell's people could only guesstimate the sales impact of each one, that early in the game, but from what I've ever seen, taht Ford pickup and The Outlaw far, FAR outsold Challenger 1 kit. As for TV-Tommy Ivo's "Showboat"--that one came out at a time when model car builders were hungry as all get-out for dragsters, ANY dragster--and it too sold pretty well. If nothing else, I'd be pretty certain that seeing as almost no other Land Speed Record car was ever produced in kit form, at least not to the level of Challenger I--somebody someplace got the message that model kits of such cars, wild and neat as they might be, were seldom seen away from places such as the Bonneville Salt Flats, and in general received rather sparse notice in the press, both the news media and car enthusiast publications. Art

That's the result of older PVC (vinyl) tires and styrene plastic. A bit of my history here: In February 1976, I took a position as the Human Resources Director (Personnel it was called back then) at an Essex Wire Division of United Technologies Wire Assembly Plant here in Lafayette (we built the dashboard wiring harnesses for the old large Thunderbird and Lincoln Continental Mk IV and Mk V along with taillight harnesses for Pintos and Mustangs at the time). In early 1974, OSHA declared PVC Monomer (the plasticizer chemical that makes normally hard vinyl soft and rubber-like) to be carcinogenic, which was a real hazard, as the PVC pellets we were using contained a lot of the stuff, and it gassed out when melted in the injection-molders used to mold PVC plugs onto the ends of wiring harness subassemblies. A major part of my job there was to keep our workers informed of the hazard, and what had been done to eliminate it from our factories--and advise new employees coming on as to the problem as well--so I necessarily had to become well-informed on the subject. Fortunately for all concerned, the chemical and plastics industry came up with a very acceptable method of recapturing the excess monomer gas in the manufacturing process for PVC feed stock pellets, and the hazardous out-gassing quickly became a non-issue. This was the same time-frame when the once-dreaded "Revell Tire Disease" was a constant headache for modelers--Revell's tires would literally dissolve the rims of model car wheels, sometimes in a matter of a few months after assembly, but all the other model kit manufacturers suffered the same problem to at least some degree. Revell and AMT both "solved" the problem by going to two-piece hard polypropylene plastic for their tires (which still are found in old kits from that time frame, BTW, and some reissued kits were using those as late as the early 1990's. The recapturing technology very much eliminated the carcinogenic hazard to workers in factories, and as a further benefit, tended to greatly reduce the possibility of the monomer from being concentrated enough in our 1/25 scale model tires so as to cause serious "leaching" of that stuff out and into the surface of styrene plastic--which pretty much ended the problem as long as the OSHA regulations were followed carefully. While the problem went away pretty much as we US modelers are concerned, it's still a periodic problem with Chinese manufacturers, as apparently the regulatory process in China (and probably other 3rd world Pacific Rim countries as well where environmental and occupational hazard regulations are much more lax and often are not seriously obeyed at some point in manufacturing processes) when a feedstock manufacturer slips in old-formula PVC pellets to their customers (the factories who make the model car kits over there that we like to build). Thus, the periodic problem crops up in some plastic kits every so often (and raises management's blood pressure exponentially!), even though a PVC-Monomer free plastic formula is clearly specified. The old-formula PVC monomer tends to leach out of the tires of those older kits (sometimes to the point of leaving an oily-appearing film on them!) and if it contacts styrene plastic parts, even decals and even the prepainted surfaces of a prepainted kit, and the offending tire simply puts its imprint on those parts, as the monomer softens styrene and paint every bit as well as it does hard PVC. (Incidently, do not wrap model kit parts in Saran or other clear "Cling" food wrap--that stuff is soft PVC made with PVC Monomer, and it WILL attack styrene and painted surfaces--such as clear-coated chrome parts trees!). As Bill Engwer stated, the best protection against having a vinyl tire "eat" into a styrene wheel is to wrap a band of Bare Metal Foil around the rim before you mount the tire on it. Any metal is a perfect barrier against the possibility of PVC Monomer still being present in the tires in enough concentration to seriously damage the rims. Also, when buying an older model kit (lots of those kits from the 60's and early 70's out there on vendors' tables at model car shows!), take the time to put the tires in a small Ziploc bag (Ziploc bags are made from polyethylene plastic, and are very resistant to PVC monomer--I've never had a problem with any tires I've packaged thus, even though the plastic bag itself inevitably will touch, lay right up against, the styrene plastic parts in the kit box. A perplexing problem with a very simple solution. Art

Ford actually pioneered the idea of a panel delivery-to-steel station wagon in 1933-34, when they took on an order for a couple of hundred such versions of their 1/2 ton Panel Delivery truck from the US Forest Service. Apparently Old Henry didn't see a potential market for an all-steel station wagon, so they were apparently never cataloged as a regular production Ford vehicle though. Proctor-Keefe did the conversions for Ford--and what did they name them? "Ranger"! In the Crestline book "Ford Trucks from 1905, there are a couple of pictures of one. Art