Tom Geiger

Just checked my stash-- My 1971 is white My 1972 is blue My 1973 is gold brown My 1974 thru 1976 are all white About the two different colors on the 1971, sometimes manufacturers would do a second release mid-season and add something to spur further sales. For example, Revell did those glitter cars in 1961. Maybe MPC did the red body that way. Was there any mention on the box?

Very cool Ray! A great build from one of my favorite kits. I especially like the way you converted that custom tail gate piece to hold the chute! Here's that same part on the green custom Ranchero.

Are you going with the orange and white scheme on your 1:1 reference photo? That just looks soooo good!

Hmmm.... building a '53 Ford pickup for any particular reason??

A funny thing Bryan... I saw this same post you put on the udder board. My first thought was that the management there had deleted my post. I I wondered why and sulked for a few minutes until I remembered I posted it here!

Jose is right. One of the things to think about is "would this car actually drive coast to coast?" Some of the ideas in this thread would be more for a drag race than a transAtlantic run. And things like a jet engine, Ferrari or Lambo drive train would be impossibly expensive to achieve unless you got Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to sponsor you! I will jump into this build eventually. I just have a lot of other stuff going right now. Plus I work better under pressure at the last minute!

I saw on one of those court shows, like People's Court, where a guy had gone to Rent-A-Center and rented those $3000 wheels. Imagine that! He was being sued by Rent-A-Center because the car got repossessed with the wheels on it.

Super work Jim! To keep picture taking from slowing you down, we could just put you on a web cam! Can't be any worse than the shows my wife watches!

Or the Starsky and Hutch Torino... auto trans but shifting sounds during every chase. or that every car had a Chrysler starter!

Those old 1960s TV shows like "The FBI" where there was product placement by Ford. Every car in the show was a brand new Ford, except the bad guys. They always drove older non-Ford cars, and you knew that was the one going over the cliff.

I am currently working on an International Scout II, which was tooled up by Ertl before they acquired AMT. I looked up into the body, so that I could sand off mold marks and such, and up on the inside of the roof is the lettering "(copyright sign) 1978 VICTOR COMPTOMETER CORP." What? This was an Ertl kit, so I did some digging on the Internet. I found that Victor Adding Machine Company was one of the first companies to build adding machines in the early part of the 20th century. They produced some technical products like compasses, gun sights, meters and gauges for the USA during World War II and came out of that a richer company that went on to produce adding machines, calculators and cash registers. They started to evaluate the computer market in the 1950s and in 1961 merged with Comtometer Corporation, which produced calculating machines and a communications device called the Electrowriter. They became the Victor Comtometer Corporation. In 1965 they produced the Victor 3900, a fully electronic calculator with multiple functions, three storage registers and a CRT display. The unit incorported an early MOS integrated circuit for processing and storage. I don't know why, but in 1967 Victor acquired Ertl. It doesn't seem to fall within their business. There is no mention of Ertl in the Wiki report on the company, but on the Ertl site it just states they were acquired. It would be interesting to know what the strategy was. Or if the owners just liked toys! Victor was acquired by Kidde Inc. in 1977 and was renamed Victor Business Machines. In partnership with Sirius Systems Technology and marketed one of the earliest PCs and some of the first dot matrix printers. Victor was eventually purchased by Sirius and eventually sold to Tandy Corporation... no doubt the source of the early Tandy PCs sold in Radio Shack stores. Apparently Ertl stayed with Kidde during these transitions. We've all seen the Kidde name on older Ertl kits. Kidde was purchased by Hanson LLC in 1987, who eventually sold Ertl (which owned AMT since 1981) to Racing Champs in 1999. And we all know where that went. I find it interesting that Ertl was part of Victor, an innovative company that was always at the head of technology during that period. I'll bet you never knew that the Tandy PC and my Scout had a common heritage!

Brad, I also found those little brass nails at the hobby shop on a rack of ship building supplies for rigging up those tall ships! Great work on this truck, I'm glad to see you back to it.

I stole Tom TBill's photo from the 6 Pack Camaro thread as illustration for this thread. No criticism, there is no right or wrong here. The big question- Do you or Don't you paint all the surfaces of your model cars? You can see both illustrated in Tom's photo, so he's done it both ways here. I tend to paint everything so if those were mine the rest of the chassis would be all black. I also paint the inside of the body, and the outside of interior buckets. Why? My reasoning is that you don't know what will be visible up through the wheel wells etc once the model is assembled, and I don't want to see bare plastic, or even to be able to make out things like the edge of the interior bucket etc, so I paint it all flat black. And probably because I'm a bit anal! So what do you do and why?

You just need to be careful! You don't want to come home to, "Honey I built one of your Johan kits while you were at work!"

Checker cabs! I've seen this many times, where a late model cab with side lights was in a pre 1968 scene.

Guys! You are hurting yourselves! I have a history of working in design and implementation of work space. I went on the web looking for a diagram for bench top space and all I could find was for computer stations. So I guess I will need to write an article someday! The short of it is... a standard desk top should be between 28-34 inches from the floor depending on your height and seating position. My bench top is at 30" high. You need to have enough leg room under the surface to comfortably sit with your legs in front of you. The work space should have a minimum of 36" of space (side to side) for your legs. You want to work in a straight position with your model directly in front of you so you keep your spine straight. You also want to place tools you use regularly within a comfortable reach. Desk surfaces can be 24-36" deep. You need a decent adjustable chair. Don't sit in a folding chair or kitchen type chair. Get your self a good office chair. The cheap ones found at Staples aren't that good and won't last too long. Best to find a used one at a garage sale or used office furniture store. The best name brands are Steelcase, Knoll, Herman Miller and Haworth. In short, I'd rather spend $100 on a used professional quality office chair than a Staples $99 special, for the same reason you'd buy a SnapOn tool instead of Chinese no name tools. The chair I use above is a Knoll chair on casters that I got for free when a company was moving from my office building. You want to adjust that chair's height so that your feet are out in front of you and are flat on the floor. It's best to have a chair with adjustable arms, and you want to have those parallel to your work surface to support your elbows. If the chair doesn't have good midback support, add a pillow in the small of your back. Lighting is also important. I have good ceiling lights in my model room, but also have several lights that focus on the bench surface. The photo of my bench above has two lights, now I have three. They are all on a power strip so I just hit one button to turn them all on or off. Take regular breaks. It's recommended to walk away for 10 minutes an hour. That allows your eyes to focus to avoid head aches, and gives your joints a break from being in the same position for too long. Walk around and stretch! In short, if you get head aches or pain anywhere... your neck, back, legs etc. you have placed yourself in a bad position. It will only hurt you over time. When I used to do ergonomic evaluations of office space, the minute I looked at the desk setup and computer position I would tell the person where they hurt. They'd look at me like I was a psychic, but it's all in the science.

You are lucky. My father never had an interest in models. He did own one model car, a Studebaker Avanti kit he bought but never built. The one time we worked together was building my 1967 Cub Scout Pinewood Derby car. He decided it would be cool to have an Avanti and we carved the body (and filled in the seat area with wood) to look like one. I loved the Pinewood Derby track and thought it would be cool to have that for my Matchbox cars. The very next year Hot Wheels came out and I was in Heaven!

My work bench is an old hollow core door. It's wrapped in brown paper and sits on top of two old night stands that just happened to be the right height. The door was free and I had the old nightstands. On top of it you will see a yellow board and a piece of glass on top of that. Back at my old house when I was doing renovations and had no work space, I actually built one of my best models on that board, on top of my kitchen table. It was back when I had small kids, so I'd just take the board and put it up on top of the refrigerator every night. It proves you can work almost anywhere!

Wait until you get the Bare Metal Foil. You should never have to press harder than if you were tracing it lightly with a pencil. BMF is very thin and cuts easily.

Yea, a Pentastar would have been much more user friendly!

Today there are no kids building models, but our herd would scream bloody murder!

I wouldn't be surprised. We've seen multiple releases off the same tool from them in the recent past!

I would be surprised if we didn't get a few different versions of the DS, since we've gotten versions on all the other releases. On the 2CV van, I see we are getting a pickup next. There are several versions of the Renault. Maybe with the DS we'll get a two door, a convertible and since this is coming from Europe maybe a wagon! The wagon version is really cool looking!

Peter, you don't need to make a decal, this one is a Pep Boys (store brand) battery that I copied from an old print ad in black and white. It's just printed on copier paper and I even cut it in half to go around the molded in battery hold down.

Amen Joe. One major issue at a time. We are having her funeral on Saturday in NJ