Chief Joseph

I noticed in Wal-Mart today they are carrying the yellow Frog Tape in a 60-yard roll, but only in 24mm width. A good deal for less than $6. Yep, they are awesome.

That's a private-label Badger 200. Badger used to make a lot of airbrushes for other retailers. It's a great single-action airbrush. It's probably the older version of the 200 before Badger changed the head style on them. I'll bet if you send it to Badger they'll go through it and fix anything that's amiss. Badger is an extremely modeler-friendly company!

When I paint walls with latex paint, I use green Frog Tape and it works really well with no bleed-under. Model painting is quite different, though. My advice is to skip the green version of Frog Tape and get the "Delicate Surface" yellow version instead. It's virtually the same Kabuki rice-paper tape as Tamiya tape but a lot cheaper per square inch. It's available at Sherwin Williams stores. It cuts very well in a vinyl cutter, too: This was a little test I was doing of the tape's cutting & handling ability. I'm going to make a custom van with dragons and wizards on it some day

You can apply talcum powder the messy way by shaking some onto the mold, giving it a pat or two with your hand, then blowing off the excess. A cleaner way is to put some powder in an old sock and tap that sock against the mold to release the powder. You just need a slight coating of powder on the mold surface-- any excess should be blown out. Does not interfere with the detail at all.

I have a digital model that I can scale to 1/16 and have printed. Quality would be great at that size. In fact, I would probably need to go into the model and add some additional detail because I made it with 1/24 scale in mind. It's a 235/60-R15 size tire in 1/24 scale, but can be manipulated to give different scale sizes around that basic proportion.

I buy Smooth-On products from The Engineer Guy in Atlanta (www.theengineerguy.com). The prices are usually the same from all the full-line distributors, but I have seen some cheaper prices for the basic items at www.misterart.com. If you're not already using talcum powder on your molds, you should give it a try. The talc helps break the surface tension of the liquid resin and reduces surface bubbles and voids. Nothing beats using pressure, though. Good luck!

I have used 310 in the past because of its very low shrinkage rate. For large parts with a great mass, shrinkage can be a concern. Most of the time, a rotationally-cast hollow piece is better than a large solid resin casting, but that's beside the point. The downside to that long pot life and demold time is potentially shortened mold life. Resin is destructive to the mold surface, and the longer the liquid/gel resin sits against the rubber, the worse the effect. Smooth-Cast 321 and 305 are a good compromise between good working time, shrinkage, cost, and mold longevity. Very short pot-life resins like standard tan Alumilite and Smooth-Cast 320 might yield more castings per mold (depending on a few other factors), but their high shrinkage and short working time make them unsuitable for my work.

Smooth-On's 305 (white) or 321 (off-white). Pot life is about 6-7 minutes with a 30-45 minute demold time.

Ah, one of the famous Sunny King Ford-sponsored cars. When I was in high school way back when, there was a running joke about the Sunny King Ford cars (I grew up about 45 minutes away from Anniston, where the Sunny King Ford dealership was located). The joke was very visual, and I had a friend who acted it out very well. It went basically like this: "Down at Talledega, the cars go screaming past the grandstand VROOOOOM! And there's always one car that kind of buzzes around the bottom of the track BUUUUUZZZZZZ and tries not to get run over by the fast cars. That's the Sunny King Ford car!" This was way before video games and the internet, so we had to make our own entertainment

A Pontiac 389 and 455 are virtually the same externally, so you could theoretically use that 455 if it doesn't represent a highly-optioned race motor. As Riley said, the 389 in Revell's 1966 GTO is very nice and is probably a better choice than the Gibson motor.

I have the old, original issue of the AMT kit and those wheels fit perfectly in my BFG tires. I can even show you a picture if you like

Send me a picture! I love pictures of my parts on peoples' models!

Pretty close. The sidewall lettering on the original movie car had a different spacing and read "B.F.GOODRICH RADIAL T/A" instead of "BFGoodrich Radial T/A." Most of the replica cars have the modern versions of the tires, and that's the style that is on my tires.

FYI; I have produced another batch of the hard white resin BFG tires and I can produce the flexible black tires on a make-to-order basis. Info is available at my website link in my signature.

I've been using the same needle stuck into a wooden handle for about 5 or 6 years. I use three different thicknesses of CA, too. The thin works the best I believe since it has the least surface tension. It'll flow right off the tiny fork onto the workpiece. The medium thickness glue doesn't flow as easily, and the thick CA barely flows at all-- one may as well use a toothpick.

Did you connect them together on one axis? I have seen at least one of the scale train guys on Shapeways who connects three copies of a part on a sprue, each one oriented on a different axis. He claims this way he gets at least one consistent, usable part from each printing, no matter how the Shapeways operator orients his order within the larger job. Costs a little more, but cheaper than waiting on a part to be reprinted. If your three components were "free" within the STL file, i.e. not together on a sprue, Shapeways may have split them and oriented them differently from what you intended. This is just a theory; Shapeways seems to have no consistent procedures and there is apparently a wide variation between what their operators can achieve with the printers.

Who is going to see "599 GTO" and think Pontiac? Chris, I would paint the green & clear, then lightly scuff the roof, mask it off, and paint the flat black. I'd go very easy when applying the black so it stays very thin and doesn't build up against the masking. I believe you'd risk getting a ragged-looking edge between the green & black if you do it the other way you mentioned. edited for grammar

Great work, Norm. Until Shapeways offers customers a way to specify print orientation, we'll be dealing with inconsistent quality on FUD parts. Other print services will orient the model to optimize surface quality. You'll pay for it, though. In addition to www.Moddler.com, you can look at www.Finelineprototyping.com and http://www.PCSEngineering.com.

I jumped on the sale last night when I saw the Facebook post. The four colors I've been needing were actually in the sale. so I went ahead and pulled the trigger even though I probably won't use any of them for another month or two!

I draw the lettering in CorelDraw and then export the individual letter drawings into a TrueType Font (TTF) file. Add that TTF file to the system and then it's available for use in any program, just like Arial or Courier or any other font.

Raildogg, I sent you a PM. Frank, I use Inventor also and I emboss a small section of the tread pattern onto the tire casing and then do a circle pattern of the emboss around the circumference of the tire casing. For the sidewall lettering, I created TrueType fonts with CorelDraw that I use to emboss the lettering with the geometry text tool. The actual modeling is pretty quick, but getting all the measurements ready to build the model is what takes a lot of effort and time.

I drew it at 1.6mm, but the actual print measures at 1.66mm. The extra thickness could be the primer I put on it.

After reading some of the posts on the Shapeways forum, I borrowed by son's rock tumbler and started a test to see if it might work to smooth down FUD build lines. I'm not using an actual FUD part to test with, but rather a resin casting that has some sharp corners and details. I mainly want to see if the process with smooth the part satisfactorily or just chew up all the details.

Mods-- feel free to move this as I didn't know whether it belonged in resin & aftermarket or not. These pieces may or may not be offered for sale at some point, and Shapeways could sort of be construed as an aftermarket supplier, so I put it here. Here are a couple of pieces I received from Shapeways today: This is a 1/25 steering wheel for the 2011 & up Dodge Challenger and a 1/25 20" tire to fit some wheels I made for the same model. I am working on the AMT version of the car, so the steering wheel has a socket on the back to specifically fit the column from the kit. These parts were printed in Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD) and I have made a round of sanding & primer on them. They need some more sanding & priming before they'll be ready for molding. Details came out pretty well, including the button clusters in the spokes of the steering wheel. Tread pattern on the tire came out well: The texture on the tire's sidewalls is a little more than I would want, but for the price (roughly 1/4 the price of some of the other printing services), it's decent. I have some raised white letter tire models I want to print next, and the details on the sidewall lettering should come through in the print.

Nice car and a great backdrop for your photos!