LDO

I'm getting a 55gallon tank ready. I've had it a long time but it has been in the garage, empty, for ages. I wanted something different this time, so I'm preparing a couple of under-gravel habitats for crayfish. They're made of PVC pipe and fittings. There's an entryway and a "cleanout"; a 90degree bend going up at the end so I can push water in or vacuum water out of the habitat. I think they will feel much more secure, having a replica of their natural type of habitat. They may even reproduce. Hmmm...gotta get some kind of fish to keep the crayfish population in check. Oh yeah, I'm planning to get Australian Blue Crayfish. I'll get photos of the habitats later on. I'm not at home right now.

Yeah, but the Mudd coupe could be reissued with any number of bodies. A concrete pipe is just a concrete pipe.

Get a piece of PVC pipe and a spray can of Mr Surfacer. Spray it down from 15 inches or so, to give it some texture. Spray light grey over that. Presto, concrete culvert. You're welcome.

Now I see it. I need to form an online club of Duesenberg model builders who are into large scale. We'll get all worked up over the idea of a new tool 1/8 scale full-detail Mudd coupe. Revell will have no choice but tool it up, just because it makes so much sense. It can even include extras, like a bag of groceries that includes potato ice cream. There is no full-detail Duesenberg Mudd coupe in 1/8 scale available at the moment, therefore all your "market data" is irrelevant.

...And having shown it to my model car club, even taking it to a couple of regional shows, it pretty much drew a collective yawn. Art Oh, so it's not just me?

There's a world of difference between selling 50 or so model tractors for $300 apiece and selling 100,000 at $40 apiece. The market is just not there. If someone REALLY wants a 1/24 bulldozer, there's always Evergreen Scale Models. ;-)

If you lived in the area, I'd take you a car magazine and shoot the breeze for a while. I thought I was going to die of boredom when I spent 8 days in the hospital last year. Good luck, man.

A friend who makes resin parts once sent me some 1/8 scale wide whitewall tires, copies from a 1960s kit. I took them to a model club meeting and literally couldn't give them away. No one was interested because they were off-white resin, rather than black rubber. The copies were very high quality, no bubbles or flash. It blows my mind that people will build a model carr out of styrene, but pitch a fit over tires not made of the "right" material. The same thing goes for diecast models of Corvettes and other cars not made of metal. IMHO, that's just plain STUPID.

If you MUST have it, then it's worth the asking price.

Monty- if you're ever in Austin and want a free beer, look me up.

It's not just younger people. There plenty of people who grew up before the internet age who don't know the difference between there/their/they're, to/too, along with punctuation/capitalization, etc. Their posts can be hard to comprehend at times...especially if they're having a meltdown. :-D Always fun to watch.

Personal milestones: Discovering SAE in 1988, along with the articles that really fascinated me, like Mark Gustavson's "Mercari", and later in Car Modeler, his "Custom Clinic" series. As a huge fan of lead sleds, that series of articles was just incredible. Chopping, channeling, sectioning, hammering brass...and above all, doing it with a sense of style and balance. Not building a car with mail-slot windows "so they'll know it's chopped". I was also inspired by the Hot Rod Magazine contest coverage. I had always lived in small towns, never being exposed to new ideas in modeling, and I remember being blown away when I read that one of those cars had a custom tail light carved from a toothbrush. Radical stuff for a high schooler before the internet age. For the industry, I'd have to agree with the poster who mentioned AMT's '66 Nova. It set a new standard, and was followed by others like Revell/Monogram's '59 Cadillac and '69 Camaro. Bummer milestone: Car Modeler going out of print.

Wow. NSFK and politics in the same joke. Well played, sir.

Which book did you get?

It looks like Simple Green is not removing the base coat. It's soft/wrinkled on the edges of some parts. I've been using a toothbrush for scrubbing off the paint. Maybe I can try steel wool or even a small wire brush, used gently.

The "red Italian thing" was a line from Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen.

One of those red Italian things was destroyed?! Say it ain't so! :'(

Hmmm looks like it won't work when posting from my phone.

http://s1103.photobucket.com/user/johannv/media/Random%20stuff/Wild%20Willys/IMG_2152_zpsddfbd5b7.jpg Somebody had to do it :-)

I went with three gallons of Simple Green. That barely covered the parts in a tote I bought just for the job. I don't know what type of paint was used on this tank. I can only imagine it was Testors enamel. It's getting slowly lifted off, rather than dissolved. Now that I'm into this project, I think it was false economy to buy the glue bomb Tamiya rather than a new Trumpeter kit. I spent 40 bucks on paint stripper and a container for. Now I'm investing time and labor in paint removal and replacing missing/broken parts. Eh...live and learn.

Lowes has it in 5gallon jugs. I'm wondering how it does as a paint stripper for plastic models. I got a glue bomb 1/16 King Tiger tank off ebay. That thing is huge. If no one here has tried it, I may get a small container and try it on some part that be replaced by scratch building. Thanks, Lee

It looks like you decapitated a bird from a Judas Priest album cover to get the head. :-)

Check out his website: www.hyperscale.com Also look for reviews on book seller websites

No place to get it in Austin. I mentioned it once here. Someone informed me that it's available at Village Hobbies. That info came from a list in the magazine. Unfortunately, the shop had closed about 5 years earlier. King's Hobby almost went under in 2008. They quit carrying the magazine then. I've asked about it, but they say it didn't sell well enough to justify carrying it again. :-(

Drill a hole in the can??!! Holy cow, that's horrible advice. Throw that stuff away and go buy a new can. Even if you don't get the WORST case scenario, anything other than a perfect scenario involves cleaning up a lot of paint. Is that worthe the price of a can of paint? Hell no!