Tom Geiger

Now you have better sound on your phone!

This week Scale Auto and Vintage Truck magazines hit my mailbox. Yea! There are times magazines just sit and there are times like these when I have all the time in the world!

It’s a funny thing.. for us it’s been napkins. I’ve haven’t had much of a problem with toilet paper or paper towels, but no napkins anywhere. Oh well we just use paper towels for now.

Which is why we have so many staff members in lime green shirts patrolling the display room at NNL East. The very last thing we want is to have someone’s model to be damaged or stolen. We want people to be comfortable putting their projects on the display tables. We do attract a pretty astute crowd so our problems are minimal.

Appetizing for seagulls

Since we’re sharing Deoras.... I started this one maybe 20 years ago, those photos are dated 2002! That’s the backyard of my old house in New Jersey! I had bought a case of Deoras for the slant six engines. So I had models to burn! This one used two chassis’s for the stretch. I had been on CAD systems since the early 1980s so I drew this up and the body is actually card stock templates. Here’s the stretch. Back then I just lined up the leaf springs, I would’ve done this very differently today!

With every kind of event that was supposed to happen in this timeframe canceled, venues are already booked solid. I was on Skype with a friend of mine whose daughter had to cancel her wedding. She is here in eastern Pennsylvania and couldn’t get a church or wedding hall through December. We were able to reschedule NNL East for September 26, because we already had the hall booked for the Diversified Scalerz show. And there’s a big IF the state will be open by then.

Betcha there’s a couple little ladies in China who could get that apart and reassembled in two minutes flat!

You could suffocate!

It’s a bargain!

Very nice work. Especially your scratch built ladder. It's to scale and very convincing. Most attempts are oversize and toylike!

Nice work on the Flintstone body. i built one too and the body is fairly thick so I don’t recommend opening panels. Even if successful it will be difficult to hide the panel thickness. Advice for anyone with this body.. check fit on everything! I remember having to reduce chassis edges to get a fit. Check glass fit. You are probably going to have to sand the mating areas of the body flat, and the door panels.. I found it easier to thin the panels than the body. Check the fit with the front seats on the chassis. Mine was worse because I used bigger high back seats.

I have always liked Celicas and owned a 1995 Celica GT Convertible for a while. My first experience with one was a first gen car like this. I was a freshman in high school, think 1973. I used to walk to and from school as the high school was about a mile away on the same road we lived on. As I walked home one afternoon, a Celica came to a halt. I saw my teacher Mr Cowen behind the wheel and motioning me to get in and he'd drive me home. I had no idea what a Celica was at that point, but I got in the car. He took off like a bat out of hell and I remember him going through the gears. This is a 25 MPH country road and he must've hit 50 before we arrived at my house. My high school was only 4 years old at that point so the teachers were all in their 20s and often got mistaken for students. Mr Cowen was a young guy with a hot car and out to impress!

Some folks think you can just slap a big piece of foil on the car and the edges magically disappear under the paint. It isn’t so. With this method think of it as foiling the script and letting the paint fill in the gaps between and inside the letters.

Crashing through glass

I went foraging for essential supplies today. The good news is the grocery had RIBS! First time in awhile, so I bought two meals worth. And Walmart has the little 3 oz paper cups I use for paint and other duties in the model room. I was all out. Both stores had their paper aisle stripped clean! I told my wife that another month or two and we’ll have to poop on odd / even days! And my kingdom for some Testors Dullcote!

Oh, you gotta laugh! What got me all excited today? For the first time in two months Walmart had the little paper bathroom cups I use for painting and other operations in the model room! So I grabbed a pack of 250. I’ve been completely out and after multiple reuses, the ones I had were getting crusty!

Yea, nobody is complaining about that one!?

Agreed Joe! The iPhone camera can do more than the best digital camera I ever owned! It was nearly dark when I took this photo of the creek in my backyard running hard after the rains a few days ago

And then there was this one.... I saw this car in person back when I worked in this town. I was surprised how easily I found this photo just now!

Nope! That algorithm only reads "MODEL" and sends us lingerie ads! ?

Lathes are like exercise equipment... you should be able to find used ones that were hardly used cheap! A bunch of guys bought them and didn't understand the commitment to learning the craft. I know guys who produced a bunch of out of scale pulleys and lost interest. The running joke was "What do you make on your lathe?" Answer "Metal shavings"! On the other side, especially with guys who have machining skills from employment, some wonderful things can be made.

Cigar ignites! Kaboom!

I was thinking before paint.. that’s why I was holding glass in all the way around with Tamiya tape and protecting it at top where you’d be gluing frame. I cannot see your break to judge how much meat you have there to make the connection. With pieces big enough, I’ve done the drill and pin method.

Use the windshield (once you get one) as the guide for gluing. Use Tamiya tape to hold it in place and over the windshield edge where gluing to keep it clean. And a chuckle.. on a Facebook model board some guy is building this kit. He didn’t paint body or windshield frame, but was asking people if he needed to paint the windshield wipers... or it it looked ok the way it was.