Dave Ambrose

I did defragment some of the database tables. There was an important one that was especially bad. The web hosting company used to do that automatically every night, now they don't.

I started with computers in the '70s. We were thrilled to have those drives, and now getting a USB drive that size is considered an insult. I have many terabytes of storage on my home network. Those big drives get much less useful when connected by a too-skinny wire. This is an incredibly large forum system by almost any standard. Certainly in the 90th percentile size-wise. Mostly, it's getting the right structure in place. This server hosts multiple web sites, and it makes many things more complicated. I want to make sure we don't lose any data during this upgrade. That would be a first-magnitude disaster. We've already lost our gallery, and I'll be reinitializing that once we get the forum software up to current rev.

My first goal is to get the board running faster. But, before we can do anything, we have to be able to back up the files. This board is huge. The files (including pictures) are 57 GB. The database is a good deal smaller, but still big. That will be Thursday night's task. The source button is on my list, but further down the road.

I'll be taking the forums offline for maintenance, Thursday night, 8 PM PDT. They'll probably be offline for 2.5 to 3 hours, maybe less. Thanks for being patient, Dave Ambrose

The problem isn't in your browser or computer. I've identified the problem and am working on improving it. Thanks for being patient.

The chrome bumper MGBs rides 1-1/2 inches lower than the rubber bumper models. The ride height was raised to meed federal bumper standards.

Ladies and Gentlemen, This thread has gotten political. I've removed the overly political posts from view. Please, respect the board rules and don't discuss politics here. It's an important subject, but I'm sure there are better venues, and their hosts are more than happy to have you there. We don't allow political or religious discussions for good reasons. These rules have served us well. Your religious beliefs and the political scene is generally not relevant to building model cars, which is what most of us came here to enjoy. I'm going to make the charitable assumption that some people forgot the rules in the heat of the moment, and not hand out any warnings. Please do not continue to discuss either politics or religion* here. Moderating people's posts is generally annoying to both the person moderated, and the moderator. Thank you for your cooperation, Dave Ambrose * When we say religious discussions, we mean discussing or debating the merits or characteristics of various religions. Offering to keep someone in distress in your prayers is fine.

We've been there a few times. It is so hard to get on the plane going back to the mainland.

Gregg is in Hawai'i. Being good Americans, we incorporate a lot of local vocabulary in our conversations. Things I've come across here: pau -- finished or doneokole -- the north end of a horse heading south, a rude person, or your tuches.ali'i -- the ruling classakamai -- smart, intelligent, or cleveraloha -- hello, goodbye, or an exceptionally compassionate way of living indigenous to the Hawai'ian Islandsmahalo -- thank youPost any new ones here, and I'll translate as best I can. Unfortunately, I don't have the proper diacritical marks, so I can't clue you in on which syllables are accented. But, all the vowels are pronounced, and use the same pronunciation as Spanish.

I have Presbyopia. I could not build without one of these, or the clip-on magnifiers for my glasses.

This is uncalled for. We're supposed to be doing this for fun. You don't need a vast tool chest to build model cars. You can enjoy yourself with an Xacto knife, a set of needle files (highly recommended), some sand paper, a few good brushes, and some paint. Oh yes, glue. You'll need that. Try a few, stick with the one you like. "Best" often degenerates into a religious argument. If you're feeling luxe, get some small diagonal cutters like the Xuron cutters to remove parts from the trees. As someone who could open a hardware store in their garage, buy tools as you find you need them. Your first model car won't be great regardless of your tool collection, so just build it and enjoy yourself. Your skills will develop with practice.

Thanks. That's what I was wondering. The ability to delete posts is a separate issue, and was removed because someone was abusing it. As an operational policy, we don't actually delete postings, we hide them. There are times when we need to go back over old postings so keeping them around is essential. I'll look into the source button. It seems to me it should be there, but it may be affected by some other setting in the BBS software.

What's your screen resolution? Some people with really old, low res screens, end up with the tablet version of the editor. It don't think it has that button. My editor window does have that button, it's on the left hand side of the toolbar. But, I'm not sure whether it extends to otherwise normal people.

Hardly anyone ever used it, so it got shut down, and we let the domain expire. It was then renewed by some entity who thinks they can get big bucks for it by selling it back to us.

I'm also the site administrator. I keep the underlying software and servers working properly.

Going forward, please just upload the photos to this site. We have unlimited disk space from our hosting company, and they will never go away unless we do. You can also go back and edit your older posts with new pictures.

I'm looking into the possibility of downloading Harry's pictures from Photobucket and hosting them here. The, ahem, people at Photobucket aren't making that easy. I hope they understand that when I see that company on their resume, it's going straight into the trash.

We're looking at doing that. If we can download the pictures from the links, we can probably write a program to update Harry's posts. Unfortunately the P'tak at Photobucket haven't made it easy.

You should be able to go back and edit them.

Just upload your photos to this site. I removed the storage quotas. Our hosting company doesn't have them, and we don't need them either. That didn't used to be the case, but we have a much better hosting company now. If you run into problems uploading pictures, please let me know.

Photobucket has, without prior announcement, stopped serving picture links from "3rd party" web sites. That means that a lot of our embedded pictures will not show up. My feelings about this run afoul of our bad word filter, but I do hope that the fleas of a thousand camels settle in their beards. Photobucket pictures will display if you right click the link and select "Display in new tab." This doesn't help the funky display on the article itself, but will at least let you see a picture in an old post. Going forward, I recommend that you just embed the picture(s) directly in the post. You can drag the file into the paperclip region at the bottom of the post editor, or click choose files in the same region. We have unlimited storage on our server, and I removed all storage quotas. Please let me know if you have any problems. This is an incredible pain, but if you used Photobucket links in old posts, please go back, edit the post, and embed the pictures. Thanks, Dave Ambrose

OK. it should be reenabled. Someone please let me know one way or the other. I do apologize. I altered a different setting and don't understand how that one got turned off too.

Thanks for the heads up. The edit function totally needs to be there. I'll get that fixed ASAP.

You need to remove the mold release agent from the body. If you don't remove it completely, you get all kinds of paint drama. I was told to use Westley's Bleche White tire sidewall cleaner. It definitely does the job. I soak it overnight in the stuff, and I haven't had a paint job on a resin model go south due to adhesion problem. I see that you can't get that any more. <huff> I'll have to let others make some suggestions, but it needs to be powerful enough to clean the oil off the resin, but not dissolve the resin itself. My gut feel is that a 50-50 mixture of denatured alcohol, and Windex will probably remove the mold release without affecting the resin. I've been using epoxy to glue things, mostly because I have a lot of it on hand.