Tom Geiger

Whoa! That is the coolest color!

Yea, I never do the drive in at a fast food restaurant. They often screw up the order and you have to go in the restaurant anyway!

Bill, I agree that this is one cool looking ride. Funny thing is that for some reason they don't command Honda resale value. One of my favorite dealers here in PA has a silver 2011 with 34,000 miles on it for $10,900. This one is advertised as a 6 speed, and I've seen automatics, odd for a hybrid. I believe I had read that Toyota hybrids use the electric and supplement it with the gas engine, and the Hondas are the other way around. This one doesn't have that 50mpg that a Prius has either, listing an EPA max rating of 38mpg, which we can get from a conventional gas engine.

Looking good! Great progress and we're all rooting for ya! BTW, credit for my process goes to Irv Arter, who wrote the article that I followed. Anyone who wants a copy, just PM me your email address and I'll send you the PDF.

Yes! I have a couple of the Lil Stogie, which is the same chassis. I do plan on doing some kind of A or T rod on it someday. In fact looking at the Hot Dogger, it doesn't look a heck of a lot different than the recent Fruit Truck... and nobody had an issue with that one!

The moral of the story is to never take your concrete mixer through the drive through window! Actually that looks like the guard house at a gated community. Look at the columns, those are probably fake brick around a metal pole. I have bought a lot of those made from fiberglass over the years for detail on office construction jobs. Idiots will be idiots. Back in the day my numpty friend worked as the dealer prep guy at an AMC Jeep dealer. When they were very busy and all the prep bays were full, they'd take cars to the local you spray it car wash. This particular one had a high entrance and a low exit if you pulled through. It even had big yellow and black tape warnings on it. Everyone at the dealer had been warned that Jeeps needed to be backed out! So my idiot friend was in a hurry since they needed to deliver that Jeep so he did the quick wash job, jumped in and HIT THE GAS! Took the roof right off a brand new Jeep, essentially totaling it. Somehow, they didn't fire him for that one!

So was this ever a real show car ? Gotta laugh guys! The same board that is all gaga about stuffing Allison engines in Chevettes is concerned if this one is real? I'd say this one is more feasible than some of the models and ideas I see coming from the grown men on the board. Remember that this was an era of wild show rods, and the main consumer of model kits were kids.. actually the same folks who are now on the board in our age group! Back then any kit could do 500,000 copies and model companies could afford to commission 1:1 versions of their show rods. Now that I look at the Hot Dogger it reminded me that I have a laser cut copy of that kit that I believe Dave Van produced!

I get it. Round 2 has a lot of show car molds since those were unlikely to be updated to next year's annual. These models represent someone's memory from their childhood and will make some folks happy. For instance, I have fond memories of building the Lil Stogie when I was a kid. I always had one eye open for an example of the kit to complete my memory collection. The kit was quite elusive and I passed on examples that were over $100. I never thought it would be reissued, but there it was! So I was happy to grab up a few copies! The guys running Round 2 are on top of their game, and know model cars better than any previous owner of the tools. It's a known fact that show cars don't sell as well as something more mainstream. They know the number they can sell of a show car, so they no doubt will distribute an appropriate number of kits.

Back in the day my brother in law bought a bright yellow 72 Pinto Wagon with a 4 speed. He bought it from a new car dealer and paid way too much. He's not a car guy at all, nor does he have any mechanical ability to this day, He had problems with the Pinto starting almost right from the start. Every few weeks/months it wouldn't start and he'd have it towed off to some dubious garage. One day he was leaving his parents house and the car didn't start. I opened the hood and gave the starter solenoid a whack and it started immediately. Since he was leaving to go back home to New York, I pointed to the solenoid and told him this was the offending part and to have it replaced. He looked under the hood like he was viewing a nuclear reactor, gave me one of those "yea, yea" responses and went on his way. The next spring he had enough of this Pinto, still acting up and costing him money, so he bought a brand new Nissan Pulsar. He dropped the Pinto off at my house and asked me to sell it for him. It was registered and insured so I figured I'd drive it a bit. I got in it the first morning, turned the key and "click!". Once again I opened the hood and gave the solenoid a whack. It started immediately. That evening on my way home from work I bought a solenoid and put it on. I drove the car all summer and it never failed again! It was a fun little car to drive and I was sorry when someone actually paid the enormous asking price! The sad fact was once I had the car at home, I cleaned it out and found a huge wad of garage receipts in the glove box. Time after time, sometimes a few weeks apart, different garages would charge him for a complete tune up... plugs, cap and rotor. Some even charged him for wires. I doubt they did this work because it all would've looked new to the stupidest mechanic. And the odd thing is that none of them ever touched the starter solenoid!

ok, that was scary!

Tim, every year I do my Model Car Christmas Amnesty program. Just like the president gives Thanksgiving Amnesty to a turkey, I do the same to some long unfinished model car. I pull one down from my unfinished project shelf, and actually finish it. I've been successful most years in completing that project. If you joined me you could finish up those projects in, say 65 years!

It's been single digits and a foot of snow in the front yard... I look out this morning and there's my neighbor walking his dog in SHORTS.

I tried to create a list database a few years ago. I saw it as an opportunity to learn Microsoft Access at the same time. I did get maybe a quarter of my hoard into the database. Then I got distracted with moving and such, and never went back to finish it, and now it's hopelessly out of date. One of the reasons I was doing this was that in my old house, stuff was all over the place, my model room was over flowing, I had stuff in the attic, in a loft in the garage, in the downstairs den and even in the crawl space under the house. So it was difficult to access to hunt for something. Today, I have a mess of it up in the model room and most of it in a finished basement room. I have planned on buying enough rolling shelf units to put everything on shelves, sorted by car make, year and categories. Someday ha!

about 10" of snow here in Exton, PA. This afternoon I gave my snow blower a good exercising. I did my sidewalk, and the same for my neighbor on either side.... about 700 feet of sidewalk, and my driveway. My arms are sore!

Yes, back when American cars were sold everywhere, a Buick was a prestigious car in China. A car that a plant manager would drive. That image remains today and GM sells more Buicks in China than in the USA. In fact one of my contacts at my company facility in China was proud to tell me he drives a Buick Century. I prefer Buicks to Chevys.... I've owned a 1960 Electra 2 door hardtop, a 1973 Electra 225 4 door hardtop and currently own a 2005 LaCrosse with 34,000 miles on it. Note that Buick was recently named on of the most reliable cars, way up there in Japanese territory!

Because Moebius is a relatively new company and is very small. Dave Metzner is the project manager for ALL their new kits. I'm amazed at how much they have accomplished and the car / truck products coming in their pipeline. And from this thread, you can see the reputation and following they have already. More good things to come. Companies like AMT and Revell, although they've gone through a long succession of owners, have been around since the late 1950s and have produced a lot of model tooling over those years, much of it during the heyday of modeling when there was a much larger market and money to be made.

Steve- Must've been RMR? They were next to Lone Wolf, next to the door into the photo booth room. On the other side of Lone Wolf was Tara Hobbies (display cases) and Don Banes (older kits) The one I have was done by STS back better than 15 years ago.

There was a resin of the Champ pickup years ago. I have one and realized that the master was a Johan Studebaker Lark cut behind the front seat. So this one would be fairly easy to create from that kit.

Here's how far I got on the Citroen Bordens Milk Truck. Chassis, engine and drive train went together well and it sits flat. I was surprised at how many detail photos I found on-line. But try to assemble that body! I wasn't able to get it to square up at all. Further frustrated that I followed their directions of painting it first, which made sense since I had a lot of detail painting inside of the box. Last try I was adding some Evergreen strips at mating points to create surface to glue. I walked away in frustration, but need to go back and finish it with a clearer head.

Hmmmm.... not quite spring!

I can understand your viewpoint, of looking at the big picture of completing the entire vision. I know that feeling of not being able to wait to get back to the work bench as something is coming along very well, so I understand! Plus as you said seeing the 4 completed ones on the show table, along with the encouragement of this board would keep you fueled! Thanks for the explanation!

Seriously? I'd like to have the Kubelwagen. They are very rare because the engineering spec was for a lifespan of 90 days in combat.

That was an original promo tooling that Johan sold as a curbside kit back in the late 1980s, along with the '62 Studebaker Lark Convertible and the 1960 Plymouth wagon. I doubt that the tooling exists today.

Very cool, I admire your perseverance in working through all six! I would've lost interest as soon as I could imagine what number one would look like finished! And I'll bet you could build this kit in your sleep by now! One question- In building these assembly line style, what amount of time do you think you saved over building six individual models?

I agree! You can input all the exact measurements into a CAD system and the resulting model will be absolutely accurate, but won't look right to our eyes. Much of that is that we look at model cars from unnatural viewing positions that we don't normally see the 1:1s in. For instance our first look at a model car is the equivalent of looking at a 1:1 from a second story window. We see the roof down view. Second, to view a model "normally" we need to get down to table level with our nose against the table edge to get our eyes to the right level, then because our eyes are not apart from one another in scale, we see the entire length of the model in a different perspective than we view a 1:1.