LDO

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!

Another tip: Punctuation and spelling are your friends. Ugh, that last post hurt my head.

Knowing the scale would help. Detail parts for a 1/12 scale model might not look so good in 1/43. Having said that, solder can be bent to pretty much any shape you need. Wire can be had by taking apart junk electronics. Lead foil makes great seatbelts. I've read that you can get it at places like Golfsmith. Golfers use it to balance their clubs. Don't use the stuff from a wine bottle, That is no longer lead. It's now aluminum foil with a plastic coating. Oh yeah- descriptive thread titles do wonders. "Newbie needs help" is pretty vague.

That is cool.

Awww, man. I thought this was going to be a thread about listing the dumbest questions we've ever seen on this forum. Leaving disappointed.

Something done by armor modelers is to brush on some liquid cement, to soften up the surface of the plastic, then use a large, stiff paint brush to push into the softened plastic. MEK is great for this. It's really hot, so it will really soften up the plastic, plus it dries (evaporates?) quickly. The surface may get some tiny "strings" that look like cotton candy. Get rid of that with a couple of swipes with steel wool.

Sounds cool for a '70s custom van, though. Are all their metal flakes like this, or only lime?