Jairus

James is right. You HAVE to drill a hole and pin all exhaust connections. Otherwise you will be fixing it everytime it breaks... and with the weight of solder... it will break! Personally I use evergreen and bend it over a candle...

I wonder if this is interesting to anyone....

I don't mean to steal your thread.... but (will anyway ) wanted to show you what I have done with two swap meet 1962 Fords that I picked up about 15 years ago. The first one was to be a response to Tim Kolankiewicz's "Coral Aura"... which of course never got finished. (boy did you miss that bullet Tim!) The roof was/is a new at the time Revell Thunderbird SC donor item inspired by the Starliner. This was to be an all out turbosupercharged Ferrari engined, fully independently suspended with a aero-effects undercarriage.... not to mention 4 wheel drive. Yes, I ran out of steam on this one....... The second car I received at that swap meet was in very much worse shape. The body had huge glue marks on the sides and much of the details were damaged.... so I choose to do a quick weathered street car for a show in Texas I was suppose to attend. The car ended up taking best in class... (what that was I forget) or some such. I just wanted something to bring. Anyway, I utilized much of the damage to the body as rust, and dents... etc. Weird thing was that I had the bumpers re-chromed by Chrome Tech and then ended up weathering them.... weird huh? Note that the fender "bulls eye" trim pieces were scratchbuilt on both bodies? They both arrived with just holes and the trim pieces missing... What I mean to say with this post is.... Ron, I love where you are going with this build up but you need to break up those slab sides a bit. The removal of the chrome trim really emphasizes the flatness of the panels. Maybe a two tone paint scheme with a graphic painted spear or break between might be needed. Just a thought.

Ooooo NO! I am not going to fall for that again....

Revell's '40 Standard Coupe.

I am loving this project! Just like a model only ... useful when done! I can remember three of these cars from my past.. one owned by a room mate in college but that is another story. This short story is about a young girl who attended my church and she was about 17 at the time of the event. Lisa is her name and she was very cute. Her family was and still are close friends and she eventually married a good friend and moved to Cali. Anyway, she drove one of these Celicas for a couple of years after getting her license. It was bright orange/red, with aluminum 5-hole wheels and the rear window slats. One warm summer day, I don't exactly remember the year.. must have been 79 - 80 - or 81. Lisa was exiting Lancaster Mall and was accosted by two hispanic dudes who spoke no english but threatened her with a knife for her car keys. Since the Celica had a clutch.... and neither knew how to drive a clutch... they ended up forcing her to drive them to the coast. For over an hour she took them from Salem Oregon to Lincoln City and then turned south for about 20 min's with a knife pointed at her ribs. True story! At some point they turned up a smaller road off Hwy 101... and then off that side road to a little dirt logging road where they forced her to drive about a 1/4 mile. Lisa told me that she was pretty sure she wouldn't get out of this and was thinking about running as soon as the car stopped. The guys told her to stop and then they got out, tossed the keys into the bushes and walked up the road leaving her sitting there. ( I suspect she had been crying but then she's a pretty tough kid...) Anyway, after searching the bushes for an hour Lisa managed to find the keys... back down the logging road without getting stuck and drove to the nearest pay-phone where she called the police and her parents. The Police found a pretty large pot grove up that logging road but as far as I know never found the two dudes. Lisa is cool now has three kids and has been married since 1984... or so... I don't remember exactly. It is still fun to listen to her tell the story because she laughs now and is not really afraid of anything anymore. I guess life can be like that. Anyway, Lisa and Doug sold the car shortly after getting married and they come and visit her folks a couple times a year so we keep in touch. Ciao!

Painfully correct and exquisitely beautiful. Bravo!! Like the Caddy motor too....

That is some nice work Bill! Having done all that to some of my models in the past I have to add that just because you can... is not a reason to do it to all models. If that were the case, you would only complete one project every-other year! The amount of work and time spent triples each time you cut open a single door or trunk! The only reason to open a door or hood is to give the viewer access to greater detail INSIDE. For instance, if I am building a Convertible.... I usually don't open the doors, but a tight little coupe.... sure! About the only thing you have done that I have not is roll down windows. That to my knowledge has only been done by you, Shuklis and Hamilton.

Airbrushing also equally distributes the paint. I have noticed that flat colors if brushed on tend to have an uneven sheen all across the surface due to uneven thickness which effects drying time somewhat. You want the roof to look perfect because that is the first thing a viewer sees. I spray even the smallest areas now!

You are having just too much fun!

Your welcome! Always glad to help...

I think he is building 1/12th scale if I gauge it right. Beautiful work regardless. Not insane... unless it is actually 1/24th....

YES, that would be a great project. Not a great kit as the market is a little limited..... but as a Scratch-built project I say GO FOR IT!!!!

The simplest method is always the best! First off, hold up your model car and determine the distance your eye sees the car in scale. Then go out and look at a car from that same 1:1 distance and truthfully tell me how much detail you actually see in the vinyl roof? Not much if you are truthful. More likely it is the semi gloss appearance you are actually seeing along with the two seams running from the front window header to the back glass moldings. My suggestion is to get some spray glue from the local craft store. It is usually made by 3M and is also called "Photo-mount". What you do is mask off the rest of the body and then shoot a light misty coat or two of the spray glue on the roof after using evergreen strips to replicate the trim edges and the two seams. Let the glue dry a few hours and shoot some semi gloss black (if new) or flat black (if a few years old). This process works with white, tan or any other color vinyl roof. Plus, you can use the spray glue to replicate the texture that undercoating creates on the chassis as well.... If the texture is not deep enough.... do it again!

Some of you have seen this before but the question keeps coming up with regularity on the forum and since the older magazines are becoming harder to find... I thought I would post it here for all to see. Hood, trunk and door hinges are one of the first modifications modelers should consider when building a contest winning car. Of course, some kits already come molded with opening doors and working hinges. But they are usually limited to the use of weak styrene plastic which cannot hold up to continuous use, not to mention weak enough to break unless non scale thicknesses are used during the molding process. With this post I have demonstrated a basic hinge I first used in 1984 and have incorporated in many of my models since. This first hinge is bent from a single piece of .048 or .039 steel wire. (thicker .055 is harder to bend and smaller, .032... tooo springy and will allow the door/hood/trunk to bounce) The wire is bent as shown and held in place with blocks of .063 thick styrene that has had a slot carved into it for wire clearance. All four blocks are the same basic size and all four are glued in place at the same time. Not to worry about glue getting on the wire because once you pop open the hood the bond between the wire breaks with the torsional action thus providing a pivot and secure alignment for consistent closing each and every time! This hinge is used when a prop rod is used to hold the hood in the open position. Or magnets and/or additional springs can be incorporated later depending on application. This second hinge is a "torsional two piece" hinge. It is bent with mirror pieces of .039 steel wire with one end matching the hinge in the first illustration and the other end bent in a simple "L" shape. Trunk hinges on many cars come like this in the 1:1. The simple use of the "L" bend provides a little tension built into the hinge that will POP open the hood and keep it open... unfortunately a latch will be required to hold it closed with this design. Magnets are a simple solution... a more elegant and complicated design I will post at another time. When installing this hinge, like the first one... one should tape in place the hood or trunk lid. Then the wire pieces are laid in place and the hinge blocks glued in place along with the hood hold down blocks. Clothes pins are used here to make sure of a secure bond... and good drying time required, about 8 hours, before proceeding. The next step is to push down the springy "L" bend and glue in the anchor blocks somewhere over the fender area of the body. This too is held in place with clothes pins and left to dry. Later, the tape can be removed and the hood popped open! If you did it right... the hood should stay open and at a realistic height. Unfortunately it is not possible to make the spring stronger once installed but you can put limits on the spring if it pushes the hood or trunk open beyond the normal lift. Therefore is important to put the "L" bend at least 90 degrees off from the hood bend. Hope that makes sense. At any rate, trial and error are usually the best way to accomplish this as is the way in most modeling. If the hood is heavy then thicker wire or a greater degrees between the "L" bend and the hood might be needed. If the hood is lighter... maybe one spring is all that will be needed. Like I said, trial and error is the only way to be sure. Good luck!

Making an altered wheel base funny car requires a lot more than just moving the fender lip forward, although that is the first thing you see. It also requires a lot of chassis scratch-building to create a solid framework behind the cut off frame rails to mount the rear axle and wheelie bars in some cases. The whole "AWB" craze only lasted a few short years as a way to get more of the body weight on the rear axle. Some builders even moved the front axle forward, mounting on leaf springs with a straight tube. Almost to a car, the AWB craze was an experimental period utilizing trial and error, with no two cars the same. But since they were all hand made and experimental, there is little chance of messing it up unless you are replicating an actual car. But it all ended as soon as someone realized a welded tube chassis and fiberglass body went faster, was easier to build and way easier to work on! No, I don't know who was the first.... So, if you want to make an Edsel AWB, I would put your mind in the very early 60's and simply think... "What would I do to make this car faster and lighter"? Remove all interior pieces except the dash board. (requires scratch building all sheet-metal support work in the doors, floor and roof.) Get yourself a good tube or "I" beam front axle and front suspension leaf springs and shackles. Move the rear fender wheel openings and scratch-build a new frame from the rear axle back. (don't forget to sheet metal it all in) Leave off the front and rear bumpers... which requires thinning the remaining sheet metal so it looks realistic. Leave off all glass. Scratch-build a roll cage. Then PM James Warkinten for more ideas because he has built a number of these....

Motorcycles are cool! Nice build there too...

Beautiful build! However, you could have gone whole hog and put an AMT engine and chassis underneath... unless your plan was for curbside. At any rate, the look is spot on!

Those fender ornaments were the first to get lost on a build up. The glue dries out and one bump... the piece drops down (installed from inside) and you never see it again! Then, they look like nothing on the parts tree and a lot of kids miss putting them on, so that is THE most often missed piece on early 60's Ford kits. Filling is one way, another is to make an ornament by carving or forming and then add BMF! It is not that hard...

It's way too thick for small items in my opinion, but for chrome side trim... it could work. As long as the sticky on the back is good. I have used aluminum foil actually... It was before there WAS BMF and I used gold leaf adhesion glue to keep it in place. The nice thing about thicker material is you can actually polish it smooth and shiny. But it won't conform to shapes as well as BMF and it will NOT stretch like BMF will for wheel well moldings. You should have lots of different materials on hand for the various applications and effects they can provide. It's all about being a modeler....

A hemispherical (i.e., bowl-shaped) combustion chamber allows the valves of a two valve-per-cylinder engine to be angled rather than side-by-side. This creates more space in the combustion chamber roof for the use of larger valves and also straightens the airflow passages through the cylinder head. These improvements significantly improve the engine's airflow ("breathing") capacity, which can result in relatively high power output from a given piston displacement. With a hemi combustion chamber, there is minimal quench and swirl to burn the fuel-air mix thoroughly and quickly; the spark plug is frequently located at or near the centroid of the chamber to facilitate complete combustion. Engines with hemispherical combustion chambers often use dome-topped pistons to attain the desired compression ratio. All this creates a very wide head. Chrysler built three generations of hemi engines for automobiles: the first (known as the Chrysler FirePower engine) in the 1950s, the second from the mid 1960s through the mid 1970s, and the third in the early 2000s. Stands to reason that each era would have different shaped and styled valve covers. The modern Hemi doesn't look that much like a hemi at all and more like a SOHC Ford Modular engine at a glance. Chrysler also made industrial engines for agricultural work. As a kid I saw one of these "workhorses" behind the back of a Canadian barn in 1975 inside the pump shed connected to an irrigation pump. The engine was not real huge.... almost like it was a 7/8's scale but it was soooo pretty in rusty patina with those huge valve covers!

It is sort of far removed from my life now... but something to hope for again.

That is quite good DR! Very good actually... what size was the original? Here is an airbrushed Harley I did for a customer. He didn't want a big one so it was drawn and painted on a 10 x14 piece of Bristol. Harleys are cool here!

Yes, to a point. Street rods, Customs and some Street Machines can be considered with-in the realm of artistic expression. With-in normal boundaries of safety, roadwortheness and local legalities. Replica Stock is more like the subject of military modeling, relegated to studying charts and "rivet counting" to make sure that the model correctly represents a scale model of the real thing. That is not artistic in the truest sense, unless it is withing the confines of the builders mind. Art usually springs from the creative conscience and therefore limited to very few boundaries. Which is why we have nut cases dumping trash on the floor and calling it "ART", when it is actually just trash dumped on the floor to most of the public.

I remember the fall of 1978 when the first Fox body '79 Mustang hit the streets. EVERYBODY loved them and wanted one. I was very disappointed when my parents bought a.... 1979 Capri instead of the Mustang. Nice replica by the way!