Dave Ambrose

Just start a new topic in Under Glass. It's nice if you can include a link to the On the Workbench topic, but not required.

Stopped by a hobby shop we don’t usually visit yesterday; Military Hobbies in Orange, CA. It’s a great hobby shop, it’s just very far away for us. Picked up a Finemolds X-wing kit. These are much better than the Bandai kits. My daughter found several 1/144 tanks for her Gundam dioramas. I especially appreciate how the owner treated my daughter like any other modeler and didn’t talk down to her.

I have several C-cell powered SCUBA diving flashlights. Tenergy makes an actual C-size rechargeable battery. It has a capacity of 5000 mAH. A lot of C-cells only store 2500 mAH, which is the same as both the AA rechargeable cell, and your garden variety alkaline C-cell. You can get a set of good C-cells, and a charger for a reasonable price at the usual outlets.

That's true of battery powered tools in general. When the batteries in my drill die, I generally find it's cheaper to buy a new drill. I suspect part of it is due to the rapid evolution of battery technology in general. They just can't get equivalent batteries for a long time. My shop has one battery powered tool; the drill. I was lucky with this last one. I was able to get new battery packs with different and better technology for a reasonable price. Maybe that will be the case going forward, but I suspect Dremel isn't a big enough market to justify the investment. I just stick with line-powered tools for the most part.

I have a VL and like it a lot. The double action is nice for some effects. But it has an adjustment for both the minimum and maximum amount of paint. That flattens the double action learning curve a lot. Getting the set makes a lot of sense and it gives you all the accessories you’re likely to needs for a while.

I agree. With respect to most models, current economics have little in common with their predecessors from our youth. Kit runs are much smaller now. I believe they're making runs of 30,000 (give or take) kits instead of 700,000. That makes the cost of molds, and the rest of the kit development more critical than the manufacturing costs. It also means you don't need the molds to last forever. Cutting a mold from aluminum is much cheaper than cutting one from steel. And, thanks to advancing technologies, you can use the same CAD file to create a 3-D printed part, or a mold. Over the very long term, 3-D printing costs will continue to decline, and that will further skew the economics at the niche end of the model market. I don't think we'll se resin casting with RTV molds disappear, but the number of parts you need to make to justify an RTV mold will rise over the long term. Now, if we could just make 3-D modeling software more user friendly. That would be a revolution.

I’ve had nothing but coverage problems with yellow paints. Pearl paints must be at least somewhat transparent, and I’m sure this makes it worse. I’m painting Testor’s chrome yellow over white primer this week. Should be fun.

Harry was a good guy. He touched a lot of lives in a positive way, including mine. Thanks, Harry.

I've read that too. Very interesting. Those guys were far braver than I.

Oh so true. It's stuff like this that makes me want to activate a like button.

Thanks. Somewhere in my mother’s pictures is one of a very much younger me and Big Daddy Roth. All of Ed Roth’s cars are cool, but I especially like the Mysterion. It was one of the first kits I bought when I got back into model cars.

Fixed this topic. Someone posted a link to a site that Google now considers toxic. If you were using the Chrome browser, you got a big red page informing you that you were in great danger, and all the elastic in your underwear (pants in the UK) would be neutralized if you proceeded. Oddly enough, Safari and Firefox both realize that a broken picture link isn't going to cause a Phishing attack. I removed the link, and now we're just fine, so I'm putting the thread back. Post away, my friends.

Do the standard stuff when your merchant account gets hacked -- Change your password Turn on Two-step verification Delete your stored credit card Review your current credit reports. Lock your credit reports, and put an alert on your account if you can. This prevents them from opening new accounts in your name. Problem is they probably have your home address, which is an important piece of authentication information. Amazon is usually better than almost anyone about security. Chances are, they got in via your computer, or with information stored on it. I would run several different malware checks. Microsoft Defender is actually pretty good. Malware Bytes has its virtues too.

We're inventing new words, and uses for old words, faster than the curators can add them to their catalogs. Call me old school, but I still have Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language on my bookshelf. The title is something of a misnomer since it's very much oriented to the American dialect of English, and doesn't have British spellings of anything. Interestingly enough, it does have the British definition of table (a discussion subject) which, is the exact opposite of the American definition.

Slack is another chat platform. It's gotten fairly popular among software development and corporate types. It's supplanting the original IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in some areas. It isn't, but probably had the sole virtue of being available in the desired contexts. Welcome to the age of worldwide naming. No worries there. The field of computing hasn't gotten any less esoteric over the years. I had to constantly explain to my parents what I did for a living, and why they shouldn't be worried about my future. I had to at least try to keep things comprehensible to the uninitiated.

As someone who's had to name two companies in the last 10 years, I can attest that it's damn near impossible to come up with a name that's meaningful and unique. We end up with the weird names that have only the vaguest connection between them and the service or goods they offer. Quick, tell me what Slack and Twitch do without looking them up. But. . . the capitalization should have alerted you that it was a proper name. I did check out the site he posted, and it's legit. There are other users, but not a lot of discussion yet. A lot of people don't like the forum format and prefer the interactivity of a chat. We used to have a heavily used chatroom here, but we had to stop due to cost, and when we put it back, nobody used it. I wouldn't mind having that back. We had some good discussions there, and it was nice to have some friendly voices when I was on the road. Twitch is a video streaming and conferencing service. There is a whole model building subculture that streams the video while they build. I can see some situations where that might be pretty cool. The Coast Airbrush videocasts on Facebook are usually fairly interesting, but they move too slowly for me. I know it's easy to think of this as the universe, but we're hardly the last word in media platforms.

You might get them off with Walthers Solvaset. The model railroaders use it and it a lot more powerful than the Microscale products.

Wow. That's interesting. I need to go watch that movie again.

I don't know the specifics of Randy Ayer's situation, so I can't comment on that. A backup server of the requisite size would break our budget. However, we do run nightly backups which are not directly accessible, so if some scoundrel breaks in and trashes our site, we can recover with relatively little loss of content. Thank you for your good wishes. I'm recovering well.

Yes, this is a chatroom server. My son set one up for him and his gaming friends. Easy to get the meaning confused when lacking context.

Yeah, you'll just leave that right here. I see what you did. Maybe I should put on in my 1:1 Morris Minor Traveler?

Count me as another Ernie Irvan fan. Very nice build.

Boy, do I feel like an outlier. It varies, but I usually switch between Alternative, Jazz Fusion, and 20th Century Classical music. Favorites are Weather Report, and Return to Forever for Jazz. Classical is usually Hindemith, Prokofiev, Nielsen, and sometimes Ives. I sometimes binge on Tragically Hip.

Football, or baseball?

This trips my significance alarm. Thanks for the info. I definitely have a new line of inquiry.