Tom Geiger

I know someone on the board who has driven a Model A as his only car for over 30 years!

Brad, are you coming to GSL with this truck? I'd love to see your work in person.

I love that decal Mike! Remember that you cannot print white, if you are using an inkjet. So you would see the green of the body there. One way of doing it is to either put a blank white decal behind it, or mask off and paint the area behind the decal white. You'd want to do a test to see how the yellow holds up as well. Never mind... I just scrolled back up to your photos and it seems you have made that panel white!

Things are coming along well at this point! Vendor list is on-line, we have several new aftermarket companies this year... coming from as far away as California and England. And not on the list yet, we just picked them up last evening is Scale Concepts from Michigan. Hotels -- we sold out our host Ramada Inn a while back, so we signed an agreement with the La Quinta that is very close by. Go to the hotels page on the website for details and rate. Shirts -- Our shirt this year is just sooooo cool! The George Trosley drawn gasser hearse looks great on the shirt. And guys have asked us for black shirts in the past so we're doing that this year! And this year we have a neat NNL theme gift for everyone!

Serious frig Ed! But then you do live in the middle of no where! I would recommend adding a a bit of Brooklyn Brown Ale to the collection\

Really enjoying this project!

Dealers in New Jersey try to pull that stuff. When a salesman approached me and asked if he could help, I'd point at the bottom of the factory window sticker and say, "Yea, and we'll be starting negotiations here." Nobody argued. I remember cars that supposedly had polyglycoat, Scotch Guard on the seats and dealer installed undercoating. Most of the cars on the lot had no such treatments on them, but a dealer added sticker for $1200. Then the dealer would run a big ad screaming, "$1000 off dealer price on every car this weekend!" That was their scam to sell cars at full list price when numpties thought they had saved a grand. A buddy-0-mine who wasn't too good at negotiation really got screwed over by a Dodge dealer on a new Daytona Pacifica. He paid more than full list for the car after all the hocus pocus on the sales contract. So I went back to the dealer with him and grabbed the sales manager. The car had a special Chrysler finish on it that you'd never need to wax etc. It had a leather interior and factory undercoating. So I started by asking if these services had been performed on that car... he swore that indeed they had. So I told him that they had voided the warranty on the car and we would need them to repaint it, and replace the interior, and we'd be talking to Chrysler directly about this. Talk about an about face! He had someone go out and 'look' at the car. The guy came back and said that they must've forgot to add those services to the car because it hadn't been done! My friend got a $1500 refund on the spot.

Looks good John! And you are ahead of the GSL deadline! Hope to see the model and you there!

They are 1/25 scale. Aside from the trucks done for AT&T and Bell Canada, there is a Model A postal truck (same style as the Danbury Mint one) and a small tanker.

The cops at the accident scene will put it out of it's misery. I've seen that done locally.

When I saw your photos I thought of this truck, that I saw many years ago.

I can tell the story behind this kit release. The order to make them came from the Bell Telephone Pioneers, an employee social and service organization that did charity work, etc. They did a lot of fund raising on the AT&T Bell Labs properties, within their corporate and research facilities. The company was huge at the time, the Holmdel, NJ R&D facility had over 6,000 employees. My wife worked there for 14 years, I consulted there for a year. Today, that enormous facility has been vacant for ten years. All those jobs just went away with the government break up of AT&T. Anyway, the Pioneers did an annual phone truck for the Christmas season. Think Hess truck, same kind of program. The trucks were made by a Yorkshire Company, and there was a series of six trucks, several Model T based, several Model A based and one Dodge Powerwagon. These were finished diecast trucks. The final finishing and paint on them wasn't the greatest. But my wife would bring home the next version every year for me. This is not to say that the Pioneers didn't do other vehicles by other manufacturers, and the local Bells did vehicles as well over the years. A bit o' trivia... Dean Milano had a hand in these way back then! I've also seen these in red, produced for Bell Canada as well. Note that a search for "yorkshire" on eBay will regularly uncover a bunch of these. Some sellers think they're gold so there are some with enormous prices on them. And then there are those for $10-20. Buy those! So back to our story. Apparently who ever did the ordering for the Pioneers, who did the AMT order, didn't realize they were a model kit, instead of a finished diecast. They did accept part of the order because I remember seeing them for sale at Pioneer events, but AMT got stuck with a load of kits that they then sold to the model dealer network, rather than to retail shops. Quantity? Probably a huge number since the Holmdel Facility was 6000 employees and they had like facilities all over the country. And that's why these kits are still plentiful at shows today!

That's the problem with this board. Although articles get archived, many of them are missing the pictures since people uploaded them to the board and later deleted them for space to upload more photos. That is lessened when folks use photo storage websites. I say lessened since some of them have revamped servers over time so ancient web addresses for individual photos changed.

In those cases they probably got hit by a car and some opportunist grabbed the head to sell to a taxidermist. I wouldn't be taking a road kill for food since you don't know how long it has been sitting there. I do know who the local deer butcher is, and I've told my wife if we hit one with the car, I'll have it butchered to recoup as food in compensation for the damage to the car.

Sounds like rush hour on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey! I survived eight years of that one. A road that is six lanes in each direction. Traffic is going 75 mph near bumper to bumper. Then someone hits their brakes and everyone stops dead. You'll sit there for a minute still, then the traffic starts inching, and in a minute it's back to 75 again. Every frickin day there are accidents. Same one over and over. Someone smacked into the back of the car ahead of them. Cars pull into the shoulder, then everyone inches by to get a look. I had a 60 mile ride to work.... 50 minutes on a Saturday morning, 1.5 hrs on a regular work morning, 2 hrs on the way home!

Sounds like contract carriers, some of them bought used USPS vehicles. Last I looked Subaru sold RHD US Spec cars for postal use to private carriers. Studebaker used to offer those in their day.

Driving in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Traffic as tight as in the photos above... up and down mountain roads... now add to the mix that you are driving US left hand drive cars, on the right side of the road! Yea, completely backwards!

At one point the USPS stopped selling the RHD trucks. Seems too many citizens couldn't drive the RHD, and those accident suits wound up including the USPS because 'they should've known'.

I know! The stupid thing starts across the screen and you have to click the X to get rid of it... every 10 seconds... like a shooting gallery game. And ever notice the picture on that app is a really good looking young lady? You just know you're not chatting with her!

The resin body does come with the rear windows as shown here. See how nice the hinges are on the doors? I added the windows on the side doors. Again, see how nice they did the molded in hinges. The working ones on the kit are probably 3 times this size. The messy paint lines are due to the fact that this is a replica of a 1:1 truck a friend drove back in the 1970s. We brush painted it so those lines are as good as we did! And yes I have a Ross Gibbons slant six. I wouldn't use it in this model since it won't be all that visible. I'd be using the one from the Lindberg 1964 Dodge and Plymouth kits, since that's the best one ever done in our scale. The one I used in this model was from the Deora because I had a few extras and for the limited view from underneath. You will need to use the A100 kit transmission since it mounts in a unique way in the 1:1

This past week was a roller coaster of different temperatures here in the PA/NJ area. One day it was 60, next day freezing. I did go into the office in NJ 4 days, and there is a guard house where I need to roll down my window and put my company badge against a reader for an arm to go up for site access. I found myself leaving the window down from there until I got to my building (maybe a half mile) just to feel the fresh air!

It's exposure, cultural and time frame. I used to car pool with a nice Indian guy about 10 years younger than me. I always enjoyed the cultural differences and his take on things. One day we passed a beautiful 1966 Mustang on a trailer behind a pickup. I pointed it out to him and he just didn't get it. He said it just looked like an out of style frumpy car to him. We all know how we feel about the '66 Mustang. Why? Well, he wasn't even born, much less exposed to US culture and car design in the 1960s. I think our excitement over that design, and continued appreciation of it was due to all the hoopla over it back then. I was in 2nd grade and was keenly aware of the new Mustang, and accepted the consensus that it was good. I had a plastic toy fastback. And when my father went car shopping that year, I enthusiastically recommended he buy a Mustang. That's part of the whole essence of an advertising campaign. It covered everyone since they knew that a seven year old could influence the purchase of a car. (It didn't work in my case, my dad bought a '66 Lemans coupe with a 4 speed) My Indian friend, on the other hand, had zero exposure to the Mustang design his entire life until perhaps my pointing one out to him. He had no reference, nor the herd consensus that this was 'good design'. He processed it from his vantage point of another culture and what they deemed 'good design', and what he was exposed to in the USA in the 10 years he had been here. He had no history with this design so it wasn't in his heart. On the other hand, when I showed him pictures of a Hindustan Ambassador, a car derived from old Austin tooling that lives on in India to this day, he got all excited. In a country where few had cars, the Ambassador was THE car that government officials and important people drove. It also was 3/4 the taxi fleet in the country so everyone had ridden in one. He said in his life they would take mass transit and scooter based cabs, so the ride in the Amby was always associated with a special event. So his herd had wired him to smile when he saw one of them. He was told it was a pleasing car, so he believes it to this day.

In my case it was this one! I did the Testors modifications when I was 11. The roof became black because it got scratched, repaired by Testors Lumpy Black! And it's in my display case today, I wouldn't change a thing!

Not just yet. This pair lives in the woods in the middle of my development and come around a few times a week. The smaller guy has one horn.

The downside is that you now have to walk back to work to retrieve the car!