Matt Bacon

£12K for a sports car...? That's entry level hot hatch money over here. £15-16K for an MX-5, £17K for a Fiesta ST, £15K for a SEAT Leon Cupra... The BRZ is £25K, the GT86 £27K... That is seriously affordable for a new car... ...now, as to what your £12K would buy in the used car lot... I can think of a few alternatives! bestest, M.

It's interesting that the "Skill level" gets more or less equal billing to the "Revell" brand... bestest, M.

My pleasure. I think that is the new style of Revell Germany box. They've had to up their game following Airfix's redesign and artwork. bestest, M.

...like I said, the built up model was on the Revell stand, and the Revell guy said that it probably wouldn't be in the shops in December. If it's not around sometime in January, though, I'd be very surprised. bestest, M.

Of course, Harry's right:

6. Clean up every part throughly when you remove it from the sprue: remove all the mould parting lines, ejector pin marks and the remnants of attachment points. Fill dings and holes. 7. Test fit every assembly, and trim, shape and clean up every part until they fit together cleanly in the bare plastic. There's nothing that spoils a build quicker than parts not fitting together properly because they just haven't been cleaned up adequately. 80% of the time, it's not the engineering and design of the parts that is responsible for bad fit... it's failure to get them the way they were meant to be before putting them together. Of the other 20%, maybe 15% can be fixed by test-fitting and remedying BEFORE glue or paint comes near them. And for the other 5%, well, that's where scratch-buulding comes in... bestest, M.

That's interesting. It hasn't managed to find it, even when I upload the original image. It looks like it takes some kind of "fingerprint" of the image which is independent of size, so it can find other versions of the exact same image, and then presumably parses the text around all of the other instances of the same image before doing a text search to find other pictures of the same thing. It certainly seems to be confused by a scanned-in picture that hasn't been sourced from on the web... I don't mind having a go at Auto ID for a while using images scanned from my library... bestest, M.

Just trying this out. I want to see how clever GIS actually is... bestest, M.

...and how many people complain about warped or broken parts whenever Revell (US) rebox a Revell Germany originated kit and stuff it into one of those tiny shoeboxes you guys have on that side of the pond? I don't even know how they do it sometimes... the i8 and 918 kits are so well stuffed into RoG's standard 14"x10"x2" boxes that I couldn't get either one back in so that it's still four-square and shuts properly! bestest, M.

IIRC they got their start producing the Pescarolo Judd, in some kind of deal where the team took quite a few built up as sponsorship and corporate gifts. Without that arrangement maybe the economics of the Matech GT and Focus didn't really work out... bestest, M. (who was very pleased to snag an affordable GT on eBay recently, even if it's a tricky kit to build by all accounts)

At that level of technology, you've got to assume that the driver's helmet is going to have some kind of visor HUD overlaying "situational awareness" on the real view. She'll be able to see where all the other cars around her are, their monitored or predicted fuel and kers state, accelerative potential (are they running light because they've yet to pit), and AI assessment of their driver's intent based on analysis of previous races. It'd be an R2 unit sat behind the canopy except that would interfere with the aero... Seriously, anything you could imagine that you could do with software and sensors you could do in the time it'll take to engineer the new engine and battery technology... bestest, M.

I'm in the UK, so I don't know much about US "One Hit Wonders", which rarely cross the pond (maybe "Camouflage" by Stan Ridgway... it made the top 5 over here). "Will You" was Top 10 here, and came from an album which spent over 6 months in the Top 100 and went double platinum. i'm surprised it never surfaced in the US -- you'd have thought the slightly alt take on big power power ballad would have had a natural home on college radio and even MOR stations... bestest, M.

One of my favorite songs ever. She's still working 35 years on, but never troubled the charts again... bestest, M.

Great kit... Tamiya Metallic Black for the catsuit, the rest mostly Citadel paints. bestest, M.

This is the first of the Pin-Up series from Master Box, no 24001, "Marylin." There are six in the range now, but she's the most "civilian" -- the others are more "Stars and Stripes" cover girls. I think she'll make a handy display accessory! And with a paint pot for scale: Mostly painted with Citadel colours, with my first airbrushed flesh tones -- although a lot of brush work over the top... bestest, M.

...again, I'm seeing two identical Ferrari pictures, one above the other, at this end at 17:27... bestest, M.

The top one is right click copy, right click paste from above. The bottom one is right click "copy image address" and then "paste" between hand-typed [ IMG ] tags... bestest, M.

The reply box was completely empty when I first pasted the first picture. That screwy "jpg.html.jpg" on the end must have come in as part of the right click copy or paste. As a matter of interest, the images I pasted have now (15 minutes later) disappeared on my screen as well. The Ferraris that you posted and Ken copied and posted are visible up above. So it looks like Windows firefox does something different from Mac Safari, and the forum software likes one but not the other... bestest, M.

Now it's 17:04 UK time on Thursday (why aren't you lot all out at Thanksgiving dinners?) and I can still see both of those pictures in this thread on my computer screen. But on my phone, they are replaced by hollow boxes with: "custom-made-front-engine-dragster-02-zpsiisqxlil.jpg.html.jpg" and "51Tk3T0jS6L.jpg" inside. So right click copy and right click paste is clearly not working in Safari on a Mac. Though if all I ever looked at was my own computer, it might look like it was. I wonder if those image filenames are all you guys ever see, but I see the actual pictures while they are still in my browser cache, but once they are flushed from the cache they revert to the filenames in my browser as well... bestest, M.

OK... so I just right clicked up on the image in line above and pasted it in. As I type this, I can see the image in the reply window. Now, here goes copy-pasting exactly the same way from a different web site`; That's from Amazon. As I type this time, I can see both images in the reply window. Now I'm going to hit "Submit Reply" M.

Obviously not... It looks like you're having the same problem I did: copy/pasted picture appears in the thread when you've posted it, then a while later has vanished leaving a broken picture icon. The only way I've found that reliably works is to use a photo hosting site that provides a URL for the image only (not a thumbnail hyperlink). Copy the link. Then hand type the [ IMG ] and [ /IMG ] (no spaces in the real ones) tags into the message box and "Paste and Match Style" the copied URL in between them... The only thing I can think (before anyone pops up with a snide PEBKAC comment, I've been building web sites and phone apps since 1994, so I do have _some_ idea how to use a computer) is that there are significant differences between the ways different browsers handle the copy/paste, and the scripts in the forum systems that handle them haven't been tested to work against all of them. That's the only way I can account for the differences in "what works for me" between different forum users. bestest, M.

Buy every early-teen you know a copy of this book: http://amzn.com/0544668251 (Use "Look Inside" to find out about Tiny bags of Water You're Made Of or Heavy Metal Power Building) It's fantastic... bestest, M.

Not quite sure where to post this, but Albion Alloys has just launched a new line called "Connecto". It's all brass, and is made up of fine brass tubes and etched "star" connectors. The stars come in varying numbers of points. You slide the number of tubes you need to meet at one place onto the points of the appropriate star, add a few drops of superglue to fix them, and then you can bend them to the geometry you need. Bingo -- fine tube spaceframe with good joints without any tricky holding and soldering... http://www.albionhobbies.com/connecto/ bestest, M.

This is the Hasegawa boxing of Monogram/s 1/24 kit, with additional white metal parts by Fine Molds. First up, the body in Zero Paints Guardsman Blue, with Zero 2K clear coat. This is as she came out of the paint shop. There are a couple of minor blemishes to polish out, but other than that I don't plan on doing any more "added shininess" Here's a few of the engine in progress, to compare and contrast the original and Fine Molds parts: And this young lady will be popping in from time to time in this thread. She's a Master Box figure, from their new "Pin-Up" series: Loads more work to do on her as well, but she's very nicely sculpted... ;-P bestest, M.

I cheated slightly -- my parents bought one last year... ;-) If you don't care about 0-60 times, feelsome steering, and chuckable handling, but are instead a nearly 80-year-old pair who still travel the most of length of the country (OK, only 400-ish miles over here) to visit friends, it's hard to beat as a comfortable long-distance cruiser with (genuine) good local MPG, and fantastically equipped. They bought a 60K mile diesel, top-spec with every option, three years old for about £7K... Depreciation's a killer for the original owner, but it's a bargain for the 3rd... bestest, M.