Art Anderson

Bill, While someone has already suggested 1965, I have to add this one. Let's try 1949: FoMoCo--Ford, Mercury and Lincoln, all new bodies, new chassis. GM (Cadillac was introduced late for 1948, but predicted 1949 for GM's entire line), Chevrolet, Pontiac Oldsmobile and Buick got all new body shells. Chrysler: Chrysler Imperial, Chrysler, DeSoto, Dodge and Plymouth all got new body shells. In addition, Nash also got all new body shells for 1949. Art

While not directly involving the Detroit Big Three, it does appear that the Federal Government is setting the tune by which any financial aid to GM, Ford and Chrysler might work: The Government and Federal Reserve rescue of Citigroup involves, in addition to billions in cash (to shore up the bank's reserves) and billions more in guarrantees. But, the unique thing, or so it seems to me, is that in exchange, the government will directly be overseeing the operations of the bank, regulating the loan risks Citi will be allowed to take on, and have pretty much the final say over executive compensation and bonuses, how much, and when and why. Could we see government overseers in the executive suites in Detroit? Art

Ford trucks built in Canada were badged and trimmed as Mercury Trucks for about 25 yrs or so. Art

"_________ builds great cars (?) "When better cars are built ___________ will build them" (?) and this one Andy! "The Power Of The Hour" ? Art

One of the biggest obstacles to more frequent restyling of today's cars is all the regulations that exist today, but weren't in place 50 years ago. This, added to the smaller numbers of any individual body shell design that are produced annually, makes it imperitave to run a particular body shell/basic styling for multiple years. Time was when a Chevrolet, for example, was but one basic body shell, shuffle the B-post, you get your choice of 2- or 4dr sedan. Revamp the structural members of the body behind the B-post of a sedan shell, give it a much heavier but short B-post, and you get a convertible--add a steel top to that, you got a hardtop. Move the stub B-post forward, create a new rear quarter panel, add a different top stamping, you got a 4dr hardtop. Take a sedan body, punch out a new rear structure eliminating the trunk, making a second set of C-pillars, stamp out a long roof and you got a station wagon (using basically the same door structure, with the rear side doors on a 4dr wagon having different window frame stampings, for the square shape needed under that straight and level long roof). Stamp a new rear wall and B-posts, add a severely truncated roof, and you got an El Camino (this is all from 1959-60, it wasn't all that much different in earlier years, and only slightly modified technology well into the 1970's). And then, for that '59 Chevy, keep in mind that you had only to sell a million or so (1959 Chevy was the last year of "one size fits all" Chevies, and something like 1.2 million were produced), and it was pretty easy to amortize the body tooling. Engines and chassis remained the same from 1959-64, with only minor variations in either. But, with the advent of smaller cars, a still-perceived (and actual) demand for larger cars still, plus the consumer demand for more and more choice, then the tooling has still to run to that million or more mark before the costs associated with its creation are paid back, or else kick up the selling price FOB the end of the assembly line accordingly. Now, add in all the stuff that is required by law and regulations: Just look under the hood of a modern car, any of them, and note how crammed it is under there, and I'm not talking just about mechanical stuff--there's all manner of components and engineering features having very little to do with the basic job of moving that car down the road--much of it, and perhaps the most expensive to design and engineer is all the crash-resistant stuff. Not that any of the safety engineering now required (and backed up by crash-testing experimental and pre-production prototypes!) is bad, no it's not. Today, the accident fatality rate in the US is about half what it was in 1959--roughly the same number of fatalities, but today spread across perhaps twice as many cars (US population has nearly doubled in the last 50 years as well!). But, it all costs money, BIG money to do these things, to make the much safer cars we can get today. While I'd hate to have a headon in any car period, if I must, I sure wouldn't want to meet someone headon with a '59 Chevy--do that hard enough, and the engine will be right beside me in the front seat, but I wouldn't care anymore, my chest would be crushed by the rigid steering wheel, perhaps the shaft inside the steering column speared through my heart. Or, my front seat passenger likely would have punched through the windshield with his or her head, likely with fatal results as well. But today, it takes more than a couple of years for any automaker to get back their development costs, even with sophisticated computer technology taking much of the labor costs out of design, engineering, and development, and robotics doing much of the grunt work on the production lines (and even the high-tech equipment now in use had to be amortized as well, hopefully before it went obsolete by something newer and better). Now, add this to all the legacy costs which GM, Ford and Chrysler still must bear, AND things like wage/labor costs far higher than their newer US-factory competitors, and the much higher property taxes assessed in older cities of the Great Lakes States (Even though property tax breaks are used as an incentive to get a transplant factory sited in a town, believe me, as soon as the announcement gets made of the new auto plant coming in, the city fathers get dollar signs in their eyes!!!), and it's little wonder that costs are so outrageously high. Of course, the mega millions laid out to top execs are a problem, but beyond the obvious message they send, they aren't the major problem. Art

Bill, In truth, General Motors started the industry trend to body sharing back in 1929, when the A body series was developed, for Chevrolet and the then-new Pontiac. Starting in 1933, at the insistence of Harley Earl, the A-B-C body sharing plan developed at GM. The story of 1959-60 GM bodies is that they were born out of necessity, time rather than money--as GM Styling had already used up a full year of the styling lead time for '59, when the stylists saw the '57 Chrysler line in factory storage lots (September '56) and realized they'd been had, big time. Trouble was, with body sharing (which BTW, Ford did very successfully for years with the Fox platform (all the way from Fairmonts to Lincoln Continental Mk VII), and the Taurus/Sable for years, when cars got slimmed down, there just wasn't much wiggle room for creating those distinctive styling wrinkles in lower body sheet metal to truly differentiate one from another, just the grilles and rear fascia. As for the Olds vs Chevy 350 thing, I found that one ludicrous to the extreme! After all, Chrysler had been using corporate engines from the late 1950's, and in the 60's, the 413 and it's later offspring the 440 were available all the way from Imperial down to Plymouth, and Ford did likewise, but a bit later, and NOBODY filed a lawsuit such as this over that issue with either company. As for Oldsmobile, that was their weakest line always--fewest and smallest dealers and dealerships. Even though the Cutlass was a sales superstar for several years, the senior Oldsmobiles really suffered sales-wise from the late 60's onward. Even "This is not your father's Oldsmobile" was little more than an acknowledgment that Oldsmobile was a car for the middle aged and elderly, and it's pretty hard to sell a young person an old person's (in their estimation anyway) car. Oldsmobile was periodically on the chopping block, in the teens, in the 20's, even in the early 30's. Another problem for Olds was that which has always plagued the mid-price range--too many makes out there, particularly if sales go sour for awhile--that's what took most of the mid price makes out of the business in the 30's, for example. For a few dollars more, you could get a Buick, and for a few dollars less, a Chevy or a Pontiac. It may be similar for Pontiac--after all, since 1932, a Pontiac has been more or less, a gussied up Chevy, albeit with different engines for most of its history. Art

Torino, Believe it or not, those springs are very close to the drawings of the real truck, and the few pics of that truck (real one is fitted with a 1.5 ton grain body), so I'm not too worried. During the building of the gasoline tanker body, I did do some calculating as to the volume of gasoline and kerosene this tank would hold (Always wondered if I would ever use the formula for determining the volume of a cylinder when I was a Freshman in HS!!!). I came up with 400 gallons of gasoline (the larger section of the tank) and 125 gallons of kerosene (the short, rear section of the tank body). That volume of these two fuels would weigh in at just 2800lbs. Give another 1000 lbs for the tank and the wooden framing, and it's all well within the load range of that suspension (realize that a closed-body luxury car of the day could weigh in around 4500lbs WITHOUT fluids or 7 full grown adults as passengers, on much lighter springs, add luggage for them, and you had a pretty hefty load right there), the weights for a truck such as this aren't out of line, I don't think. The bigger issue would have been tires and brakes. Even though the relatively anemic Oldsmobile 4cyl engine had about 50hp, with that much load, it wouldn't have been any speed demon--loaded, that engine was probably out of breath under a full load. Likely, a truck such as this would have been in city delivery service only, gasoline deliveries to farmers in their infance (internal combustion farm tractors just then coming into use--"Daisy and Dolly" were still pulling the plows and wagons down on most farms), very little open road deliveries would have been done. Almost all gasoline and oil shipping between towns and cities was still by railroad tank car, which was then drained either into some sort of bulk tank operation, or the tank car just sat on a siding until emptied into trucks such as this. Top speed on a truck like this would have been pushing it to top 25mph, and under load, in city traffic, perhaps 20mph in good tune was all that could be had, Tires such as these were heavy duty construction--8-10 plies of heavy cotton cord in the casing, on "clincher rims" (rims that literally clinched the tire bead, unlike the style of tire bead/wheel rim we see today), and carrying 80-90psi to support such a load. Brakes were an even more "iffy" proposition! This truck was equipped with external contracting bands on the rear brake drums, mechanically actuated by a brake pedal, there being internal expanding brake shoes in the same drums for emergency use, mechanical as well, controlled by a brake lever in the cab--actuated by the "armstrong method". Hydraulic brakes had yet to be introduced into passenger automobiles--Duesenberg did that in 1921, with the first Duesenberg Model A, and air brakes, while already in almost universal railroad use, had yet to be scaled down to fit motor trucks for the road. Runaway trucks, even in the city, were a constant worry! Steering was by non-reversible (meaning the driver had to physically steer the truck around a corner, and then steer, by arm strength alone, out of the turn, no letting one's hands slip on the steering wheel as caster & camber joined up to bring the front wheels back straight!) worm and sector steering gears. So, driving a truck like this, fully loaded, even in town was a full-time job, and one NOT for "97lb weaklings" or the faint of heart! Art

Harry, Believe it or not, this project has come to the point of beginning to think about what level of finish. I am pretty certain that in 1920, such a truck wouldn't have had the hign, concours finish of say, a 21st Century restoration, but it wouldn't have been on its last legs to the scrapyard either (after all, that was an era of company pride in the vehicle). Tempering my usual deal of a show car finish is all the wood there--the biggest reason for it was to get a wood grain surface after painting, but that could be enhanced by a lightly applied patina of road dirt. So, I am in the midst of thinking on this. Art

To paraphrase some California winery's slogan: "I'll finish no model until its time" Art

Harry, There is no guarrantee whatsoever, short of intensive government intervention, to the point of making say, GM, some sort of government agency (those do have unlimited life!) that whatever is extended to them won't end up failing. That's why interest rates in the first place--the "rental of the money" of course, but also the risks involved (will the money eventually get paid back?). And as for putting all the unemployed to work, creating all these notions of some magical, almost instantaneous sources of "alternative energy" is pretty much the "pie in the sky" stuff politicians and government nabobs love to spout out. It often seems to me like the promise of a "free lunch" at times. As a parallel, just look at HDTV--it took how long for government to decide on just what that would look like, whose system would prevail, and then, the lead time to institute the conversion, and the resultant confusion on the part of perhaps millions of consumers less educated than you or I, as to just what is going to happen when the sun rises on 2/9/09. Just imagine how long it would have taken to computerize our world, had it been government controlling and directing the development in the computer industry. Or, the telephone, or the electric light, or the airplane. Probably the alternative energy sources that we will use in the future are already in existence, but which one will prevail is is still up in the air--adamant proponents of each are already competing, each with little or no sympathy for any other form than what they themselves have signed on to. And to expect several hundred thousand line workers coming out of closed auto factories to somehow be the engine of discovery seems to me to be at least a bit unreasonable--do they have the knowledge, the inclination, the training to make that transition almost overnight, or would that be some sort of ruinously expensive "make work", with little chance for ultimately producing something useful? Bear in mind, FDR's Works Projects Administration did what they did, in concrete and steel, using available labor, readily available skills, not going into some massive retraining, or educational program with perhaps years of lead time before the first yard of portland cement was poured. And, IIRC, WPA and its derivatives, such as the TVA, did produce fairly quick results by providing what was in the 1930's, an alternative form of energy. While it's of course true that compared to say, aircraft (both private general aviation and airliners) safety and performance standards are quite tightly regulated by government, planes are subject to close scrutiny as to maintenance, and overall condition, as a rule we Americans haven't much cared for government, be it Congress, or some body of bureaucrats in Washington dictating what we can or cannot buy and drive. For us, our car is still an extension of ourselves in so many ways. We, in this country, pride ourselves on having a consumer-driven economy--we want choice, we want what we want, and oftentimes that goes 180-degrees to what "experts" love to tell us we should have, should be buying (or driving, eating, or drinking!). And in that, it's pretty hard to convince someone that they should be limited to driving a car seemingly smaller than the wheels and tires of the trucks they share streets and highways with, hence the market for larger cars, pickup trucks and SUV's. Let's not kid ourselves here, if Detroit hadn't built those larger vehicles, someone else would have, plain and simple. Toyota's factory in Southern Indiana was built to produce the Tundra pickup, not Corollas or Tercels, folks. Now, if government is to step in, give some form of financial aid to the likes of GM, it would, in all likelihood, come with considerable strings attached. If the mood in Congress is one of some sort of conformity to say, fuel efficiency, rest assured that it could be the death knell of say, Corvette, certainly the limiting in some manner, of the availability of say, full size pickup trucks, even the Suburban--these do have their uses, their utility value to at least some buyers. A Cadillac as large as some of the Mercedes Benz models that are readily available? Not likely, if the more extreme types in government have there way. Bailing out say, General Motors, while failing to address the true underlying causes of their financial problems won't do a danged thing but prolong the agony, delay the inevitable. It's not the cars that GM makes, or doesn't make that are at the root of the problem, but how much it costs them to make what they make, VS what they can sell them for. And that is the hardest part of the equation to solve, as production costs are directly related to the human factor. It's going to be a tough sell for any politician to go with something that means dramatically reduced compensation, but then, when GM pays almost twice what any of the transplants pay, for essentially the same services, something will have to give in order to solve the situation, make the company sustainable. Trouble is, factory workers vote, and today's congressmen and senators don't like getting voted out of office. It's true of course, that executive compensation is a "hot button" issue, but in the overall scheme of things, it's NOT but a symbol, a symptom of the problem--millions in a paycheck to the CEO don't add up to billions in losses--the numbers just don't match. However, the mere symbolism of cutting production costs, without a corresponding deep cut in executive pay, perks and benefits will never fly on the factory floor, nor should it, period. Cutting back, way back, on the overall bureaucracy at a huge company such as GM should be a key to the solution as well. Just as with government agencies, in a mega-corporation, it's too easy to base the need for more "cogs in the gears" to higher pay for those who must direct the activities of others. The more "reports" any manager (in government, institutions and large companies) has, the more he/she can demand in compensation. One has to wonder, just how many engineers, stylists does it take say, Toyota, to operate as huge an operation as they have, compared to GM? But to give goverment the power to dictate what sort of products GM (or any other manufacturer for that matter!) shall make is a very slippery slope. It's interesting how vehicle types and sizes get mixed up in all the discussion about what to do about Ford, GM and Chrysler, and the "suggestions" of just what THEY should be making. It seems to me that once government is given that level of power, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for politicians and bureaucrats to extend that into the daily lives of each and every one of us, choosing what products any of us can have, or not have, well beyond the rather basic rules in place now. Do we really want to start sliding down that slippery slope? I don't think so. But to ignore the worst-case scenario is one way to ensure that it may well come to pass. Ultimately, if we are to have any sort of free market system, where the consumer dictates what gets made, based on sales or the lack thereof, is what will solve the problem of what cars will be built, whether there is to be such as a high performance Corvette (or Ferrari, or whatever), or not. Only government power could ever dictate that our future might lie in the bland, drab availability of latter day Trabants or Moskovich's. Art

Finally, I got to work on the cabinet that goes on the back of the tank, which housed the delivery hose (for carrying the fuel from the truck to an underground tank, stowed on a reel at the rear), plus having space for stocking cans of grease, etc. Sometimes, it makes sense to go looking around the house for stuff to make, say, a template for an arc such as the top of the tank--in this case, a discarded CD fit the bill perfectly: After drawing an arc using the CD, it was a simple matter of a few basic measurements, drawing a line across the arc giving the width of the cabinet, using an Xacto stainless steel right triangle square to get the sides drawn in, and then the line across the bottom so that these panels could be cut: (the smudging is from lightly sanding the sheet styrene, so that the pencil lines would not only show up, but be relatively permanent) Raw assembly of the cabinet (the extra panels are for one of two more tank bodies I am building along side this one). You may note the slight overhang of the sides and top, this is clearance for 1/32" thick basswood and birch plywood, as many of these units used wood at the rear, for the access doors and their framing: And finally, assembled onto the rear of the tank itself, with the woodwork done (still needs hinge and latch detailing): Finally, after all these years (soon to be 23 years since I started on the chassis for this thing!) it's beginning to come together, look like something! Art

For years, Vagabond polyurethanes were the standard, used by just about everyone in resin casting. Their 36XXX resin is the one that cures to a light tan color, and I suspect it's still the brand that Modelhaus uses. Located outside of San Diego CA, the transportation costs are higher than some more locally available resins in the Midwest and eastern parts of the US, however, at last I knew, Eager Plastics in Chicago was marketing this brand and formula for Vagabond, in the midwest. With resin casting however, generally speaking it's not so much the brand or formula of urethane resin used, but the mold and its surfaces that determine the quality of the casting. The most common formulae of silicone RTV rubbers are those which use a tin-based catalyst. These grades of rubber can be had ranging from as soft as a feather (figuratively speaking) to nearly as hard as a rock (again, speaking figuratively). The harder the cured compound, however, the less elasticity it has, and consequently a lower tear strength. With all tin-cured RTV's I ever used, "leaching" of some of the component liquids in the uncured resin will occur in an unprotected mold, leading to gradual surface deterioration of the rubber, and consequently, an often grainy surface to the casting. This is what mold barrier coatings are meant to prevent, at least for a significant number of casting cycles. Price-Driscoll makes a line of barriers that are rattle canned onto the mold, which prevent this leaching, in addition to lubricating the rubber mold for easier demolding of the finished castings. The best of these, in my experience, is their Polyester Ultra Par-Film, which is used about every 4th or 5th casting cycle--extends the life of a mold considerably (and makes the mold surfaces retain their smooth finish longer as well), but it does need to be washed away before painting, regardless of what P-D says However, remember that a mold is only as good as the master used to make it--RTV is more truthful than the finest camera, it will pick up the tiniest of surface characteristics, even reproducing the shiny surface of writing on a master with a Sanford Sharpie, it's that sensitive. So, whenever possible, polishing the master to at least a satin sheen will give the best casting surface characteristics, and in the bargain, will give you a few more parts from the mold as well. Art

If one were to say that certain states, certain cities allowed their economic base to be dominated by the auto industry, I would agree with that. While Michigan, in particular, is at least culturally tied to the auto industry, and a couple of neighboring states, particularly Indiana, have a very heavy stake in that industry, it's not really valid to say that the failure of say, General Motors (or all of the Big Three) would spell economic doom for the entire country. Certainly not in a time when the population of the country has passed 300,000,000, the total employee base of the US Big Three somewhere around 300,000 (or one in one thousand). It would take an absolute "worst case scenario", in other words, the total shutdown of every Ford, GM and Chrysler plant in the entire country to take all those workers off the payroll--and that is VERY unlikely to happen. 30 years ago, politico's and financial analysts were writing the obituary of the US steel industry, yet today, more steel is made in the US than ever before--it's just concentrated in a different region--Pittsburgh isn't the epicenter of steel, Gary Indiana is. And, while former steelmaking centers such as Birmingham, Bethlehem, Youngstown, Fontana saw their steel plants fade away, dozens of others have sprung up across the country, feeding off the scrapyards that are out there, just too long a distance from the traditional steel centers for their scrap to be profitable. Forty years ago, seemingly everyone was predicting the end of railroads--after all, they were an obsolete method of moving materials, finished goods, and people--yet today, a much streamlined railroad system is pondering how to grow, in order to handle the growing demand for their services. True, thousands of miles of abandoned and torn up track won't be replaced by new, anytime soon, but in a very real sense, railroads had overbuilt themselves, to levels that were unsustainable. And yes, those changes, those evolutions came with some pretty painful costs--thousands of jobs lost, some towns completely impoverished, and that's not easily swallowed, but a fact of life they were. When Studebaker closed its doors in South Bend, IN, a grey pall seemed to have loomed over that city for years afterward, notwithstanding that employment grew well beyond the jobs lost when their local icon automaker folded, only in fairly recent times has South Bend truly experienced a decline. But, in St Joseph County, business and industry moved well beyond Studebaker. GM is perhaps the iconic American carmaker, with Ford and Chrysler close behind--they are ours, their makes of cars the makes that our parents and grandparents bought and drove. Perhaps that is the biggest hurt of all--it would be much the same in Japan were Toyota or Honda facing potential oblivion. Germany without Mercedes or Volkswagen, or Porsche? Same thing. But, in the overall scheme of things, none of this is a sort of "Custer's Last Stand", and I say that knowing full well that I, just as with the rest of you, would hate to see anything take out the Big Three. Art

Harry, At the risk of making you mad, there ARE thousands of people at work building wind turbines, AND solar collectors--here in little ol' flyover Indiana, those big propellors on posts are the talk in many a cafe every morning, over coffee, and in places in the Southwest, solar panel fields are going up, but guess what? NIMBY is already at work there as well. NIMBY you ask? Not In My Back Yard is a real rallying cry. Outside of the midwest corn/wheat belt, many, if not most of the best wind corridors are in scenic places, such as the mountains of New England, along the coastline, and horror of horrors, we "just can't compromise the beautiful landscape". But, I digress. Wind farms, with their advantage of producing electricity with no input from the burning of any fossil fuel, no nuclear fission, are one of the most sensible things to come along since the invention of the windmill by the Dutch centuries ago--air's still free, there's still no charge for wind, no way to put a meter on that stuff, I suppose. However, since the thrust of all this thread isn't electricity in general, let's go back to cars, and the stuff that makes them go. (besides, it would take a pretty long extension cord to power most automobiles--battery technology isn't quite there just yet). The gist of what I wrote above is that the problems faced by GM, Ford, and Chrysler are pretty much of the making of "all of us", as opposed to any one person, group of people, or entity being ultimately responsible. As the old, legendary cartoon character, "Pogo" once observed, "We have met the enemy, and they is us". We all want (fill in the blank here), but we all seem to want someone else to "pay the piper". It's interesting that it's so politically popular, even politically correct to blame such as Exxon Mobil for all our troubles, but what about say, the farmer, who might have a million dollar corn crop (not all that hard to believe, given the size of those large farms you see when you get away from your Windy City and its environs. If something comes along which raises the value of that 250,000 bushels of harvested corn, say by double--and the world goes nuts--the price of cornflakes is going to rise, not to mention the cost of a steak, a hamburger, a porkchop, or a pound of bacon. Eggs, milk, yup, same thing. However, if Farmer Smith doesn't see a serious value in planting more corn next year, he's not going to plant it, pure and simple--he's going to scale back, either plant some fields in something else, or just let some land go fallow for the season, concentrating on his best fields, the ones that give the best yield for the work and $$ put in--that is Business 101. Same with drilling for oil--sure there are hundreds, probably thousands of square miles of drilling leases out there across this country--but how viable are they? Were drilling for black gold always a sure thing, there would have been no problem--just poke a hole in the ground and like Jed Clampit, up it comes, bubblin' up, "Black Gold, Texas Tea". But, not only NIMBY, but people from one region of the country trying to insist that those living in another region toe the line, buckle down and obey what one group is telling another group they must not do, no matter that say, people on the East Coast aren't the people living in say, Alaska, North Dakota, Utah. Were the current crowd alive today, braying as they are about "the environment", I suspect John Deere himself would have been tarred and feathered for daring to make a plow that would break the prairie sod in Illinois, for to grow corn. It's far easier for us as a people to push the drilling for oil, to make the gasoline which our cars require, off to some remote place, which we see as somehow less valuable, less scenic, be that some "worthless desert" (which I suspect is most people's view of the Middle East), or some remote, tropical area (Venezuela, Indonesia, Brunei, Yucatan come to mind) where the dense tropical rain forest (used to call those jungles, remember) hides the "ugliness" of an oil well), than have them screw up the view from someone's dream home in California, Florida, the coast of the Carolina's--no matter that those areas may have some very productive reserves--or God forbid, Alaska's North Slope (too close to where Santa lives, at the North Pole, I wonder?). But, it's the failed business models of the US auto industry that are the thrust here. Franklin Roosevelt was one who wondered if the concentration of auto production in the hands of an ever shrinking few companies as was well underway in his time in office was a good thing: Capitalism of course, is the engine that drove the American auto industry to the heights it achieved (along with the first big domestic oil supply in any country in the world), but at the "cost" of survival of the fittest. Over time, there have been over 500 different makes of automobiles produced here in Indiana, far more than in any other political subdivision in the rest of the world--but where are they now? Sure, we have a GM plant (Roanoke), Subaru and Toyota (Lafayette), Toyota (Vandenburgh County down on the Ohio), and a new Honda plant just now coming online in the south eastern part of the state--but not a single one of the former companies who once made cars in Indiana is known today, outside of a museum somewhere. Had there been no post WW-I booming "seller's market", it would have been just Ford, General Motors and Chysler left standing before 1950. Oh, and let us not forget the FOURTH major US automaker of the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's, the UAW. They fit into this business model as well. It's hard to argue with the success of the UAW, indeed the very need for them to begin with. It was the UAW which brought some sense of order to the often chaotic world of industrial work--they, to their credit, brought about some stability for factory workers heretofore used to constant layoffs for model year changes, often very uncaring working conditions, but even the UAW apparently went too far. A lockstep insistence that a factory stay in one place forever, demands for ever increasing wages, to the point that (and I was being taught this in grade school, Jr High School and High School, 45-50 years ago!) wage costs in this country had risen to the point that few in other parts of the world could afford a consumer product such as an automobile built in the US. It was also argued, vehemently, in the 1950's, that Americans just "NEEDED" smaller, more compact cars--a few makers tried to do just that--Nash, Hudson, Kaiser, Willys, and guess what? Buyers stayed away in droves. Had it not been for the sudden, steep recession of 1957-58, American Motors would not have cleaned the rust and cosmoline off the dies for the then discontinued Nash Rambler, freshened them up a bit, and brought them back as the Rambler American. Small, in the context of that era meant "cheap", less affluent, just as it has with private homes up through this very day (ever try to get someone to buy say, an 1100 square foot ranch style house these days???). So, when a significant number of consumers began looking for less expensive cars in 1958, almost overnight, the only ones extant were cars such as Opel, Vauxhall, Renault, Fiat, Volkswagen, and even then, the market for those was miniscule, only a couple hundred thousand per year. In the 70's, almost coincidently with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, two cars, both extremely prone to rusting to oblivion, went head-to-head for the dollars of American buyers wanting a car that could go from one gas station to the next, able to cruise right on by the dozens of closed gas pumps in between, and not cost an arm and a leg. Vega and Honda Accord were both notorious for rustout troubles early on. But there was a difference! Where the Vega was designed around cost considerations (so much of that neat little car was designed around CHEAP to make), the Accord was designed around excellent design. GM seemingly just did not care that their little, fuel efficient car wasn't at all what it was made out to be, and zone managers looked to their "budget" when considering repairs to nearly brand new cars, while Honda graciously replaced, at little or no cost, hundreds of thousands of rusted out body panels, and rushed to solve the problem, ASAP (and they did--by the late 70's, it was pretty hard to find a Honda, or a Toyota with anything like serious road cancer for thousands of miles after purchase). In the bargain, a Toyota or a Honda (to a lesser extent Nissan and the others) came across as much higher quality cars, from the fit and finish, to the very sound of the engine when you started them up. They even looked better after hundreds of wash jobs--when paint peeled and flaked off Fords, Chevies and Plymouths, a bit of soap and water, a wax job, and that 3 yr old Japanese import sat there and shone. In response to "Protectionism" in this country, first Honda, then Toyota, then Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Subaru built factories in this country, to give American workers the opportunity to earn their living building those cars. Politicians won or lost elections based on their success in landing a "transplant" auto plant to their state. And in the bargain, those transplant factories brought a level of worker satisfaction, along with wage rates which in their local markets, were the highest achieved by any employee living in the particular city or town in question, without the high taxes and other barriers faced in places such as Michigan, the old industrial centers in Ohio and such. The UAW did come to insist on both wage rates and benefit packages that ultimately proved to be unsustainable in the long run. And the "Big Three" went along, eager for labor peace, until that unsustainability became reality. It's nice to be able to have a pension plan that gives not just a cost of living adjustment annually, but goes up whenever there is a new contract providing a wage increase back at the plant where the retiree used to work. But when it comes to a point where a company has as many, if not more, retirees for which they shouldered considerable responsibilty, as they have active employees, then is that sustainable for very long? Apparently not. Health care coverage? Should this be something that is only voluntarily funded, funded by those who purchase a particular product from a particular company? Apparently so, given our general national revulsion for anything approaching "socialized medicine". But again, I digress. Perhaps the biggest problem faced right now, is the legacy of management of companies, as though they lurch from quarter to quarter. The current downturn notwithstanding, for decades now, the stock market holds its breath every January, April, July and October, waiting for quarterly results to come in. And, corporate management lives by the quarter as well--do well this quarter, and you keep your job, has been their watchword. Enough good quarters, and you get a promotion. On the other side, a bad quarter, you might be out of work, and enough lackluster but "OK" quarters, and you will be passed over forever for promotion, as one who is "well placed in your current position". Obscenely huge salaries and bennies for Corporate CEO's? Hardly these are the root of the financial problems faced by any of the companies in trouble right now--not when we're talking millions against billions of dollars--after all, a million is but 1/10 of one percent of a billion, or one-one thousandth--kind of like a flea on an elephant--not the really significant problem it seems to me. However, the message those superstar compensation packages mask much greater problems, it seems to me. This method of payment for services has lead to a whole cadre of "professional" managers, whose briefcases hold almost as many copies of their personal resume's as they do company business to be dealt with. The average tenure of a corporate CEO with the firm he is running is measured in short years anymore, not in long and meritorious service with that company, sheer decades of hard work. Is it little wonder that educational disciplines such as engineering, the sciences get short shrift from American college students, while the lure of an MBA has business administration schools bulging at the seams? And, no matter that a particular CEO failed in his or her attempt to maintain, let alone restore or increase the profitability, even the viability of the company they were hired to head--when they get fired, they go away all too often with pay envelopes so fat, it makes one wonder if that wasn't their first motivation, NOT the success of their last company. Washington DC, you say? When's the last time there was a truly wholesale cleaning out of the chambers of the Capitol Building in Washington? I suggest that one has to look all the way back into the 1930's to see any significant change in the membership of the House and Senate--even this watershed year, only a fraction of House races, even fewer Senate seats truly changed hands (of course, only 33 senate seats were up for consideration this year, Constitutional provision, you know). Talk about entrenchment! I would maintain that regardless of political persuasion (our's, or the politician in question at the moment) that far too many senators and congressmen have held their offices for so long as to have forgotten (if they ever did know) what it means to be an average American on the street (some of them have never held a private sector job in the last 30-40 years--how can they possibly truly know what it's like out here, back home?). Was membership in the halls of Congress truly meant to be a lifetime appointment, really? All in all, it's us, collectively, who are the problem--not some nebulous figure out there. It seems to me that that little porcupine in that little john boat in Okeefenoke Swamp got it pretty right--the "enemy is us". Art

As a college student (Business Administration, if you can believe that!) in the late 1960's, one of the things we had to do was read and analyze case studies, which included the then Big Three automakers, plus AMC and the then-late Studebaker. With History as my minor, I was struck by several things surrounding the American auto industry at that time, even wrote a couple of papers in which I postulated my concerns, and gave my conclusions based upon my research at the time (wish I knew where at least one of those was!). One was the story of Chrysler Corporation to that point in time (Chrysler was truthfully, in the late 1960's, fast becoming the "sick man" of the domestic auto industry, they could barely eke out a profit, at least by the standards set by Ford and GM). My research pointed toward a watershed event, the many months-long strike that Chrysler endured in 1950-51, with both company and union intractible in their demands and counter demands. Chrysler permanently lost all hope of ever challenging Ford again, for the position of #2 in the industry, which they had been a couple of times in their past, and had been able to come close to passing Ford several times in the 30's. In addition, a long-running battle between competing factions of the stockholders/Board of Directors caused no end of animosity and uncertainty in the ranks of management, and to a certain extent, out on the factory floor as well. Basically, it was an all-out fight between the staid old engineers-turned-higher management, and their staid old thinking as to building cars to THEIR specs, rather than truly listening to customer demand and expectations (wrapping 1941 Plymouth and Dodge chassis with new postwar bodies, rooflines set so as to not knock the dress hat off the head of the Chairman, coupled with truly dowdy styling). The challengers, led by a maverick executive backed by a huge proportion of stockholders, sought to unleash Virgil Exner, et.al., bring Chrysler products truly into the 1950's, and they did win out. Finally, after years of trying, Chryco cars had V8's across the board (Plymouth a full 23 years after Ford, but still to offer the same old flathead 6 as standard equipment, basically a 1930 engine, in the midst of the jet age), truly automatic transmissions 15 years after GM's Hydramatic, a full 5 yrs after the first Ford-O-Matic. But, in doing so, the new management team spent the groceries and half the rent, and then pushed the introduction of the absolutely trend-setting 57's so fast, so far ahead of any realistic development schedule, and at such expense that cost cutting, coupled with warp speed development lead to shiny new cars that were litterally rusting out within mere weeks of reaching the dealerships. The damage to Chrysler's public image was horrendous. Sticking with such a trendy fad as huge tailfins, as much due to the lack of capital to come up with something really new to replace the "Forward Look", even with tremendously improved styling by 1963, further damaged Mopar's reputation. In the early-mid 60's, it took a particularly brave baby boomer buying his first new car, to be seen in a Mopar, no matter how well they performed. The damage of all this carried forward, all the way to Chrysler's near bankruptcy in 1980-81. Studebaker, in the mid 1920's the #3 automaker, was beset by a Board Chairman and President (Albert Erskine) who tried to prop up the stock price by declaring dividends quarterly as the Depression deepened 1930-33, to the point that he bankrupted the firm (one of the longest receiverships of any major corporation in the US--1933-1940). While the new Champion was the car that saved the company from ultimate liquidation, and their time of greatest sales was still in the future, Studebaker, after the debacle of 1932-33, never had the capital to develop truly marketable cars, their period of greatest sales coming during the postwar "sellers' market". Complicating all this was a refusal of management to investigate ways of financing new, modern plant and equipment. So, as the postwar "seller's" boom gave way to the increasing competitiveness of the 50's, Studebaker was stuck with factory buildings way outdated (their main assembly plant in South Bend was built in 1919, impossible to expand or truly upgrade, some of the outbuildings dating from the late 19th Century. In the midst of the postwar boom, Studebaker management gave the UAW the most lucrative contract (both in terms of wage rates and work rules) in the industry, which saddled them with production costs making the legendary '53 Starliner HT a solid $500 more to produce than if say, Chevrolet had produced the very same car. Hardly a recipe for both profitability and competitive pricing. The rest, as they say, is history--in December 1963, regular production on South Lafayette Avenue in South Bend stopped for all time, and two years later, the Studebaker marque vanished into the never-never land of orphan cars. The list went on and on and on--Pierce Arrow, Packard, Peerless, Hupp, Graham Paige, and so forth. What has happened, in all these cases, it seems to me, is that the original innovators, those so-called auto industry pioneers, such as Ford, Olds, Chevrolet, Dodge Brothers, Walter Chrysler, Charles Nash, John N Willys, all were ultimately replaced by more or less itinerant executive types, who today come to work with briefcases carrying a small pad of their resume's, just in case a better deal someplace else turns up, and with pitifully little true interest in the products they are honcho'ing the mass production of. Henry Ford was the genius behind every Ford car from 1903 through 1932 (his robust health began to give way by 1933), he had the vision, he gained the power to do with as he saw fit with the capital his company had (the richest property in the entire industry as of 1932), and incredible customer satisfaction. GM took that over in the middle 30's, only to see subsequent generations of Board Chairmen and Corporate Presidents wither away a company known in the 50's and 60's as much for its steady profitability (almost yearly back then, 10% net after tax profits--or about the same profit percentage after tax that Exxon enjoys right now--only nobody truly objected back then). When men the likes of John DeLorean left GM in the 70's, management decisions became more and more the province of executives trained in "administration", which is a glorified way of saying "accountant" in most cases. The bean-counters arrived. Couple all this with the trend from the late 1970's through today--make the stock price go up, stockholders are happy, quarter to quarter--product, quality, service go hang. And all that had to be on a quarterly (every 3 month) basis--the death of any sort of long-term vision by professional managers is pretty much the "kiss of death" to their careers--please the stock analysts, at all costs. While the warning signs, continual wage and salary escalation, along with as-we-know-now unsustainable benefit packages, all were quite visible years ago, management and labor chose to ignore the simple fact that such could not continue on forever, and now we are seeing the results of that. Bean counters, even in the face of all this, insisted on shaving costs almost draconianly--their attitude is, for every dollar per car shaved off, a Million or more in increased positive cash flow (profit), the customer go hang when such became simply cheapening the product, rather than improving or maintaining the breed. So here we are in 2008--our three remaning US-based automakers, each one, singularly, too large to let fail, but perhaps too expensive to prop up for long in any serious matter. I don't envy Congress or our incoming President in this, no matter what they will do, it's going to be "damned if they do, damned if they don't. Art

Yeah! That little MGB-GT body conversion was perhaps the finest resin master anyone ever did, certainly up to that point. It was a bear to make the rubber molds though, which lead to its ultimate demise. Art

Avenger, WOW! You do realize you are an endangered species, right? I mean, EVERYBODY knows that 12yr olds today are into only video games, collectible cards, skateboards, all that stuff, and they NEVER build model cars? You're proof positive that what we read here on the boards just isn't always true. Welcome to the greatest little hobby on the planet--a hobby where we get to build what we want to build, the way we want to build it, and critics go hang! Whatever you build, it's YOUR project, your baby, your creation--so be proud of it. Please don't let any of us scare you off because some may build things that must seem to you at 12 (or 13, 14, 15......?) seem completely impossible. If you want to do it, and want to do it badly enough, with a model car kit, you WILL do it, eventually--it might take a buncha steps up the mountainside, but hang in there, keep gluing, sanding, puttying, detailing, dreaming and scheming--you can get there too! Also, please show us some of your stuff--but only when YOU are comfortable with that--you'd be surprised at the positive reactions you will get. Also, please realize that some of us are way older than you, old enough to be crotchety and occasionally irritable, but that sometimes happens after years and years--pay it never mind, we do come to our senses at least once in a while! Just realise that some of us have projects we started on long before you were thought of, and someday, you too likely will have to admit to the same thing, to some future kid. Anyway, WELCOME! Art

Unless that V8 engine is somehow oversized, it should fit in the pickup kit. For starters, 55-59 Chevy pickup engines, V8 or 6, sit all the way back in the engine bay, the back of the block VERY close to the firewall. That engine bay is long enough for the longer inline 6, I've installed them in a couple of AMT 55-57 Chevy pickups, as have others), so the 8 should be a drop in fit. Also, the transmission on the AMT pickups is the Saginaw 3-spd stick, I am pretty sure, and that is a longer tranny than any manual shift, so some shortening of the driveshaft likely will be needed. Art

Scott, Slide in truck campers, from a scratchbuilding point of view, should be some of the easiest projects out there to do, given that they tend to be slab-sided boxes, or a series of box sections, with mostly square corners, except for the roll of the roof at the front on most of them. The question I would have is this: Given that the VAST majority of model pickup truck kits are in 1/25 scale, why a camper for one in 1/24 (at the moment, the only close to modern pickup truck kits that are factory stock in 24th scale, are the Monogram '92 Ford pickups from about 15-16 yrs ago)? Oh I know, the "engineers" in the group are going to take me to task for this, but 25th scale is far easier to work with, as a 1/25th scale inch is EXACTLY .040", or only VERY slightly larger than 1mm (25.4mm equals an inch in 1:1, divide that by 25, and I challenge anyone to maintain that TINY decimal of 1mm when working in styrene with razor saw, Xacto knives, needle files and sandpaper! It's just not that necessary to worry about that tiny bit. Any plans you get for building your own camper surely aren't going to be full size--who among us has even a garage floor large enough to even unroll one sheet, let alone read them spread out on the floor, walking or crawling on them? No, those plans in all likelihood will be in scale themselves, with full-size dimensions called out wherever they are needed. For that matter, you could simply slap a measuring tape on your own 1:1 camper, take lots of pics of it (with digital cameras, those pics don't cost a cent, unless you print them off, and even then, only a few pennies a pic). Just simply convert the known dimensions of the real one to 1/25 scale (mount on a 25th scale truck model), and get yourself a stainless steel metric rule, and an inexpensive metric dial caliper. That's all you need to scale down either from pics and measurements of your camper, or from the dimensions given of the homebuilt for which plans were obtained. While you might have to adjust a few dimensions (primarily the lower part of the camper, the narrower floor box that has to fit between the wheel wells of the pickup box come to mind here), little if any further modification to any dimensions would be necessary. Give this some thought, then give it a try. Remember though, Confucius said "Better to measure many times, cut only once"! Art

Agreed! Most modelers today weren't around in the 60's, when AMT Corporation sold more model car kits annually than did Revell across their entire line (AMT produced ONLY car kits back then, Revell did aircraft, ships, a few armor kits, and some car kits). In point of fact, through most of the 60's, AMT Corporation had nearly 50% of the ENTIRE plastic model kit market in the US, all on model car kits. That's not to say that the others, Revell, Monogram, MPC or Aurora didn't have some great kits, they did--but it was AMT that most kids gravitated to, and for what reason? They were nearly all buildable, by just about any age pair of hands back then. Now, that "buildability" came at a price, for sure. Revell kits and most of the smaller line of Monogram car kits, even a number of Aurora kits, had parts breakdowns across the board such as separate suspension setups, separate exhausts, some even had opening doors, even some with posable steering, but AMT kits just tended to get built far more readily than the others. Trouble is, while Revell and Monogram moved their respective envelopes further, AMT was forced, by the realities of the 1970's marketplace, to regress considerably, cost cutting became almost a watchword, it seems. Their kits became less sophisticated, simplified, some even used nondescript, generic engines, and their tires went from very nice (in the 60's) to often grotesque imitations of something purporting to be an automobile tire. Ertl's buying AMT was no overnight panacea either. Some of the earliest new releases under Ertl ownership were rather sad (1933-34 Ford sedan kits come to mind here), until the late 1980's, when they started to actually do some pretty neat stuff. In so many ways, AMT/Ertl turned a huge corner with their 1987 releases of the never-before-done '66 Nova and the '55 Chevy Cameo/stepside pickups. Not perfect, but very easily built, and with only minor accuracy foibles (none that couldn't be fixed). Trouble was, Ertl was in the midst of making a run at the toy market, the bulk of their profit dollars being channeled into things like dolls, and the eternally damned "Bumble Ball", while model car kit tooling budgets languished. And, for a few years, it seemed that they really couldn't get it right at times. Even so, there were some stars there: The '88-'92 Chevy C1500 series of pickup kits, while started as MPC kits, were excellent, still are. And, that '69 Olds Cutlass 442? Nice! From the mid-90's forward, until just after the buyout of Ertl by Racing Champions, AMT/Ertl did some dynamite car kits: '58 Edsel, '57 Chrysler 300C, '62 Thunderbird Sport Roadster, '41 Ford Woodie station wagon, '70 Camaro, '66 Olds Cutlass (both HT and Convertible--a heretofore forgotten year for the Cutlass, BTW), and their last really great kit, the '56 Thunderbird. If these kits have any supposed "flaws", I see them as having been designed rather tightly, which means there wasn't a lot of room to stuff in some of the details for easy assembly ('57 Chrysler exhaust system can drive you nuts until you get it in place, at which it is simply dynamite!) but they are eminently buildable. Most of these kits moved just that little bit beyond what Revell did in the same time frame as well, and they came off quite well. Alas, though, once past that '56 Bird, things did get a bit iffy--almost as though model car kits were the ugly stepchild of the corporation, but that's life in a wannabe Fortune 500 Company, sadly. What's all this drivel mean? Well, it does mean one thing for me--I look at the subject first, the manufacturer second. If the subject is what I want, and it's at all accurately done, regardless of mfr, it comes home with me, if not, then not. But to "blanket" say that one brand is "better" or worse than the others isn't worth the bandwidth, or wear and tear on a keyboard, but it just isn't true. Art

If you are going to leave the fuel rails in their natural brass finish (kind of like gold anodized aluminum), I would suggest cleaning them, to remove your finger oils, which will cause raw brass to tarnish over time, then clear coating them, to prevent tarnish. Art

Yup, folded away in a drawer. Art

Andy, While of course, Okey isn't particularly willing to talk about the "condition" of the tooling he has, and I won't ask him. However, I do know from other sources (and some personal knowledge as well) that not many of the tools are complete, for varying reasons (including some of the rumors which have more truth than we all would like to believe, I think). In addition, JoHan tooling did apparently wind up in several hands, upon the auction of JoHan's assets now years ago. I do know that some tooling, in particular some of the ones which were last run by Seville for Testors, the HSO series, probably are still usable, but at what cost? My understanding, from a few people who seem to know, is that JoHan was using a set of way-obsolete injection molding machines, apparently dating back to WW-II, when injection-molded plastics came into its own as a manufacturing method, for both war production and civilian goods which could be made using non-strategic, defense-needed materials. I do know, for example, that Revell-Monogram did survey some of the tooling, and backed away, for reasons best known to them. I believe also, that AMT/Ertl looked at them as well, and likewise turned down the old JoHan tooling. Apparently, JoHan cut almost all their tooling from beryllium copper alloy, which alloy is expensive, almost to the point of "precious metal", but has some pretty serious environmental and OSHA concerns, particularly when ground, or machined. AMT/Ertl, when running some of the ESCI tooling they owned (remember, AMT/Ertl bought the Italian firm ESCI in the mid-1980's, and ran some of their stuff in Dyersville), had some beryllium copper aircraft tools that had been cut in Italy by ESCI, they even displayed some of those tools, open, for their famed "Factory Tours" in the 1990's (a buddy of mine and I took that tour in July, 1994). Apparently though, even with the health concerns from this alloy, it has pretty much been a rather valuable commodity in industry--bringing a premium price at the scrapyard. So, the stories of disgruntled JoHan workers stealing small, concealable sections of tooling and selling them at nearby scrap dealers probably have some truth to them. But, in the end, the costs associated with contracting an injection-molding job shop, or a larger producer, to make a production run of even such tooling as does exist in complete form has been prohibitive, at least in this country. Also, given that with only a couple of exceptions, JoHan's subject matter was seldom part of the mainstream, where the marketplace was, and is, concerned, selling such model kits in any sort of reasonable time frame might well be problematic. I suspect that anyone who remembers Walmart stores from the mid-70's into the early 1980's, when that company was beginning its transition from small town and rural variety stores, to start challenging KMart and others, will recall that Walmart Stores actually carried the complete JoHan line of reissued and ressurected model car kits, including the legendary "Gold Cup" series. Those stores weren't seen in major cities yet, unlike today, but were in larger county seat towns, spreading out from Arkansas. I suspect it may well have been Walmart's continuous restocking of that line for perhaps 7-8 years, that made the USA Oldies a viable product line such as it was in the 80's. But that was then, this is now. Art

Sadly, there are those (not you!) who will start a rumor such as this for whatever reason. I was at the Circle City Modelers contest and swap, spoke to Okey, bought some stuff from him. I asked him about the rumor, and he said emphatically, "Not True!." Art

Sad update, lordairgtar, if true. I am going to Indianapolis in the morning, to the Circle City Modelers show and swap. If I see Okey there, doing biz as usual, then I suspect this isn't at all true. I hope not! Art