Dave Ambrose

I tweaked the settings again. Hopefully, this gets them reined in until I can replace the system.

I tweaked the settings again. Hopefully, this gets them reined in until I can replace the system.

I sometimes come across cool hot wheels. My grandson thinks they're cool too. I'd love him regardless, but it's so nice that we understand each other.

Thank you all for your kind comments. We very much appreciate them. You don't see the term interdependence mentioned much outside of science and Buddhist philosophy, but that's exactly what we have here. Without your participation, nothing I do matters, and without this forum, there's no good communication platform. We're working well together and that makes it all worthwhile.

I would love to just leave that enabled. Unfortunately, some individual(s) tried to carry out an attack using the edit feature as the vulnerability. That's why it's set the way it is. We are enabling long term editing on a selective basis. If you want to go back and edit your old posts, PM me and I can set it up. If I can find a way to readily recover from that kind of attack, then I'll open it back up. I'll also be popular on the CMS conference circuit since this is a big problem.

Happy father's day to all the dads out there. I hope you're getting to enjoy the weekend with your kids.

I remember seeing a similar vintage car at the Monterey Historics. I too was surprised at how large they were. Even into the 40s, race cars were pretty good sized.

With all that's happened over the past year, it seems like a good time to catch up and let you know what's happening behind the scenes. Our server upgrade didn't go as well as it could have, and some of the problems took longer to resolve than I would have liked. I appreciate everyone's patience while we got that all working again. The new server is faster in almost every way, and gives us a good base for more and better services going forward. People seem pleased with the most recent forum upgrade. I personally like the cleaner and more readable look. What you don't see is that it's easier to administer and maintain. At some point, we'll be tweaking the appearance so it harmonizes better with our web site, but that's a ways off. We enabled the like button. We think it will be more helpful than detrimental. Please, don't get overly concerned with your number of likes. Just keep posting as you normally would. This hobby has more branches than a Bodhi tree, and someone will need your information at some time in the future. We've experienced significant growth during the pandemic. There were some refugees from the now defunct Scale Auto forum. If you found your way here from SAE, welcome. More importantly, lots of people suddenly had time to begin, or return to model building. It was fun when we were kids, and amazingly enough, it's still fun now. Our new user rate tripled starting about April of last year. We also had an unusually large contingent of guest users. This is all good for our hobby. This influx has presented some surprising challenges. My local hobby shop ran out of styrene glue. A week before, they had 50 bottles. I've never seen that. Our additional users have put more load on our infrastructure too, but we're well positioned to handle it. I don't anticipate us having any capacity problems for the foreseeable future. Our new server is working very well. Uptime has been excellent, and the upgrade gave us the headroom we needed to handle both the increased content, and new users. Our goal has always been to have a welcoming and supportive community. I feel like we're generally doing well in that regard, and for that, I thank you all. Given our influx of new people, we see lots of questions, some of them more naive than others. We're trying to get helpful content on the web site, but it will take time. It's worth noting that our new modelers are coming to the hobby as adults. The challenges are different, and they don't have a passel of friends where they can pick up the very basic stuff. Please, be patient, and helpful. We have a wealth of information here, but it's not very well organized and harder to search than I'd like. We have a love/hate relationship with the advertisements. On the one hand, they pay for the server, and software support. On the other, they're intrusive, sometimes inappropriate, and lately have taken to obscuring content. Getting the ads to a tolerable state is currently my top priority. Advertisers like to game the system in multiple ways. This is causing us a lot of problems, and I'm tired of spending part of my weekends trying to weed them out. We are going to switch to another provider as soon as I can get it set up. Ultimately, we'd like to carry ads from model car providers too. That's a ways off as we don't yet have the personnel to manage it. My responsibilities changed at the beginning of the year. While I still maintain our online presence, I joined the editorial board for the magazine. I'm also responsible for our online marketing and distribution efforts. It's a good challenge, and we're looking forward to bringing you more excellent content. Our first major project is rebuilding our main website. We expect to be done with that shortly. It will be simplified and easier to navigate. We want to bring more of the magazine content online, and perhaps more importantly, expand our content with valuable information we don't have room for in the printed magazine. I'm spending somewhat less time on the forums than I used to, but I'm still available via PM. As a general rule, you should report any posts you need deleted from trading and wanted to the moderators. All the mods will see it, and you'll get a response much sooner this way. I also see reported posts if one of the moderators doesn't deal with it first. Speaking of which, we am extremely fortunate to have an excellent team of moderators. Xingu, iamsuperdan, and Badluck 13 are the ones who carry out the day-to-day decisions that make our policies real. I'm grateful for their continued contributions. This board wouldn't be the same without them. I'll close by thanking our members for making this the kind of forum that's worth visiting. It was special when I joined in 2008, and thanks to you, it remains special today. We're always interested in improving, and if you have any ideas, I would be glad to hear them. Happy modeling, Dave Ambrose

I got the word. Will be working on it this weekend.

I got the word. Will be working on it this weekend.

@Pete J.-- you need to clean out your messages. Plaza Dentistry in Rancho Bernardo. I started talking about my antipathy with the hygenist. It helps. I also have to keep reminding myself that she's caring, capable, and competent. That goes a long way toward relieving my discomfort.

got back from a cleaning this afternoon. I’m one of those lucky ones who can hear the ultrasonic cleaning tool. Doesn’t make for much fun in the chair. They have a monitor running a soothing video over head. It actually helps me a lot. I’ve had my hygienist for years and she’s great. Truth be told, I’m not a very good patient, but she puts up with me. This practice had one dentist for a very long time, unfortunately, he died of a stroke. There was a temporary dentist, who was very good, and now the practice is in the hands of a new owner. Don’t have a good read on his skills yet as I haven’t needed any work (knock on wood).

There goes that hypothesis.

Which browser are you using?

Never underestimate the strength of a child's curiosity. You want them to stay curious, so best to secure anything you don't want them into.

Support for Windows 7 ended last year. That means you don't get patches for security vulnerabilities. You should be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for no charge, and I strongly recommend upgrading unless you want you computer breached and mining bitcoin or sending out junk emails.

Any ACC glue will fog paint and windows. On sensitive stuff like that I've been using Microscale Micro Krystal Kleer. It doesn't fog, dries clear, and is rubbery once set.

I like this build. I used to own a FIAT 131 Mirafiore. It was the first new car I ever bought. Ran great so long as you kept it out of the hands of a FIAT mechanic. (kinda like MGs in that regard) Kept that car until it stripped the cam belt. That was my fault for missing the service interval. The engine lived on it my brother-in-law's 124 Spyder.

My grandson asked for a fishing pole. We found a good one, and put a casting plug on it. It didn't take him long to figure out how to cast with it. For the moment at least, the cats are thrilled. There will be at least a few outings for fishing this summer.

I didn't realize it, but the new version doesn't have an image button in the editor. I'll get that added back in. In the meantime, you should be able to just paste the link in, and the editor will automagically [sic] generate a preview.

If you've tried to subscribe in the last week or so, you would have been greeted with the notice that we were implementing a new subscription system. We are very pleased that the new system is live. You can either click the subscribe at the top menu here, or go to the main page and click the subscribe link. Thanks for your patience.

We were doing fish counts on SCUBA and I needed a large slate for underwater use. I made a nice one out of some .1 inch styrene sheet. Drilled a hole for a wrist lanyard, and another for a string to the pencil and I was set. I even made it left handed.

<sigh> This isn't acceptable. I'll take a look at it this weekend and let you know when I tweaked the settings. You can let me know whether they worked.

Modelbuilding is a great thing to do with your kids. I got my kids involved in modelbuilding. They enjoyed it, though they went off to do other things for a while. Then two of them came back. They build Gundams, but we have long talks about what we like, and what we want to build. They're all adults now. and building on the patio is one of our happy times.

My son likes to build Gundams. He needed to go to the hobby shop, and my daughter went with him. She also builds Gundams. She came back with a motorcycle kit to go with one of her other figures. Her husband was actually pleased. He doesn't build models, but he builds lots of other stuff. Our hobby is still alive, but it's morphing.