Tom Geiger

I actually changed it right after making that post!

Chrysler has been paying copyrights on some of the old names for decades. I don't begrudge them using a cool name on a new car line. After all there are few names that aren't copyrighted, which has led to letter and number cars, and the Japanese making up words for new car names. So if the new Chrysler, a division of Fiat, wants to use old names, so be it. The fact is that the majority of new car buyers are too young to remember Chargers and Darts of old... remember that was like 30-40 years ago! In fact I'll bet there are some new Charger owners who bought them because they have nice memories of their 1980s Omni Chargers! So the Charger and Darts of today have nothing at all to do with the cars we remember. We are the minority of cranky opinionated old men!

and what exactly are we doing with this thing? Short of waiting for the zombie apocolipse...

So if I move to Texas I should be able to make a living as a model building coach??

My daughters were involved in the 1990s (they are now 30 and 26) and the league was run by a few folks with big egos. They demanded that all the parents took on duties and took a $250 check from you in liu of you working. When you completed your assigned duties, they'd give you the uncashed check. Otherwise, they cashed it. I asked why it was so much, they said it was originally $100 and parents just let them cash it instead of working. When you went to work these crazies made it miserable. Where it should have been a fun thing with other folks from the town, these idiots yelled and screamed at people, and told us all that they were working way harder on the league thing than the rest of us. Really wrong.

I am the walrus! I spend too much of my time picking eye snots off the dog!

Whoa Whoa Whoa, yes I have the perfect life A house out in the suburbs, two children and a wife Whoa Oh Oh, yes I've got the perfect life but something is burning deep inside me... Baby, you need to understand I'm running, as fast as I can I'm just a normal man But I keep on trying...

My daughters played softball in the town league. The bleachers were out past the outfield because the parents didn't know how to act. Even at that, there was an open assault case involving parent vs coach.

Oh Yea! Un huh!

I get what you are saying Jeff.. we've spoke about this before. My daughter sprayed her own models and I taught her techniques, and expected her to then follow them on her model. In some cases, I'd assemble one wheel for example and have her do the other three. She felt a sense of achievement when we finished a model. I made sure of that because my father was the opposite. As a kid I'd just sit there and watch him do things. He wanted perfection in what we were doing, so he did it himself. Even as I got older and we started to work on 1:1 cars together, he had me cleaning parts in gasoline in an old hub cap. I never got to do the real work stuff. So I lost interest. I swore I wasn't going to do that with my kids and probably went overboard in the other direction as a result. There were times my daughters felt bad when they got beat by the daddy-do projects, but we talked about it and we agreed that we were there to do our best, and that they had clear consciences when they accepted an award for their work. Another arena of 'daddy-do' is grammer school science fairs. Some of the projects there looked like AT&T degreed engineers built them... because they did!

Still do in New Jersey... $3.19 this afternoon. I've been taping things off MeTV. Some of it's cool and some of it, I cannot believe we sat through!

I laugh at the guy who does that in $1 increments, fishing for the current high bidder's top bid. And that's exactly why you need to use a snipe program. I use esnipe.com which has a free introduction offer. They do charge a fee per auction, but only on winning bids. And the fee is small, I believe I buy $10 in their points every year or so. Well worth it. It allows you to put in your bid with a few seconds left... no time for any human to react and play that $1 bid thing! Also when you put in your bids, don't do round numbers, especially sale type numbers like $4.99, or even $5.00. In those cases go for $5.66 to beat those guys who use round numbers.

Big weekend here! We bought the Sleep Number bed we'd been looking at. Should be delivered in a few weeks and maybe I can finally get a good night's sleep without sleeping on my aching shoulder. Got an iPhone 5C which falls into that ancient technology that gee golly new to me. My wife had wanted a smart phone, so I upgraded so she could have my 4C, which is only a year old. And I got new shoes. I didn't think I needed them but the wife says I do for an upcoming wedding. Heck, I'm just one of 200 people attending this shindig. Nobody is looking at my feet! Could've had 3 kits instead!

If you live there, you should be surrounded by the current plate. Just take some digital photos, straight on shots. Use a photo etch license plate frame for scaling, and then scale that photo down until it fits. I do this all the time, I steal license plate photos from eBay for that purpose. Here's a plate that's going on an upcoming build of mine. US Forces in Germany 1970s version. Took the photo from eBay.

The big news! My pictures arrived from Germany. It's amazing to live in this computer age where you can reach across an ocean and someone will go take photos for you! Upon receiving a bunch of pictures, I suddenly realized that this is a different restored Trabbie Postal Van. I also have pictures of a postal wagon with side glass, also in a museum setting, so I'd pretty much conclude there are three and probably more of these in restored condition. Pretty interesting! And here's the money shot. Never mind that the focus isn't great and it has a flash on the screen, it has those details I need to finish the interior. From other photos, I thought there may not have been a passenger seat, maybe a mail sorting area like on some US postal vehicles. This shot confirms that there were indeed two seats and a bit of a divider / cargo stop behind them. So I can proceed with a bit of confidence! You do realize if I had proceeded, which ever way I went, I would've been wrong! So now I can pull this one to the front of the bench.

Trabant 600 Universal.... oh yea, they did make a kit of this one! Which means anything is possible!

Old story... Augie Hiscano built a model for the old Revell contest series. It was black. The head judge told him that he didn't win because black wouldn't photograph well for all the magazine coverage they were planning, and to try again next year. The following year Augie built a very similar red hot rod and won first place! I remember that he won a brand new 1:1 Comet ! (anyone with better facts please chime in!)

Nice work Al! Hope to see it at our next meeting.

I've always been a Deora fan and have collected a lot of photos of the original, and other paper / digital property. I love your take on the vehicle! I wouldn't be doing it all black, since it won't photo well at all. I like all the black trim you have on it, but I can see this as bright orange or lime, some color that someone taking that puppy to the North Pole would paint it so rescue planes would see it!

Be sure to create an eBay search agent for the cars you are looking for. That way you'll get an email from them every time one appears. It gives you more options and you won't miss any. Like Rich, I set a mental price limit for any model I'm looking for. I pop that into my snipe program, and wait. It's cheap sport! Sooner or later I do get what I want at the price I want to pay!

Cool! It's great that you got those skirts off without much damage. Those things are the curse of most built ups of that era!

Many thanks to everyone who chimed in about the Sleep Number bed. As a result we ordered a king size one today, 50% off sale on the top model! We didn't get the one that raises and lowers, that doubles the price, so we went with the flat one.I am hoping this will be a big improvement in our sleeping! Heck, I've bought good running cars for less than we paid for this bed.

Works for me Dan! Ever see a mother in the store with two or three misbehaving kids, screaming "I'll kill you!" while the kids laugh at her. I always figured that if she actually did kill one, the other two would be towing the line!

Many years ago I had to fire a guy for stealing coffee packets from the office. We had noticed that we were using way too much coffee, but didn't know where it was going (we thought the department next door was taking it when they ran out). One day I get a call from security that they have this guy in their office. He was walking out of the facility, reached into his jacket pocket for his car keys and dropped a few packs of coffee on the ground, right in front of a guard! He was decent employee, and had a family so I went to bat for him in Human Resources. The head of HR fired him, and told me that with people who steal it's never just a one time thing. He said dishonesty and contempt for authority was a way of life, something in his psyche, and we just managed to catch him one time. So out the door he went. In the next few weeks we noticed a lot of things changed in the office. We no longer were missing supplies, nobody had any of their personal tools go missing and sloppy things like the coffee area wasn't a big mess anymore, there were no longer snots flicked on the mens room wall over the urinals, and no more poo stains on the toilet seat! We could only conclude that all this was this one guy! As said in this thread, there is no room for cops who steal. Some of them probably get a big 'above the law' feeling, but cops are held to a standard a step above the average citizen, because they are supposed to be upholding the law. Back in NJ there were two local cops who went to a break in call at a closed restaurant. They got caught with a few cases of frozen lobster tails in the trunk of the patrol car. Lobster tails / hobby supplies, no different!

that last photo kinda reminds me of a scene from many years ago.. far enough back that we didn't have cell phone cameras. I was in my car pool on Route 280 in NJ, and that day traffic came to a complete halt. We get up to the obstruction and I had to laugh! It looked like some scrap truck lost the door to some large commercial freezer or something, smack in the middle of a lane, with a Nissan Sentra completely on top of it. All four wheels off the ground. Belly on top of this thick slab of metal.