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Second the 70 - 90% isopropyl alcohol, normally followed by a spritz of Windex. The “Proof” of clean surface is just like on your freshly washed car, the water should sheet right off of a clean surface, where a contaminated surface will gather droplets won its surface where it’s incompletely cleaned.

Vote for thinner, turn upside down and wait until you can unscrew by hand.

That’s exactly right. Too many get pushed or guided into a double action airbrush before they’re actually ready. I would much rather see someone get a single-action airbrush and get the processes figured out, before they are trying to put the paint on the model and control the flow through the trigger to boot! As we all know, the whole painting processes are like a recipe that has to be followed or the bread don’t rise, flat bread’s OK, but not as good as bread that rises. Neither is dull, orange peel paint when it’s supposed to be bright and shining, it just gets better with the polishing. I know of a few guys who can lay down paint with a rattle can that looks like it’s through a paint gun they got talked into a double-action airbrush and took about ten steps backwards! The learning curve wasn’t anticipated or factored into the switchover. Some get frustrated and never come back. When you’re tying to pick up any new learned skill you have to find a mentor who is willing to take you under his wing and bring you along someone who will tell you the truth when criticing your work; they’ll tell you hen it looks good and be honest when it doesn’t quite look so good either. The other harder path would be reading a whole lot of books and watching a ton of videos then get out and practice, wear out an airbrush or two until you get good! Study people like Steve VanDaemon, Rhino, the late Mike Lavale, David Monig, Craig Fraiser…. Heck study anyone that’s good until you get good yourself. Right now, a young guy can pick-up the skill set by just watching the right YouTube channels. When I started, you had to find someone willing to teach you the skill sets needed to practice a craft. I apprenticed for four hard years under some crusty old Sign Painters to pick up the skills needed to do production work. Along the line adding frills like pinstriping, airbrushing starting with Hi-Liting, murals, touch up - for a while in the eighties dealerships were advertising airbrush touch ups and guys were making good money with a little hand sanding, prime, paint and polish. If a guy was fast and good at it, he could do 10 - 15 touch ups a day walking away with some good money doing so! You are going to have to work hard if you want to get good. Just having the tool won’t make anyone a custom painter; It’s the experience and artistic skills behind that tool, that separate the somebody’s from the crowd of nobody’s…

Brand? Single or Double Action? Air Pressure initially and after adjustment? Air pressure adjustments typically solve siphon feed pick up issues, crank it up a couple of pounds at a time until the paint is sucked up the siphon tube. Might help to stop, reread the directions and tips and troubleshooting section, regroup, reclean everything, mix to recommend ratios, try it again. Keep at it you’ll figure it out! Back when I first started you could get five jars of Tester’s enamels for a buck, toss in another $1.50 for a half gallon of lacquer thinner. Go home and spay away until you were either too goofy to spray any more or your mom yelled at you to quit because it was stinking up the house! So it was easy to get lots off practice on the cheap. We used to practice on old models, tin cans, or small jars card board, News print to learn to control the paint out of the airbrush. Key word is… Practice until you get good, then practice some more! Fish Eye - Is your paint surface squeaky clean? Did you wash the hood or did it come riiight out of the box? The only other source of contamination then would be - Compressor - Air Line - Airbrush. Do you have an inline filter between airbrush and compressor? Water tap? Solvent cleaned airbrush? Is there moisture in the air where you’re spraying?

As long as you polish the needle and tip with any airbrush you should be good. I recently wore out my last Harbor Freight De Luxe which they discontinued like almost five years ago, tip finally split out. I used that one for tons of sign painting work spraying anything from enamels thinned with lacquer to acrylics even urethanes. For model work it sprayed lots of MCW paints, enamels thinned with lacquer thinner, lacquers, acrylics and any other stuff on hand. I also own several of each Miller single action, Paasche, Harder & Steenbeck, Iwata, Badger, and toss in another handful of no-name brands collected since I started airbrushing back in Jr-Hi in the early 70’s. So, with a cursory clean and adjustment I can probably grab any single or double action out of the toolbox and spray away for either production or model work. The oldest airbrush in the roll-a- way is a pre- WW II Paassche double action given to me by an old sign painting buddy, who is now long gone both his Paasche sprays on occasionally, just to remember how heavy had those old airbrushes were! For production stuff, those El-Cheap-O specials work great right out of the box and sort of go down hill from that point. They will however teach you all about the minor adjustments or will end to work on their more expensive brothers. Stuff like air pressure +/-, distance to the painted surface, trigger control on the double actions.. most of if you can learn to break down and clean cheap airbrushes and develop good maintenance habits; you’ll do just fine when you graduate up to the more expensive name brand brushes… My recommendation for years to anyone wanting to begin airbrushing is to start cheap and work your way up to a name brand airbrush. First, not everyone likes using an airbrush. Second, not everyone likes airbrush maintenance and cleaning with every use. Third, not everyone is mechanically inclined enough to tear down their airbrush and reassemble it again. I can’t begin to count the times some guy has brought a pile of parts that should assemble into an airbrush, crying for help to put their expensive baby back together! I’ve got some pretty good deals along the way and flipped quite a few of them for a buck, especially when they lost a part or two. I don’t take advantage of them and make a low ball offer either, if I buy one it’s always offered for sale to me. Friendship is always worth more than a killer deal! Bottom line - Don’t go whole hog and get the Iwata right off the bat! Buy the cheaper airbrush. Learn how t spray with it. Learn to clean, maintain and adjust it. Decide whether you like airbrushing or not, then go from there!

I would see about buying it, if I could convince Ed to repop it. Seeing as how Ed Sr.'s stuff is getting pretty rare these days. Ed jr. is awful funny about repoping other people's work because he's had some of his own work stolen and repoped then sold on Ebay. So I can see it, plus Ed is a businessman of tip top integrity! He's also a pretty good friend so I can say that because I know it about him, we've talked about such stuff. Let me see if I can get ahold of him and we can see what we can do, it would be all dependent on if Ed would be willing to redo this kit. I'd love to have one and love for other people to have one too! Be a great way to memorialize his dad too.

In one of the short lived Rod & Custom & Model Cars magazines they did an article on the Strombecker Midgets 1/32 scale (I think I remember that was the scale). Pretty much a go faster and more detail article. The magazine shows up every once and a while on eBay, so do the Strombecker Midgets which are normally just north of unobtainium in price. For what they go for and what I’m willing to pay, I’ll probably never see one, unless some crazy person shows up with one and I actually get to hold it and look at it! LoL! Does anyone 3D print a Midget Body and details to build up a slot car? 1/32 would be a great size, for me at least as that’s the scale we run around my place. The parts Box (Australia) used had a Midget Racer that was supposedly the Strombecker Midget, but I have never seen one in person, so I’m not certain what the scale is or if it really came from the Strombecker Midget Racer.

They do show up on eVilbay every once in a while. I found a Drag City Castings '50 Olds Tuck & Roll interior kit for reasonable price. It was right around the price Ed was selling them for, so don't count out eBay.

You might check Exact Match Car Paint Made Easy | AutomotiveTouchup I've used them before for full size projects, a 12 oz. spray can is $28.95, they also have compatible primer and clear coat. If I were spending that kind of money, for a single can of paint, I would go with all of the same product line, just to be on the safe side. You might be able to get pints mixed locally for less than Automotive Touchup wants for their pints then spray it through an airbrush. For models, I have got away with using the brush in bottle touch up kits sold in most good Auto Parts stores. Just drain out of the container and thin as needed. Nassau Blue and Daytona Blue are popular enough for muscle cars that you might find one or both in the Duplicolor line, or something for a late model with a different name but a close shade.

I have two shakers one is a small hobby shaker that works great for enamels, lacquers and anything oil based. The other is a Vortex Test Tube shaker which works really good with acrylics like the small Vallejo dropper bottles, it has enough oomph that it will stir up the big squeeze bottles of hobby acrylic paints, both are small enough that they don’t get in the way, that’s what matters!

I just watched the first JB Weld video Bill recommend about a month ago. I’ve used and been around epoxies in Engineering and prototyping (at Boeing’s Model Shop), where most of the time we used Devcon metalized to epoxy; but when they ran out we used JB Weld for tooling and prototyping, the tool rooms carried it for that reason. Biggest takeaway from that video (already knew it) is to roughen up the surfaces to be “glued” together to give the epoxy a tooth to bight into. This video includes recommended grits of sandpaper to give tooth to the surfaces, it’s worth the watch.

I thought the same thing; with the stitch and glue technique, the stress may be minimized by doing the stitching progressively. Place a stitch or two then glue…. Until the panel and contour you’re looking for is close enough to finish off with filler. This also might be an application where either medium Viscosity Super Glue and Baking Soda or Acrylic powder is mixed onto the body work then sanded in. Creates a harder than styrene filler which is less prone to cracking. I have also used the lightweight fiberglass cloth the kind for RC Aircraft modeling. The super glue as it is lighter than most of the common hobby shop and big box polyester resins, without going something specialized read that expensive resin. Work the superglue into the mat just like you do with resin, it will set much like resin as well. I was thinking this might be used to reinforce the inside of your bodywork and be thin enough to work around. idea #2. Create a lofted latticework which fits the contours of the interior, a contour gauge (pin gauge) would be useful here to get the outside contour minus the thickness of the body will give you the inside dimensions of a part or panel applied lofted section. Depending on how much the contour developers the contour splines (cross ways) could be spaced every 1/4 to 1/2 inch with 2 - 4 stringers to connect the contour splines. Which is exactly what you’re creating cross slices along the bodywork, you’ve likely seen this type of latticework lofting on shows featuring Foose and other custom bodywork shops. Ace has probably done this too in some of the plaster and plastics shops he’s worked at, with 3D printing I fear this old technique could be lost. In some of the more intricate contour development the splining may run lengthwise as well, normally in the aircraft tooling shop I worked the contour between splines would be filled in with either self curing modeling clay or just plain old plaster. Something like lofting might be way overkill just to develop a clamping point. Although it could work on a less developed lofted section too where you develop the contour over a shorter section to give a clamping point. You are only limited by what you can dream up, any tool you can get the job done and it works is the tool needed, who cares what it looks like it’s not the finished product anyway!

Jack, that Chevrolet Stocker looks great with those tires! Carl, If I remember right, this series of Modified Stockers go back the Model Car & Science days. The tips that I seem to remember seeing was that they sanded the tar out of the tires to get shape, any of the asphalt and dirt tires back then were miniature compared to the AMT Slicks the Stockers came with. Their next trick was to take metal window screen, (which is probably next to impossible to find now) which they laid across a hot clothes iron and rolled the tires ending up with a decent waffle design on a forty-five-degree angle across the "tread" of the slick. Now if I were doing this kit today, I would first take those tires and mount them on a tire truing lathe made out of a nut, bolt and a couple of washers and spin and shape those tires as much as the thickness of the carcass would take and not blow through (they are hollow), plus enough to get a tread siped into the tread of the slick. Probably would use an Xacto saw to do the siping, you might be able to use an Xacto knife to lightly carve the sipes into the tread. I'm sure somebody on this board has crossed that creek a time or two and has some better ideas fresh on their mind to add. Or else you could just do what Jack did on his sweet little Chevrolet Modified stocker and get some of those Plastic Performance Tires as well. Looking at those AMT Slicks today, I think they are a bit on the squared off side of things to make a good dirt or asphalt tire where the edges of the tread round out and blend into the sidewalls. Another resource that just came to mind would be to check out Clay Kemp's YouTube videos he's starting to amass quite a few these days, they are all pretty interesting as well as informative. He might just have some tire mangling treatments for asphalt stockers. The Fourth tire, inside Driver's front tire which I don't believe these kits ever included should be slightly smaller to set the stagger as the chassis on asphalt modifieds of this era were set up stiff enough that the cars tricycled through the corners lifting the inside drivers front tire halfway down the stretch, maybe never touching down on a really short track.

Yep, Thanks Bill that was the one that I mentioned I had and lost. It may be in the Del Rio boxes where I originally stored it but who knows, stuff gets moved and moved to other boxes... life goes on!! LoL!

Carl, you're right they are called "Lay Film" I think, though I have no real idea that they are supposed to cover light sources to give colored illumination effects. (Makes sense, I think I looked it up once because I had no clue what it was for, that's how I have a slight clue now!) LoL! The Lay film that I have from Hobby Lobby comes in all the Popular 60's-Gasser window colors and clear I'm not digging them out right now, but they are like 0.005 and 0.008" thickness and can be used to do side and back glass pretty easy.