Art Anderson

FWIW, if you check the Round2 Website, their 8-tire parts packs are advertized at $13.99 Art

Prior to WW-II, whitewall tires were white sidewall on both sides of the tire, for apparently aesthetic reasons: On most cars of the day, you could see both sides of the front tires. In addition, in those days, rotating tires often meant removing the tires from the rims, and rotating just the rubber, not the entire wheel part of the time, which meant turning the tires around to rotate in an opposite direction. If you look at period pics of street rods, customs and show cars of the 50's and 60's, double sided whitewalls were very popular in those applications as well. Art

A point of clarification here: This speedster was bodied by the Weymann-American Company of Indianapolis, who of course produced Weymann padded fabric-covered bodies under license from the original German Weymann company. However, that coachwork system was never really accepted here in the US (primarily due to it's not being all that durable in wet weather--it seems Americans like being able to drive their cars in the rain, in winter, etc.) so Weymann-America also produced coachwork done the more conventional way: Sheet metal formed and attached over wooden framing. Art

Not as difficult as you might believe. I've seen it done with .020" sheet styrene, blended into the bodywork aft of the color line with putty and sanding. Art One and the same. He was the heir to the Matson Steamship Line fortune. Art

William, just exactly that. Many people have virtually no knowledge of what is involved in the design, tooling, production of anything plastic model kit related. Frankly, just because a parts pack is smaller, has less product in it, does not necessarily translate into a "price" at any stage of the production/distribution/retailing pipeline that is anything comensurate on the basis of "it only has X% of the raw material/parts count as a regular model car kit". For example, while a parts pack of just tires is released does not translate directly into massive sales just because everyone wants tires for their model kit. Therefore, while there will be the potential for sales, the volume of sales would not be sufficient to cover the investment in tooling, raw materials, production, packaging and distribution IF the price were to be based on "tires are X% of the cost of a model car kit. Were that to be a valid measurement of how much a parts pack of tires should sell for, then for gosh sakes, a fret of photoetched emblems & details ought to be about the price of a 1st class postage stamp, given the miniscule amount of material present in any PE detail set compared the the sheer volume of plastic in any model car kit. Bottom line: It just does not work that way, never has, and never will. Art

Well Harry, for exact accuracy, the real car is an ivory-shaded white and black. There is one issue with the bodywork on this kit that you might want to address (I have the kit as well), and that is the demarcation line between the colors--on the model kit it's an engraved, recessed groove, where on the actual car, the sheet metal that's painted black is actually slightly raised (perhaps a half-inch or so), around that "color sweep" of white. The actual car is in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada--formerly the Harrah's Automobile Collection--it was originally owned by Capt. George Whittell of Lake Tahoe and Woodland CA--and that is how Whittell (who having bought SIX Duesenberg Model J's was Duesenberg Inc's single biggest customer!) had it painted. Just my .$.02 worth. Art

VERY well said, Tom! And, FWIW, I was IN the hobby shop trade back in the early-mid 1960's when the likes of Revell, AMT, and Aurora all went "head over heels" making parts packs for us model car guys. And, guess what? I heard, over the counter, the same grousing and griping, from people completely without a clue. Art

Ronnie, Ever since the banning of CFC's about 30 years ago, aerosol cans have used either butane or propane as a propellant! Both are highly flammable. Art

Ronnie, An advantage of any spray booth will be if it can push the vapors (the smell) out of your house. If you think of it, your clothes dryer more than likely has an exterior vent to it, particularly if it's a gas dryer, if for no other reason than to eliminate the carbon monoxide from the air you breathe indoors. Now, an exterior vent need not require a hole saw to cut through the side of your house. I use a plywood panel, cut to fit in the sash window in my model room (same width as the window frame, and it gets "trapped" between the window sill and the bottom of the window sash), with a hole cut in it for a 4" clothes dryer vent, which is connected to the back of my spray booth by means of an ordinary dryer hose. It uses ordinary furnace filters to catch the overspray from either rattle cans or my airbrush. The result is: No paint fumes inside (my apartment is the upstairs of a house, with two other apartments downstairs, all on the same common HVAC system) and no overspray paint "dust" either. Art

Pretty close, Ronnie! I just turned 70 back in July, and have been building model cars since 1952. It's amazing to see the level of kit design of today, and then try to think back 50-60 years ago, wondering if we kids back then could have waded our way through the highly detailed, and ever more complex model car kits that have evolved over those decades! Art

However, consider that the blower in question is a squirrel cage unit, the motor is pretty tightly shielded (encased), and the motor is completely outside of the air stream. Art

Very nice indeed! However, it was AMT who produced that kit, first released in May 1964 (4 years before MPC released their first Indy car model--the 1967 STP Turbine). Art

Escuse me, but my Pace commercially made spray booth uses a GRAINGER squrrel cage blower with a sealed, shaded pole motor! Art

Considering that AMT Corporation first released their '36 Ford kit in early 1961--aimed at the then market for model car kits--guys ages perhaps 10-15 or so, it's not at all a bad kit! Bear in mind, the model kit industry, just as with model builders, had to go through a "crawl-walk-run" process--if you're under say, 45 yrs old, you are seeing newly tooled model car kits that would have intimidated those of us who were around the model car hobby 50-60 years ago! Art

AMT '28 Model A Ford Tudor Sedan!

The chassis is stock Oldsmobile Model 43. Art

For me, a '57 Chevrolet Bel Air just begs to be painted Adobe Beige over Sierra Gold! Art

As for any difficulty removing that steering wheel rim from the sprue--the Opel Admiral kit steering wheel is made in the same manner, but I had absolutely no problem removing the rim from the sprue surrounding it. This feature will make painting the steeering wheel correctly very easy, BTW. Very early Model T's had steering wheel hub and spokes in a one-piece brass casting which was later replaced by a forged iron unit. The brass spokes and hubs needed regular polishing, where the forged iron unit was painted black. The wheel rim itself is made from segments of wood, glued together with dovetailed joints, I'm not quite sure how the wooden rim was finished, but at any rate, they ended up a pretty dark brown in color. Art

I doubt the tires are soft plastic, given the sprue. As for "white tires", those are a modern misconception: Early automotive (and even bicycle) tires were made from natural latex rubber, which is a cream color until vulcanized, which turned it a very light buff, or a "creamy tan" color. Carbon black only began being added to latex rubber about 1910-11 or so, which didn't make the latex rubber black, but rather a gray color, the darkness depending on the concentration of the carbon added. Camera film, even the black & white emulsion used on glass plates for photography back then, tended to photograph otherwise colored objects with very stark contrasts between light and dark, mostly due to the slow speed of exposure. That made those buff-colored tires stand out as starkly white in photographs, while the colors of cars, regardless of how bright, came out very darkly, some almost black. Now, over time, with exposure to sunlight, those old latex tires would bleach out nearly white, but by the time they did that, the rubber was so dried out, deeply checked, that the tires were unusable anymore. Art

I get 91% Isopropyl Alcohol (very high strength rubbing alcohol) at Walgreen's--but I believe CVS also carries it, as well as Walmart in their pharmacy department. As a sidebar here: Most prepainted plastic bodies are done with a non-penetrating lacquer (pretty similar to Tamiya, or Modelmaster lacquers), and once dry that stuff doesn't react much at all to anything but 91% or higher isopropyl. The "Tampo" pad-printed graphics are done with an enamel-like ink, which dissolves off pretty readily with enamel thinner, or mineral spirits (naptha). Art

It's in the works, tooling corrections based on test shot reviews. Art

A touring car can be built from the Beverly Hillbillies truck. It would take a second body from that kit, plus some Evergreen sheet styrene to stretch the "tonneau" (the term for the rear seat portion of those old touring cars/phaetons). Art

Take away the "truck" bed, and the "Beverly Hillbillies" truck is a stock 1919-22 Oldsmobile! I've toyed with the idea of doing one as a completely stock passenger car (in addition to a long-running project to make a stock one-ton truck from the same kit) for several years. From all I have ever found, the real TV "truck" started out as a roadster, which had it's "turtle-deck" trunk and rear fenders removed sometime in the late 20's or early 30's and a flat bed truck body added. (That was quite common in the years between the World Wars). On such a roadster, the trunk section often was a separate unit, fitted up to the rear of the roadster body, but you'd still have to either scratchbuild it, or rework the rear portion of some other roadster kit to fit. Art

That Pontiac was in a collection in Terre Haute IN for a few decades. I've seen it, and watched it being started and run (yeah, it does run!). It's certainly a sight to see! It and a mate were built for the General Motors Pavillion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. It was also used in the GM Parade of Progress as well. Art

The actual, stock '36 Ford V8 used a crossover pipe that went down under the engine, from the left manifold to the right side one, with the right side manifold connecting to the exhaust pipe. Pretty standard for V8's for years. As for the model kit engine--that's the way kits like the Monogram '36 Ford were laid out--intended for kids from perhaps age 10 or to out to about 15-16yrs old (the principal demographic of car modelers back in the 1960's). Art