Dave Ambrose

We’re postponing the San Diego Model Expo until October. We’ll publish a new date as soon as we can.

Folks, please keep the politics out of this discussion. I had to prune it a bit. The salient points have been touched upon. My wife was at the grocery store today. It took an hour to get checked out. The store manager was directing traffic, and people were bagging their own groceries. Everyone was nice to one another. Maybe it's because we all live around here, and have at least seen each other before, but clearly not everyone is overreacting. On a more model related front, we cancelled our meeting for Tuesday. I will miss seeing my friends, but we are sadly in the high risk group. We need to be extra cautious. We're also likely to see the same thing with car shows. Be safe, be sensible, and listen to the scientist.

Not at the moment. I need to assemble the Cass as it was originally designed and take a few pictures. There's a lot to be said for a good refractor.

We've accumulated a few scopes over the years. Our main scope is an 8-inch, f/20 Cassegrain that my wife and I built a long time ago. We also have a 5 inch refractor that we can swap in place of the Cass. To top things off, there is a 4 inch refractor on an old Super-Polaris mount. That is a very nice scope we use for moon or planetary.

I've come to the conclusion that buying model kits and building them are two different hobbies. I'm much better at the former than the latter. My other hobbies are astronomy and scuba diving. Diving, in particular, is pretty spendy, even after buying your gear. Relatively speaking, model cars are pretty reasonable, especially now that I have this stash of kits. Even if I were buying new kits, it would still be pretty cheap with one build costing less than a local boat dive. Don't even get me started with fly fishing. (my wife's hobby)

I fixed it early this morning. Some server settings weren't what they needed to be.

I think I have the problem fixed. Let me know if you encounter difficulties.

We're getting errors when you try to upload pictures. Text seems to be working fine. I'll fix this as soon as I can. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. Thanks, Dave

Thank you for the good news. I hope he has a speedy recovery.

To my knowledge, the surgeries haven't happened yet. I don't know if they've been scheduled yet. I'll update people here as soon as I hear anything significant.

No kidding. Sometimes I think the cats eat better than I do. Then one them brings home a gopher. Caviar is probably super fish to them, and what cat doesn't like fish?

That's a beautiful car. I've never seen a kit for it before. But now, I'll keep my eye out for one.

There's way to much momentum behind self driving cars for it to stop any time soon. I think there will be some not totally unexpected winners. Disabled people, and the elderly will benefit a lot from a self driving car. So will we if people who really shouldn't drive switch to them.

My wife paints lead D&D figures. If you have bare metal, the best thing is to use an etching prep on it. I use Jasco Metal Prep, and it works well. It should work well on the Zamac used in diecast bodies. Properly cleaning and degreasing is also important. Handle the bodies with gloves after you clean them. Definitely use a primer if you're working from bare metal. Other than that, the Tamiya paints, or enamels should work just fine.

Unfortunately, we now have to moderate new members because one individual started creating bogus accounts and threatened to trash the forum. just post some more good stuff and we’ll have you off moderation in a jiffy.

You can typically just insert the pictures by dropping them into the area at the bottom of the text area. You can then decide where they should appear in the text.

The LED lights are hard to beat. They're just about as bright as any CFL you're likely to get, use less energy, and last a very long time.

The cat is actually a she. I’d chase her off of there, but she has intestinal leukemia. It’s well controlled with meds, but I just don’t have the heart.

Congratulations, Steve! Those look super nice.

Wouldn’t that make a very nice sports car? It’s too bad they can’t make a whole bunch of those for the US market?

Post back here or pm me if it’s still a problem tomorrow. There are some timeouts still pending.

PM me if you're still having the problem tomorrow. By then, all the timeouts should have expired.

That's good to hear. We should be rock solid going forward.

I may have esoteric tastes, but I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat.

The fix is now in place. It may take up to 24 hours for the changes to propagate to all corners of the world, but I expect them to take hold much sooner. I don't know why, but Safari seems to be more prone to the problem than other browsers. At least that's been my experience.