Tom Geiger

We recycled our Halloween pumpkin into small brown pellets!

Very nice Mark! I especially like the colors you chose. Very typical of the time period on that truck! And a gas filler too! I will warn you that the Jimmy Flintstone resin van body is pretty thick, which is what kept me from opening any panels. I did cut windows into the doors and small portholes in the side panels. You will need to thin down the kit door panels a bunch to have them fit and clear the seats... I did a combo of that and positioning the seats inboard a bit. With the doors fixed in place, I just glued the engine cover in place too. Mine has a slant six from the Deora in it, but just visible from below. The good part of the van body is that it's nicely done, the top is done right and other details are thought out. It has the gas cap, the Dodge scripts on the doors (The larger IMC Dodge trucks that share the A100 cab had those) as well as correctly scaled hinges on all the doors. The working ones on the pickup kit are grossly out of scale.

Oh crud! Nobody told me!

An Ollies story... I was in the store one day and they had wine refrigerators on sale cheap. (it's a small under counter refrig with a clear glass door) They had two left. I have a long dead garbage disposal under the counter of my kitchen island. I thought the wine refrigerator would be a cool swap, but I needed to measure. I called my wife and had her do the basic measurements. Then I went to their hardware aisle and borrowed a tape measure.... I had eyeballed the refrig and had a rough idea of it's measurements but the tape just didn't add up. So I went back to the hardware aisle and got a different brand flat ruler.... that's when I realized that this cheap Chinese tape measure wasn't to scale! It was absolutely useless! I laughed and threw it back. Now I'm sorry I didn't buy one! And no the wine refrig was too big!

I have no use for exotic cars... no interest at all in things like Ferrari's... but somehow I always loved the Miura. It could have been the movie, but I suspect it was the Matchbox car!

Is that a hearse for bikers?

I knew a girl who bought a new car, showed it off to all her friends over the weekend, then got the call on Monday to bring it back. That really hurt!

Ah, we're exporting American culture at it's finest! Tommy, don't believe all Americans are like these guys... although I suspect some of the guys on this board are! Do they broadcast the shows in English or dub them to Norwegian ? When I lived in Germany we watched American TV shows in German. When we got back to the US I was surprised the Brady Bunch spoke English! And the part I never got used to was everyone's voice was different!

AMT 1961-2 Buick Wagons... I have something like FIVE of them, ALL have the friggin custom tail lights glued in real good!

Ken, I think there is a black helicopter idling over your house!

The Aztek was a marketing misfire. Pontiac thought there was a market for a quirky activity car turned occasional camper in the youth market. Problem was that most 4x4 SUVs already had that market and everyone knew this was a thinly disguised mini van. Never appealed to the intended market, if indeed their perceived market existed at all. I always said if I was to have an Aztek, I'd go all the way into quirky and get the bright yellow one with all the black out trim. It looked like an angry bee.

Bill, life is too short to be with people who annoy you. Just today my wife and I were planning a weekend away. She mentioned inviting another couple along... a friend of hers. But the husband is very annoying. He will drink too much and get argumentative. End analysis.. we agreed we'd be better off going alone!

I wouldn't call it that. There is 'regional tastes' and this one was designed in Japan. And there's 'quirky' designed to appeal to a very narrow set of customers. This one fits both. There's enough of these on the road in the US to surmise that some folks like quirky. No different than a Nissan Cube or Scion box toaster thingy. And sometimes they are surprised by the market... these cars were aimed at, and bought by the youth market in Japan. In the US they are more popular with middle age folks.

Taking the wife to the doctors office and I was coasting up to the red light... and this gem went from behind me, into the right lane and squeezed in front of me with no room to spare at all between me and the SUV. Idiot driving an expensive car poorly.... and for all his need to get in front of me, he made a right at the next corner.

Thanks Scott. This one was built back when the kit first reappeared so I didn't have the Internet for photos and such. I painted it a lighter yellow with a clear metallic over it. I'm pleased and this is how I'd want the real car. Here's a rear view, glad to hear they have decals for the grille and tail lights. Painting those were a real itch. A few tips. Double check the fit of the interior into the body. I had to add some plastic around the edge of the bucket to avoid gaps. The rear panel and the two side panels don't fit well. I glued them in, puttied, and then scribed the panel lines. I love the Surfite since it has a Mini Cooper base and was so different from all the other show cars. Enjoy! I am going to have to buy another one to get the Roth figure.

Ollie's is a close out store, so they don't stock anything permanently. And what they have from region to region, even store to store can vary. I got the deal on the Plastikote Truck Colors a few years ago and haven't seen any paint there since.

I understand that the radio in a Smart car just has three stations of circus music! I would like to borrow one for a weekend, just for the experience.

The Surfite was a typical fiddly Revell kit of the era. The Tiki Hut was a blast. I really enjoyed painting it up. Ancient Story: The Surfite was issued once, until the release in the 1990s. Rumor was that Ed Roth had gotten involved with Hells Angels and Revell didn't want that association for their model kits, whose primary market was teenagers. It became a $500 kit and there even was a resin kit done before it suddenly reappeared. I was glad to get it since it always was my favorite Roth kit. I asked Bob Paeth what the story was and he said the rumor about Revell dumping Roth was just a story. The truth was that the kit came out once and just didn't sell. So they didn't bring it back out again. A side story was that the Surfite is a tiny little thing, and when they did the product preview, it was just lost in the standard size Revell box. Executives were concerned that kids would open it and there would be a perception that it wasn't a good value. So the Tiki Hut was conceived. It's primary purpose was to fill the box!

I passed the local Tesla dealership yesterday taking my wife to a doctors appointment. There had to be 50 of them on the lot, and a bunch of red ones... my favorite color on them. In the meantime, my uncle is due to receive his soon, if he doesn't have it already. He's 72 and decided to treat himself to what he called "his last car". With his old guy thinking, he was going to get a silver one just like his son's because "silver doesn't show dirt". I asked him if he was buying a $90,000 car and he wasn't planning on washing it? He did go with my recommendation of going all the way and getting a red one. I will have to go back to that Tesla dealership and take some photos

On the last few issues of this kit, the engine was called an Oldsmobile engine.

Sorry to hear John! My wife lost her mother last month too. Hope to see you in a few weeks!

I have State Farm on my house. This past year we had a bad hail storm here in PA. A local construction company was recommended by my neighbors to work with me on the claim. First time out, State Farm wanted to pay for dented gutters and a few dents in my aluminum siding. No roof. Then I started to see all my neighbors getting their roofs done! The construction company said I had the same damage as everyone else. I called State Farm and told them I was disputing the claim since every house I could see from mine had their claims approved by different insurance companies. They came back out, different inspection team and approved not only the roof, but all the aluminum siding. It pays to stand your ground.

Quite possibly. There is the original paint scheme as seen in the photos here. And the other photos seem to be the car as it was sold at Barrett Jackson. The car was totally restored in NJ in the 1980s. Then it was sold to the museum in Kansas. I know someone who saw it there and said the restoration was aging badly. The guy who sold the car at BJ was a Canadian who was interviewed by George Barris in a YouTube clip. He said that he bought it from someone in Washington State and completely restored it. That would make for three paint jobs. I also noticed in a promo clip for the movie, the car had no windshield at all. And see the two different windshields in the photos here. I have photographs I took of the car back in the 1980s. Let me see if I can find them to compare.

The original Isuzu Impulse was a Chevette underneath too

Bob, you are right.... I'm sooo done here.