highway

Looking good, Bro. You are an artist, no matter the scale or material! By the way no wonder I can't find my paints, you got them out there. I see my paint box hiding in the background!

I'm sorry, but I HEAVILY disagree with you there! That is my whole reason that mirrors are my most important item if I ever do start attending shows again, and why they were important when I was showing in my younger years. The show the former club I was a member of NEVER touched a model in the show, and if there might have been a detail we wanted a closer look at underneath, we would hunt the builder down to pick the model up for us. Believe me, if I was at a show and I seen a judge picking up my model, they would be bringing back a bloody stump or at the least a broken arm!!! I see it this way, there are three things in life you don't touch: 1. Another man's wife. 2. Another man's 1:1 car. 3. ANOTHER MAN'S MODEL!

Well, it's update time again, and I did get the Spitfire in primer today, even though you really can't tell in the picture since it was molded in more or less primer gray, too! I also got more finished on the Mustang, the gun ports are gone and the wing is ready to go. I also started painting the interior. Here's a quick mock up of the Stang. This is a little teaser of the interior color, this is going to be a full race paint job, not just a fancy paint job over a more or less stock plane like the Spitfire with it's green interior. The racing fans among us might even be able to guess the final paint job from the interior color.

Dennis, I just checked Horizon Hobbies site, and they are showing the KW as early December 2010 and the tanker as early November 2010, both just in time for the ole Christmas list!

Unfortunately, I have no show pictures to share, I haven't competed in a show since maybe 2004, but when I was younger, I competed in almost every show I could get to. Even in those younger days competing in the Under 18 classes, I learned the most valuable thing I took to the show was a mirror to display my build on. I usually used one just slightly larger than the model itself and I used a cheap but effective method for raising the model high enough to see the full underside. I either used the clear plastic square tubes that toothbrushes came in or the little three legged "tables" that you find in the center of your pizza. The mirrors were definitly the selling point to the judges at one show I attended when I was 15 in Parkersburg, WV, that was a show specifically for race car models. I had a "Days of Thunder" Chevy Lumina stock car I built for my LHS as advertisement with the shop's name as the primary sponsor on the car, and my other entry was a Revell Lincoln LSC Pro street that was a sister kit to the Matt and Debbie Hayes Thunderbird. I had both on their mirrors, and in the case of the stock car class, the mirror was the winning factor. My car and the second place car were near equal, but I won because of the mirror and the judges being able to see the underside. I know that as a fact because after the awards were handed out, I overheard the mother of the 2nd place car ask one of the judges why my car won over her son's. The judge simply told her mine beat out her son's model because mine was displayed on a mirror, so they could see the underside detail as well, something they couldn't see on her son's model. Oh, and by the way, the Lincoln pro street also placed 1st in the drag racing category, and was also the Grand Champion of the age group. I didn't think that was bad for a build that took me only 2 days to build!

You know, that just reminded me of another AMT Mopar, and quite possibly my entry in this build, the 70 Coronet Super Bee Pro Street kit. I think that was a nice kit that was quite popular, but has anyone ever really seen it built the way it was intended? I'm sure most were parted out either for the Hemi or the back halves, or both. Mine sure were! I know before I lost my first collection in a house fire in 1997, I had at least 3 or 4 of them that were all raided for parts. I currently have 5 of them on the shelf now, and one still sealed just so I wouldn't be tempted to steal parts from it!

The best thing I can suggest is to check your profile settings. After you click on your profile bar at the top of the screen, click on "My Settings". After you do that, the next screen will have 8 options along the left side of the screen, go to "Notification Options". First, check that the boxes beside evrything in the "Notification Preferences" is checked, and also select the choice of notification you want where it says "Watch every topic I reply to If enabled, choose default notification type:". Also in the case of your PMs, there is a chart under the "Notification Options", scroll to the bottom of the chart where the "Personal Messages" section is and make sure the boxes for email (the first row of boxes) are checked. If not, check them and you should start receiving the emails for your PMs again. Also, I don't know why, but the popup window for the PMs is not working at all, and I even checked the boxes for receiving the popups in the options, and that is with IE8.

Ok, I'm a gluten for punishment, and I still haven't got the Spitfire in primer yet, and with a little more than a week left, I started a second build! This is my choice for the second, a nice classic P-51D. This was what I originally wanted to build, but I couldn't find anything less than a $40 kit, so I settled with the Spitfire. Then I found this one at Michael's for about $8 with my 40% off coupon! Anyway, I started on the wings tonight. I started getting rid of the gun ports on the left wing. I still have the right wing to finish. I'm hoping to have primer on the Spitfire tomorrow, and maybe the Mustang, too!

Looks great, Bro.

Well, at least it looks like the 2011 Son of Demonic Clown Car is happy to see you!!

That sounds better for me, too!

I'm in, if I can get the other builds of the bench that are also due by the end of the year. any chance of a little longer build time?

George, I think Harry either got you with one of his trick shots, or he's getting me! I have to say model, something just looks fake about it to me!

No problem! It was starting to take over mine, too!

Same here. I was driving a tow truck at the time, and I was on a call to pick up a school bus that was broke down and take it back to our local International dealer. I was almost on scene when I heard the breaking news on the radio the first plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and by the time I had hooked the bus and removed the driveshaft to tow it, I was still listening to the radio and heard the first tower fall, and the second by the time I got to the International dealer. After another call to reshift a shifted load, the whole shop was huddled around the TV in the shop. It is certainly a day I will never forget, and I pray no one ever forgets!

Looks very nice, Stewart! How is the other one coming?

Thanks for the info, Tim. These sound interesting. One question regarding the trailers, will they be a single or dual axle?

No problem, Bro! By the way, you forgot about the hot tub!! As for updates, I know I need to badly do that, and I've been slacking (McFLY, YOUR A SLACKER! ), but I'm planning to get back to it this weekend and work on it while I'm trying to finish a couple builds I have for the Jairus race plane build that are due on the 22nd.

Thanks, Hunter! I guess I should rephrase that slightly, I should have said shows that are close enough to me that I trust my truck to get to and won't take a full tank of fuel in the process! Pittsburgh and New Stanton are only about 60 miles each away, and the round trip is almost a full tank of diesel in my big dually, but I'm maybe hoping to get a friend of mine convinced to go to at least one of them, and we'll take his PT Cruiser. Much better fuel mileage!

1. Yes, bouncing thread names, and yes, IE8. 2. Full screen. And yes, after the upgrade.

ANYTHING THAT RUNS!!! Seriously though, I'm a Ford man, born and bread! I was still in diapers when I was under the hood of my brother's (who was 16 years older than me) Mustang. I have two Fords in the driveway right now, my 1990 Ford F350 4x4 Diesel dually, which is the daily driver, mainly because the other, my better half's 1990 Thunderbird is slowly rusting it's way to the junkyard. The years have treated my dually much nicer, that might be why it's still running! The T-Bird, between the rust in the unibody and the swiss cheese that used to be the rear lower control arms, not to mention the problems with the engine, just isn't worth trying to save, at least not for me. Of course, I have had many different vehicles through the years, from GMs to imports and even a Freightliner truck, and have loved all of them. I'd love to still have the Freightliner, though. There's just something about cruising the town in a largecar!!!

Ok, my name is definitely not Gregg, but I PMed him about the problem yesterday, and he gave me a suggestion of where to look!! Here is what I found out from his suggestion to look in the profile settings to fix the PM notification strip. 1. Go to your profile at the top right of the screen. 2. In the dropdown menu, go to "My Settings" and click on that. 3. The screen will now have "Your Options" and a button bar below it with "Settings" highlighted. Under that, you will see 8 options, with the last being "Your Notifications". Click on "Your Notifications". 4. After you have clicked "Your Notifications", you will see a list almost like your PM list, with "Saved Notifications" at the top. These are the notifications showing on the main screen in the PM strip, and at the bottom of the list, you will find a "Mark As Read" button at the bottom left and "Delete Selected" at the bottom right. Either option will remove the PM notification strip until the next time you receive a PM. By the way, if you choose the "Delete Selected" option, it will delete ONLY the notification, not the message in the PM in your Messenger that the notification is reffering to.

Do you have your computer set up to download automatic updates? If so, you should have the updated version. If not, and assuming you have Windows XP like me, or if things didn't change in Vista or Windows 7, click on your "Start" button at the botoom of the screen. Then move your mouse over "All Programs" and that will bring up the menu of everything installed on your computer. In the first column near the top of the screen, you should see either "Windows Update" or "Microsoft Update". That will take you to the Microsoft Update site and it will check your computer for available updates. After that, teo buttons should show up that say "Express" and "Custom". Express will install the high priority updates, and custom will also allow you to install software and hardware updates. Click the "Custom" button, and see if there are any IE8 updates that may show up in the software updates.

Same here, but I've found sometimes if I post a pic, especially in a PM, the pics will do what you were describing, Eelco. If they do that, try hitting the refresh button at the top of the screen, and then you should see the pic in the "resized" box. By the way, I use IE8. EDIT: Oh, by the way, too, mine was showing "Resized to 53%", the resize percentage depends on the screen settings and size of your screen. The screen on my main computer is a 19 inch widescreen, and most pics show up full size, but most all pics on my laptop shows as resized. It has a 15 inch (I think) screen.

Yep, once in Worchester, Mass., it was more like forty feet than forty acres! I was delivering to a small strip mall where a new ACE hardware store was opening, and I had the store's new shelves in the box. It took me almost a half hour to wiggle that two tone blue Wenie Wagon Classic XL condo into the little dock, and that was with putting the nose of it into the woods behind the store up to the windshield!! After I finally got it in enough the forklift driver could get the dock plate in the trailer enough to unload it, I had guys in suits asking a bunch of questions like "How long is the trailer?" and "What is the total length of the unit?" and so on. After a few more questions like that, I asked the suits what they wanted to know all that for, and they said, "We wanted to see how difficult it was going to be for our company trucks to get in here." After I found that out, I told them start by cutting out some of the trees!