Tom Geiger

That was me last year. I was unemployed and spent my days looking for work, but I'd knock off about 4 every day and work on my models until dinner time as an outlet to my frustration. While I couldn't control my work search results, I sure could control modeling. It was my sanity. And I got something like 8 models done for the year. That is my life time record! Best to you and hope you get back to work soon.

Congratulations! September 16 is my birthday too! Good day to be born! And this creation sure beats your Trabant build! Best to you and your family!

The front is all brick. The house was built by Toll Brothers, a huge Wall Street listed company. They wouldn't have siding left over from their last house. They build 100s at a time.

Yea, I finally gave up a few weeks ago and winterized the pool and put away all the lawn furniture. All I ask for right now is no rain for Friday and Saturday so they can finish installing my new roof. And then some nice sunny days to set the shingles!

Actually the opposite is true. Chinese auto plants are brand new so they are state of the art, higher tech than those aging plants in the USA. That Buick was probably better constructed than it's US counterpart. Back when Chevy got started in China, one of the first things imported to the US were engines for the then new Chevy Colorado pickups. GM was cautious and expected there to be a lot of quality failures. So they made their shipping containers to hold 12 engines for every required 10 units. Soon enough they sent the message to China to stop shipping engines... the ones already received were perfect. There were no rejects. And the extra engines were filling up the warehouses! Funny thing is that as we were cringing just waiting for the import of Chinese, and then Indian cars to hit the US market... when nobody was watching, Ford started selling the Transit Connect, which was manufactured in Turkey. Yea, nobody saw that one coming!

I would buy several copies of that Citroen H van! I need them to go next to my 2CV collection!

It's the American way. That's why the clear plastic bag from the dry cleaners has a warning label "Do Not Place Over Head". Yea, you know somebody won that lawsuit.

Yea! Go AMT '32s ! Even though the modern Revell '32s are much better kits, I always wind up back at the AMT kits!

Yes. We settled on a price for that today as the roof was going on. Taking off the aluminum siding and putting on new vinyl (which wouldn't have dented!). Here's a question for anyone in the business... high end house built in 1994 by a nationally known builder. They used aluminum siding. I renovated my old house in 1987 and used vinyl siding. I thought aluminum was obsolete by then. Why would this builder still be installing it in 1994? I'm just glad to be getting rid of it.

I was thinking that too. And who would be big enough to shed that much inventory? The Lindberg stuff could be the tail end of that hoard from 3-4 years ago. I've seen dribs and drabs of that in my local Ollies ever since. Ollies plays up that 'distressed merchandise' song and dance. Back 3-4 years ago when they had the Lindberg hoard, their ads said it was from a warehouse fire. Many of us knew better, that Lindberg had over produced and sold off the warehouse inventory when they were trying to raise capital. And it would've been strange that a fire would just consume the desirable kits and leave the least desirable kits undamaged!

There was a mile long thread about this on Facebook. Guys there kept asking the same questions over and over... like nobody could read back a few posts. Anyway... Ollies is a close out store. Mostly junk and obsolete stuff. For instance I tried to find a cell phone cover for my Iphone 5C.. best they had were $3 covers for Iphone 4s. Guys on the Facebook thread kept asking questions like the had a hobby department and would regularly get fresh new kits like a Hobby Lobby. Not the case, it's a closeout store and they get what they buy from entities dumping the stuff. A few years ago when Lindberg emptied a warehouse, they had those kits. And not the really good ones.. think the old Pyro stuff. You can find interesting stuff there. About 3 years ago they had a close out on Duplicolor Truck colors in the big cans. I bought all they had at a dollar a can. Otherwise, I wouldn't drive far to find an Ollies, but I stop in the one in Pottstown, PA if I'm passing it.

a comment. I do like this kit, and I even have the older kit of the 2 door hardtop. But every time I see one I just cringe with the thought of rust. These puppies really did! My father had a '62 Lark and traded it in 1966 because it already had visible rust on the body. And this was in Ohio! Back in the late 1980s I bought a 1963 Lark 4 door sedan to match the memories of my father's car. This car had a dull spray paint white coat of paint but once I started taking it down for restoration.... man was that car rusty! And I mean rust in places I never saw before, and beyond the infection I had seen. Who ever had painted this car put a lot of bondo into it. The floors and rockers were entirely gone. Rockers like missing completely. The front fenders and doors were rusty. Drivers door was so rusty it wouldn't shut properly. B pillars between the doors were barely attached at the bottom. Once the windshield was removed, I found massive rust right above it.. and that had been puttied over. A pillars were nearly rusted through from the inside. Things like the cowl and firewall were structurally compromised. Before I took it apart I had bought 4 new doors and 2 new front fenders from Newman & Altman in South Bend. They were once the most prestigious Studebaker dealer, later the first manufacturers of the Avanti II and later in life a massive parts warehouse of unbelievable NOS stuff that Studebaker never tossed. Upon taking it apart both my welder friend and I agreed that there was no restoring this beast!

Scott- read back to my original post describing the kit. It's a mess of parts! Several cabs, several rear treatments, two chassis. I want to go back and get another one so I can build more versions!

Okay Ray, you earned a story! Back when my buddy Bill and I went to GSL for the first time in 2001, we got to Salt Lake and took the bus to the rental company. We got in very late in the evening and the rental folks were just buttoning up a deal with a family with a mess of skis into an SUV. That's when they told us they had only one car left! (Which was a tad better than when I got to St Thomas and they told me they were out of cars, come back tomorrow!) The car they had left... a 3 cylinder Geo / Chevy speck of a car! The two door variety yet, which is even smaller than the four door of the same car. And this sewing machine of an engine was further stifled by an automatic transmission. So Bill and I are not little people. We fit our luggage in the back and now we are filling the front passenger cavity of this car. I think our arms touched! We figure that it's good enough for the airport to Salt Lake City for the show. Then we get the bright idea to drive to Bonneville on Sunday, since we were flying out on Monday. I will tell everyone that there is no reason at all to go there if it's not race week. Outside of the racing season there is friggin nothing there at all. Everything used for the races must be portable because the entire experience there was a road that led to a cul de sac kinda space with a driveway cut into the curb. Oh, and a huge sign to tell you where you are. Only the locals have shot a lot of guns at it so it's pretty damaged. Still, us tourists have our pictures taken with this poor old sign. And what is the only thing there? Augie Hiscano! Yea, he had left GSL and beat us there. Pretty funny actually. So I digress... being from the East Coast, when we look at a map and the distance is an inch or two, we figure it's an hour's ride. Well, things don't work like that out west. That trip from Salt Lick City to Bonneville turns out to be like 120 miles of vast nothing. I mean friggin nothing at all.. an occasional exit that resulted in a dirt road going out of sight. But if you didn't fill up in Salt Lake, there was but one gas station / rest stop on this route. So we head out onto Route 80 in this tiny little Geo Speck. Bill is driving and this little bugger is screaming like a Cessna trying to take off. Only it doesn't. So Bill doesn't feel it's safe to go faster than maybe 70 mph in this vibrating little toy. Now this is the route to Nevada and everyone is going like 90... BMWs, tractor trailers and the derned casino busses speeding down to Wendover, the casino town right over the border. The cops don't even seem to care that everyone is going 90. As we truck along at 65-70mph, we are seriously in the way, and are reminded of this every time one of them rapidly approaches our rear and vears to the other lane at the last minute. Every time one of them passes us, the entire Geo rocks and feels like it's going to fall over. So we held our breath the entire way.. both ways. A trip to remember for sure. We did make it safely back to our hotel in Salt Lake. On Monday morning we head to the airport and to the Enterprise rental return to get rid of this friggin little piece of carp. The rental agent approaches us smiling and asks how our trip was... I just start screaming at this poor guy, telling him that we had reserved a normal car and they gave us this infernal little bug that ruined our whole trip. He tried to calm me down by cutting the bill in half, but I kept yelling about how they nearly got us killed... and he finally gave up and told me there was no bill at all. Just shut up and please leave.... oh, and thank you for using Enterprise!

Getting a new roof on the house tomorrow. My roof, siding and trim got damaged in the hail storm this spring. Insurance company saw fit to approve repairs and cut me a check. Per normal process, it was cut to me, my wife, and the mortgage company. I went to a bank branch of that company today and they signed a release on the check so I could deposit it to pay the contractor. So new roof it is!

and everyone here would sell an internal organ to get to Australia! Ah, the grass is always greener!

I received this one as a birthday gift from a non-modeling friend (of course!). As I opened it he said, "I'll bettcha can't build a really big un!" as if he had bestowed a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle on me! Anyway... my impression is that it's a 1/25 scale kit they scaled up on a copier. It has the detail level of a 1/25... non opening doors and trunk. I tossed mine into the 'bay!

Folks, all of this old AMT tooling is in the hands of real model car guys who seriously want to relive the past the same way we do. Note that they've been going through the tools, and opened up all the welded off sections of molds. The latest releases of some old classics have revealed long lost kit parts. I don't remember specifics, so you guys can post what you know. As they are finding things, we are seeing kits like this Fruit Wagon double kit. Right now they are still reviving the easy to restore kits back to market. I'd say they will be digging deeper, and these guys actually know what they've got (unlike the former succession AMT owners). So times have never been better... never say never!

Here's the Johan Mopar interior I've been working on... floor is flat as a board!

Can't wait to see that one!

Like back when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Government gave people free debit cards and some of them dragged big screen TVs back to the stadium where they were being sheltered. I remember watching the news and there's this dude sitting there with his arm around a big box... no place to live, no food and no place to plug it in!

That's a 700 lb block of solid press board! My daughter bought one of those boxes. She had the brains to have it delivered. Still I couldn't move that box from the front porch. I had to empty it and bring the pieces inside!

I cannot agree more.. these kits are amazing parts boxes! Forget if you don't like one of the cars on the box, those parts can be used, and AMT encouraged guys to build with their imaginations back in the day. I recently got the above Model T Fruit truck kit. It's got the possibilities of about a dozen different rods and stock cars... not only can you do a pickup and the fruit truck huckster body, but there's also a turtle back and a shortie pickup bed in the kit. Just think of it as a box of street rod parts that you can do anything with. Better than Lego! Years ago I got the AMT Blueprinter Double Dragster and Tony Nancy dragster double kits on the same outing. Man, you could build anything from the parts in those combined boxes.

Interesting about screen size. I remember when I bought my first 32" screen. We thought that was huge! Last time around we were looking for our first flat screen. A friend told me to get the biggest one we could afford, and it would seem huge at first, but soon enough it would look normal. Got a 55" and he was absolutely right!

Lookin' good Rich! I agree with you on side glass. Not only so you can see better but because you can get inside to reattach any part that comes loose. Yea, I've done repairs through side windows. A different version of the 'ship in a bottle' game! Your photos reminded me... Johan interiors often didn't have the floor center hump. Bummer on that!