Art Anderson

Terry, I read the news article, and watched the video--what a great job you did as an ambassador for this hobby! Regards, Art

I wrote up a review of their Volvo P1800 for MCM, not published yet, but it is NICELY mastered, even though their casting techniques are not up to, say, Modelhaus standards. They are, though, still in business. Art

At my age, I am more than happy to cuddle up at home with a model car kit!

Ho-Hum! I wouldn't give Pep Boys the time of day, let alone darken their doorstep, given their treatment of a couple of employees who got called up for Desert Storm, PERIOD. Art

Pat, while I certainly respect your skills, and your expertise, trust me (as one formerly responsible for fire safety in a manufacturing plant, paint particulates, once collected in the ductwork of any exhaust system, IS a major source of fire hazards. That information comes from none other than Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, who specialize in commercial and industrial fire and casualty insurance. Art

I for one do believe that the filter is key, and very important to use. Please consider it. Overspray particulate is probably the biggest risk for fire over time. Art

Pete, Might I suggest using thicker material? That Model T brass radiator isn't at all a complicated shape--I would use at least 1/32" stock, and look at the narrow strips that K&S makes for making the sides and top of the radiator and top tank from that. That should eliminate your needing to use a jeweler's mallet to shape the stuff, just anneal, and bend over a form. As for "form", bear in mind that all craftsmen from the earliest days of the automobile, to modern model car scratchbuilders such as Sir Gerald Wingrove, always used some sort of form for shaping most body parts, and a radiator shell would have been formed on bending and rolling brakes, NOT with hammers. Art

I assume that your blower is of the "squirrel cage" type (just as with the blower for your furnace)? If so, mount that behind your spray area, with a good quality fiber element furnace filter in front of it, so that paint overspray gets trapped in the filter, and not allowed to coat the turbine of your blower, the inside of your vent duct, and as a sidelight, not stain the outside of your house. This is, BTW, how PACE builds their spray booths. Why the furnace filter IN FRONT of the blower turbine? Simple: Your goal with this exhaust system should be two-fold. First of course, you want the solvent fumes to go out of your work area (they aren't the best stuff to breathe, and are a fire/explosion hazard), and second, to remove the particulates (dried overspray) from your work room, while keeping them from lining the ductwork that directs the fumes to the outdoors. Paint overspray dust coating the inside of such a duct is potentially hazardous--it only takes a spark of static electricity, and that stuff can explode into flame in a NY Minute (just ask anyone who's seen or experienced an air duct fire in a factory or body shop (they do happen), and the cost of that air filter is FAR cheaper than repairing or replacing your house (and certainly less expensive than repairing YOU!). A $5 furnace filter will last for several model car paint jobs, which makes it cheap insurance (and keeps your wife or significant other happier as well). Art

Another thought here! For shearing thin brass, up to say, .010" thick, if you anneal it (heat to dull red heat, allow to cool!), you can use an ordinary office paper cutter, which works very much the same as any metal shear in larger shop applications, but will cut thin brass. Office paper cutters aren't particularly costly either--check your nearest office supply store (such as Office Max or Staples). Art

First, you mention working with brass "shim stock"? From my experience, brass shim stock (which incidently, K&S sells in a package of assorted thicknesses) is generally quite thin, starting at about .005" up to perhaps .010" to .015". This won't saw, simply because it's thinner than the spacing between the teeth of virtually any jeweler's saw blades. So, cutting it with shears is about the only way to cut it. Are you trying to cut narrow strips of the stuff? If so, expect it to curl, not only in the flat, but also "away" from the scissors or shears, but you should be able to cut it into straight strips by means of a fresh #11 Xacto blade and a stainless steel ruler, AGAINST a smooth, flat surface, such as a piece of fairly thick plate glass. Experienced scratchbuilders have used sheet brass for years, to make body panels, even complete car bodies--the legendary Gerald Wingrove in the UK is renowned for his model car bodies made by hammering out sheets of thin brass into shapes for all manner and era's of cars, in scale with this material. Perhaps you can elaborate a bit more on just what it is you are trying to make, surely someone on this board will be able to give you some guidance? Art

Back when I was resin-casting, I used a clear adhesion-promoting surfacer from SEM, which I found in a local dealer for body shop projects. Automotive soft bumper covers are--guess what? Urethane resin. And this is what they use to get paint to stick to those covers, even with the flexing they sustain just in ordinary daily driving (not impacts). I tried it, and it works. Art

Well, to take this back to the original topic title: Promo Kit.... There were promotional model car kits, and by that I don't mean an ordinarily-assembled promotional model being distributed in kit form. In 1963-64, AMT Corporation produced several Trophy Series models of Fords, including the first release of both their '32 Ford Victoria and the stock height '25 Model T Coupe, as promotional items (model kits) for Ford Motor Company--who distributed them through dealerships. Additionally, SMP (AMT's early on cousin) produced a promotional model kit (along with an assembled version) of the 1911 prototype Chevrolet. This kit was never sold through hobby shops in any form, Chevy Dealers only--and AMT was under contract provisions to destroy the tooling (under the watchful eye of Chevrolet representatives) once the production run was completed. Art

Here's the link to an album of Hudson pics I shot at the Hostetler Hudson Museum in Shipshewanna IN, in September 2011. The first pics in the album are of a walkaraound of the 308cid Twin H-Power engine. http://public.fotki.com/modlrA/hostetler-hudson-museum/museum-display-09311/ Art

I had one of those, back about 55yrs ago! Cost me all of 50-cents, and a Post Toasties boxtop! Art

Jacen, the tire bulge at the contact point would be very possible, I'm quite sure. However, I wonder how that would play out in actual practice (it has been done, in the past, with 1/48 scale model aircraft tires, and apparently didn't cause enough stir for more than just a very few kits made with tires done that way. Art

Except, that the more oblique the angle of a surface is to the raised detail on a mold one of two things: Either that detailing gets badly munged in order to be able to pull a half circle part out of a half-circle mold, or the steel tooling will merely shred the hard styrene unacceptably. Indidently, this is the exact same reason that model car body tooling has to be itself, multi-piece--as if it weren't, the step of pulling that styrene body out of a one-piece cavity would simply tear off the likes of door handles, side trim, even gently engraved badges and scripts. Please keep in mind, with styrene injection molded kits, we are NOT talking about flexible rubber molds here. Art

Ahhh, but to play the "Devil's Advocate", I can well imagine that any product or brand manager would look at that and wonder why--considering how loathing model car builders are of multipiece body shells. And, I can't visualize many model builders being enamored with the idea of having to clean up all those joints after assembling all those parts. Art

The normally available (in the hobby anyway) "numbered drills" come in US wire sizes, which are expressed in decimals (thousandths) of an inch. For really small metric drills, it might well be better to have a set of those tip-cleaning drill bits. Art

John, There is a vast difference between molding an aircraft fuselage in two halves, with relatively faint engravings, and a tire having the intricate, and fairly deep grooved tread patterns in hard styrene. I'm not saying it could not be done, but I have pointed out that such a tire mold for making styrene street automobile or truck tires would have to have many more segments than any aircraft fuselage, in order to just get the tire out of the molds once cooled and hardened. Styrene is not at all flexible, and it won't move sideways out of the way of engraved tooling as will either a soft PVC or neoprene rubber. Just take a good look at the tires in any Italeri car kit having styrene tires, you will see what I mean. And in addition, the tooling, and possibly the production costs as well, could very well be more than for any one-piece body shell--and that mold is the most expensive tooling in just about any model car kit. Art

How much are you willing to pay for accurately done street tires made in styrene! That tooling alone, to create anything like an accurate tread pattern would most likely involve a very complex mold, with at least 8 moving sections--now reproduce that tool into a multiple mold base large enough to mold more than one set of tires at a time. And, I dare not mention, do I, the problems of mold alignments and parting lines? Don't confuse this with making hard styrene military combat tires--they don't have anything like the intricate tread pattern of any street tires. Art

No more and no less than a plastic bodied Corvette with a plastic chassis and engine!

AMT Corporation first tooled up their '53 Corvette kit in the middle 1970's,, with a '55 variant coming out a year or so later. In keeping with the times, which were increasingly difficult for plastic model companies, particularly where cars were concerned, given the incessant recessions of that decade, along with inflation which hit the model kit business pretty hard, AMT didn't do their best work with this kit--lots of niggling problems with it. AMT/Ertl, in the 1990's, in keeping with the craze at that time for anything that was "retro", produced a line of "retro-promo's" of cars that AMT Corporation either did, or would have done, back in the days when the particular car subjects were new cars. One of those was a "retro-promo" 1953 Corvette, which was later released as a snap kit. It's actually quite nicely done, and represents the actual car very well. One thing to keep in mind here: While virtually every era and year of Corvette has been done in model form, and while PMC (Product Miniatures Company) did a promotional model/snap kit of the '53 Corvette back in the day, it was really quite crude even for the time. Ideal Toy Corporation did a sorta kit of that first Vette in a much larger scale, also not very well done, certainly not by the standards we find acceptable today. Other than a stab here or there in toys, the '53 didn't see a reasonable model kit until about 1975 or so, with the above mentioned AMT kit. It was Monogram who really stepped up to the plate with a decently done '53 Corvette, in styrene, with a diecast body and hood, in time for Christmas 1977. While the diecast body shell idea ('56 TBird, '48 MG-TC, '48 Jaguar XK-120 and a couple of Classic Era luxury car kits from Monogram used this approach) seemed to make sense in that era of rapidly rising crude oil prices (with styrene price increases matching that), the diecast body thing never really caught on. In 1984, Monogram reissued their 1/24 scale '53 Vette, this time having the body shell and hood shot in styrene, which worked a lot better with the styrene chassis and running gear--and it is a very nicely done kit. However, Monogram, by tradition going back to the early 1960's, concentrated on 1/24 scale for reasons best known to them--and Revell-Monogram did not produce any new model car kit under the Monogram label in 1/25th scale until the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible kit came out in early September 1992. Art

First of all, virtually every model company from the US used (and AMT, Revell Monogram, and Moebius certainly still do) use a standard tire, or series of tires in their model car kits. That is something which goes all the way back to 1958 and the first AMT 3in1 Customizing kits, carried forward into their Trophy Series kits as well. With the rise of the Japanese model kit industry in the 1970's, once they began doing, seriously. model car kits, companies such as Tamiya, Hasegawa, Aoshima and most all the others, went to outside suppliers for their tires--my understanding is that Shuzoka City, Japan was at one time, heavily dotted with small, almost mom-and-pop operations with perhaps a couple of small molding machines, producing both wheels and tires. Now, enter a bit of tradition here, if I may: With any mass-produced model car kit, tooling for the tires is expensive, often second only to the multiple slide tooling used to create the one-piece body shells we all have preferred since AMT started making model car kits seriously back in 1958. In addition, model car kit tires in just about every brand of kit today, with the exception of those which come from Italeri tooling, are soft material, not hard styrene, in order to give us tires that have at least some semblance of tread detail. In serious mass production, in-house (which is how AMT/Round2, Revell, and Moebius kits in the US, and I suspect Revell of Germany in Europe) tires tend to be made in molds (dies if you will) which produce upwards of 48 tires at a single cycle of the mold machine, and using PVC (Vinyl) which is a completely different plastic material than the kit itself is molded in. This means a dedicated molding machine (or machines) which do nothing but mold tires. Now, with a tire mold that can cost 10's of thousands of dollars to cut, and a very large injection molding machine that likely can cost upwards of a million dollars new, that's a very serious investment, is it not? To this, add in that PVC once cooled enough to be demolded (PVC, just like styrene, is heated until molten to about the consistency of pancake syrup for injecting, is actually quite abrasive when it must slide sideways against even hardened steel, which is what happens when the tire tread area is pulled or pushed out of those mold cavitites. In the roughly three years that I was involved in product development for Johnny Lightning diecast models at Playing Mantis, we faced having to replace several tire tools which made the soft PVC "scale appearing" tires we used in many programs--even those tiny tire molds were expensive, generally about twice the cost of the entire diecast and plastic tools used to make any one single JL car--generally after about 1 million cycles or so. The same was, and likely still is, true of larger 1/25 scale PVC tires. Now, I know that the Japanese companies make some superlative tires for their kits--but with them, generally speaking, cost has been no object (for decades, US companies had to live with very rigid price points for a model car or truck kit, just now beginning to go away with the elimination of mass merchants from the equation) given that traditionally, Japanese manufacturers could price any new kit based largely on its development cost, rather than being constrained by some artificial price structure dictated by a big-box retailer. Hence, they have been able to use some synthetic rubber or another, which makes for a really gorgeous tire, but at both a higher cost for the tooling, as well as a slower production rate in all likelihood. In addition, neoprene rubber (which I suspect is what Japanese kit makers have used all along) doesn't have nearly the life of PVC--I, along with others, have witnessed those beautiful rubber tires drying out, splitting and cracking over the years--something that seldom has been an issue with PVC tires. Some have said, in this thread even, "Why not highly detailed hard styrene tires?" Well, for starters, styrene plastic cannot be pulled out of a mold having engraving making recessed, even raised details, as styrene plastic, once cooled to demolding, will not flex out of the way of any engraving, if pulled at all sideways against that engraving. To come up with anything like accurate tread detail in a hard styrene tire, even were it made in two pieces to be glued together, would require a mold made of multiple segments around the tread. That, if done to any acceptable standard of mold alignment to minimize or eliminate mold parting lines around that tread would be frightfully expensive--so how many more $$ is anyone of us willing to pay for a car kit having such tires? My suggestion would be that the marketplace (you, me and the other guys too) would scream like so many stuck pigs, and likely vote with our feet, and our dollars elsewhere. So, I see it as a tough compromise, but a compromise none the less. Art

Someone mentioned "Fair Use" earlier--and based on the annual statement I get from Purdue University, where I work, (on staff, not faculty) I read that to mean that I can copy, in all fairness, any printed matter (or for that matter, online matter) for my own personal use (say, pics I download from the Web, scan from a book or magazine), at my own workbench, as reference material. I can even share that matter in a talk given in a meeting of my model car club or with others, as long as I acknowledge the source (who created it in the first place, or where it was found --print, recorded, or posted online somewhere). However, under copyright law, I am under an obligation to acknowledge the creator of such material, that it is borrowed for the purpose of such presentations. I am not permitted to just insert say, written matter in some sort of writing I may do for public consumption (or for that matter, any work that I might present in a classroom) as my own work. That is what is called "plagiarism" (a word which most all of us here surely heard in High School when assigned to write a theme for English Class, or a term paper for a history class. (remember having to learn how to add "footnotes" and a bibliography at the end of a term paper?) To translate this into our hobby, model cars, I can certainly create in miniature, for my own use, an exact scale model of any car ever produced, as long as it's done solely for myself, even displayed at a contest or NNL solely by myself, and not reproduced by myself (or anyone else) for profit. In other words, I am not allowed, under law, to just pass off something that someone else has written, photographed, or sculpted (after all, automobiles are considered a form of sculpture) as my own original creative work. And, seriously, that is as it should be, IMHO. With such as the automobile, there is another "fly in the oinment", so to speak: Trademarks. Arguably the two most famous automotive trademarks in the US are the Chevrolet "Bowtie" and the Ford "Script". Trademarks are valuable, they do put the stamp of the manufacturer (or even retailer) on their product, their place(s) of business, for example. Imagine the chaos that would result if anyone could put those, or any other registered trademark on just anything, willy-nilly! The same thing with patents. A patent is granted to the inventor (or inventors, or even the employer of the inventor(s) of any form of technology as recognition that the person or persons who created that technology has the exclusive right, for a specified period of time, to all income (profts) from their invention--this was set into law very early on in this country, to encourage invention, to encourage creativity--and given the sheer number (in the millions literally!) of patents issued by the US Patent Office since the beginnings of this republic over 220 years ago, it has worked to the advantage of all who live in the US. The same can be said of both copyrights and trademarks: "Why bother to create something new if there is no financial reward that can be assured to the person(s) who created whatever-it-is-that-was-created for at least some reasonable period of years?" So, yes, while you, I, and the other guys (or gals) certainly can copy something for our own personal use, which can mean sharing with others as a means of advancing our art, our creativity (within limitations for sure), we have no right to profit from those copies (meaning selling copies of someone else's work as if they were our own creation), until the end of the period of time that those created items has expired. You and I, and other model builders can certainly build our own rendition of any car, in miniature form, for our own use, even our own display at public contests or model car shows, as our own work, with no real concern that some lawyer is going to come after us for such work. It's only if I, for example, were to take that miniature creation, sell copies of it to others, that I expose myself to any sort of liability. One last thing in this all-too-long essay here: The courts have held, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, that a copyright or trademark holder MUST protect their rights, their copyrights and trademarks against any and all who might use them for their profit, or risk losing all rights to the items in question, period. That's why model companies are compelled to gain licensing approval from whatever company, or whomever owns that original trademark or copyright. And it doesn't matter what the medium is in which such copies are produced--it is a blanket thing. It doesn't matter if it's a Chevrolet front fender, original-style replacement engine parts, a Zippo Lighter with say, "Harley Davidson" on it, even molded candies, all that stuff and more is covered by those court decisions. End of rant. Art

Unimat 1's are getting pretty hard to find I think--seeing as how that series of lathe (if I am thinking the right Unimat model here) pretty much went away about 20-25 years ago, perhaps making accessories hard to find for it. IIRC, you are referring to the early style Unimat, which had round, tubular ways, which lacked the stiffness of solid milled ways. Art