Tom Geiger

I followed this one down the PA Turnpike on my way home one day. He got off at my exit, and went my way on Route 100. So I started to wonder if my wife got me a present. No such luck, he didn't turn down my street! Yes it was taken from the drivers seat. We were at a red light!

Thanks Harry. Just about everything I posted in this thread is easy to do. When I got back to the hobby as an adult and joined a club, my model quality jumped enormously and quickly. I found everything that my new club mates taught me were easy to do things. The only thing that kept my models at grade school level was that I hadn't thought of the techniques on my own. And that's what this thread is all about. Pretty much so Dan!

Okay... a tip. Someone earlier mentioned that there are different shades of bare metal under the hood and chassis of every car. Buy the full set of Testors Metalizer paints. Each one represents a specific metal, from aluminum plate to magnesium. But use them as you may, looking at each tone, I mean the part on the model doesn't need to be magnesium to use that color, just a part that you need to be a tone or two darker than the other parts near it. I also keep as many different black and greys that I can find. There truly are 50 shades of grey! Back when my daughter and I built a Suzuki Samurai to match the colors in my Geo Tracker, we discovered so many different grey tones just in the interior. A bit of care here can add depth and realism to your model. My metallic tones, blacks and greys aren't limited to model paints, I use the full range of things available to me. For instance the cheap Walmart flat and satin blacks work very well. They are very fine and go on light to leave your kit details visible. And the clears... Dullcote, Semi-Gloss and Gloss are your friends here too. If you have two parts next to each other that should be distinguishable but you've painted them the same black, give one of the a shot of semi-gloss and you will see the difference. BTW, if you shoot a bit of Dullcote onto BMF, it looks like duct tape! Don't hesitate to experiment!

At what ever point you want to stop! Me? I will always add spark wires, radiator and heater hoses, battery cables and the brake lines from the master cylinder as far as they are seen under the hood. I have done other details as I've seen fit, or saw as a challenge to do. I generally wont plumb the entire underside of the model. I do add valve stems on nearly everything. It's a great effect for a few minutes effort. In the above photo you see shifter linkage I scratch built. The transmission is very visible in this model and I had reference photos of a transmission that was for sale on eBay. So I took it as a personal challenge to try to duplicate what I saw in the photos. I did accomplish it to my satisfaction and had a lot of fun doing it. It did give me some confidence for future projects, and I did grow a bit as a result. Would I do this on every model? Heck no. I am currently working on the Trabant Universal wagon. It's wonderfully detailed under the hood, but I'm finding that some of that detail gets hidden once it's assembled. I spent time cleaning out the spokes in the cooling fan, only to find it nearly invisible behind the fender. I will add the two spark plug wires, the fuel line (since the tank is right on the firewall) and a few other details I've found in on-line photos. I joined the Trabant forum and one guy did a complete rebuild with photos ever step of the way so I have my reference material! And I've already added my valve stems! If you don't enjoy doing a specific task, then don't do it! Some get frustrated by BMF, I find it relaxing! I've actually done some for guys who didn't feel they could do their own. I would have much rather spent the time showing them how! Once you master it, and it's not beyond any one of you, it's one of the things in this hobby where a minimum of effort yields the maximum effect on your models. I have built a couple of curb siders recently, so I'm not all that concerned about what people have to say, nor am I going to enter any contests. I got all that outta me a long time ago. I build for my own satisfaction, to get the images in my head out on to the table, and for the few odd folks I call my friends!

I've been in the Princeton NJ area Hobby Lobby a number of times. I didn't have anyone approach me about religion and I didn't identify the background music as Christian. It is a new store so it was clean and organized. Not much different than going to Michaels. The only thing I saw was a center of aisle display of white wooden crosses in different sizes, no doubt for Christian crafts. They looked like the ones people put on the highway where there was a fatal crash.

I believe this was part of the Highway Safety Act of 1966 that was finalized in August of 1966. I found many references to the act on the Internet, but just the parts on highway safety. I couldn't find a list of the safety items. There were a few earlier standards enacted. The automatic transmission shift pattern PRNDL was standardized for the 1965 model year. I'm not sure but I believe the 4 passenger seat belts, left outside mirror, 4 way flashers, back up lights, were in cars for at least the 1966 year, as my 1966 cars all had them. I do agree that the dual master cylinder debuted with 1967 cars.

Charlie- Ken from our Tri-State Scale Model Car Club is working at that new store. He has about 40 years of model car experience. IF he has clout, the selection should be very good!

Jay seems to be a fairly normal nice guy. He pulls no rank at shows and treats everyone who approaches him well. There was a story a while back that he was at a show and some guy had his hood lock stuck on an exotic car (I think it was a Lambo), Jay said he knew the issue, crawled under the guy's car and fixed it. We do realize that Jay's car collection is run as a business. With his money it's probably set up to lose money for tax reasons. I figured when Jay lost The Tonight Show it was a blessing for him, now he can spend all his time playing with cars! And doing TV and such related to cars. I'd love to be him!

Ha! Throw me under the paddy wagon, why doncha! That '57 Ford was an early build of mine and I trusted the AMT plastic hinges. That one broke off, and the door is just jammed in the opening. Early lesson learned! An antenna! Made from a short bit of wire along with a Grantline scale bolt as the base. I believe someone on this board recommended do this. I hesitated posting this picture since I forgot to scribe the upper fender / cowl line! I only noticed it after I painted the body.

I could write a volume on things people do wrong when weathering / rusting a model! And the amateur work actually takes from the seriousness of those of us who strive to do these right. Some of them look like they took the body and put it in a bag of rust and shook it. We call those the "Shake and Bake" beaters. But since the thread is about details you can add... Seat belts! How many people leave these out? Here's a simple pair, buckles made from Evergreen, belt itself made from ribbon. 1/16" ribbon that you can buy on eBay as a craft item will give you a mile of it for cheap money. For buckles you can even take those styrene seat belts out of a 1960s annual. Sand the buckle thinner from behind, then cut it off the plastic belt. Or photo etch.. I love the photo etch male ends, but if you use the photo etch buckle, you'll need to put some plastic behind it for thickness. I see too many models with just that thin photo etch piece sitting on the seat. Two more things you can do with seats... 1. Install your head rests at different heights. 2. Mount your bucket seats in different positions. For instance, the drivers seat with the headrest set higher, and the seat all the way back in the track? It just adds interest. People already mentioned valve stems and interior lock plungers. Very easy to make with a short length of ignition wire. I save the bits I cut off my final fit of distributors and use them for these details. Just drill a little hole. Insert the black wire and glue from behind for a clean installation. Headliners, rear view mirrors and sun visors! Here's a finished headliner that was installed into my Chevette. It started life as a business card that had a light pattern in the card stock. Cut it to size and shape, painted it flat black and glued it to the clear runner that attaches the front and rear windows. Mirror came from the kit, but if you don't have one, it's nothing more than a small plastic rectangle you can mount on a bit of wire. I make my own sun visors from scrap plastic. This one isn't perfect but once it's glued into the model, the imperfections can't be seen from the viewing angle. License plates! I make mine on the Acme Platemaker on the Internet. They have all states and many, many of the individual designs by era and special plate styles. You type in the text you want. Reduce that image to .23 (I use Word to do that) and print. I print mine on 60 lb card stock. Great finishing touch on any model. This one has a Model Car Garage photo etch license frame. Hope these help someone!

I have to agree with Harry... I love that convertible Seville. That car had great lines, but was only sold as a 4 door sedan so the convertible is pretty cool. Kinda like if Chrysler took the current 300 and did a convertible. I'd be so all over that! The other ones... I cannot imagine anyone buying any one of those!

Do hunters worry about the purity of the meat since the environment is pretty much poluted? I've heard those concerns. In NJ there was a restaurant that had an annual venison dinner to benefit a charity. The event got shut down over concerns that they were serving non FDA meat that there was no way of knowing it's history. I know that much of the fish and sea products we buy in markets comes from the wild and they allow it to be sold in markets and restaurants though.

I don't think kids are much different than they were when I was in high school (I graduated in 1976). There were the cliches and all the teen age angst and drama. Back then though we didn't have worries of terrorists and such, our schools (at least in the suburbs) didn't have metal detectors or armed police officers. We would go to another high school and just walk in and walk around unchallenged. At the same time laws are tougher today. I'd imagine there is less bullying, which was rampant and unsupervised in my day. I remember kids that quit school to get away from agressors. And fights and assaults were common, and never involved law enforcement. Kids just got detentions, maybe got suspended for beating the tar out of each other. So there were always fights, and beatings of those who were bullied. Today, that wouldn't be tollerated. My nephew is a high school senior and some kid beat him up over a girl. That kid is going to court with assault charges. In high school I was focussed on my interests and wasn't really into the learning thing. At the time I saw no purpose for some of the teachings and was pretty bored with it all. I don't believe I was all that into models, that was more a junior high thing for me. I still was into cars big time and was at DMV within hours of my eligibility for my drivers permit. My big things back then were my creative writing and my stamp collection. I was into the stamp thing as feverously as I'm into the model car thing now. I had a very specialized collection that I still add to today of a specific stamp that was sold between 1903-08 and competed with adults at stamp shows, getting my display up to silver status on a national level. I even skipped my junior prom to go to a stamp show. That worked out because I got my first and only best in show that weekend! I wrote a monthly column in a stamp magazine, and a weekly stamp column in a local paper. I never hid this from classmates, and never took any grief over it. I think they thought I was doing this adult thing. If you asked me back then, I would have felt I was a nerd, but I got along and didn't get picked on all that much. Probably because I had been on a wrestling team in junior high and when I got attacked by a bully in the hall in my freshman year, I just took him down and held him on the ground immobile until a teacher broke it up. I didn't think I was particularly smart because my grades weren't tops, pretty much due to my disinterest. Dash forward to being an adult. When I joined FaceBook there was a group for my class, and within hours I got contacted to join it. Suddenly I was in contact with people I hadn't thought of in 30 years. A funny thing happens over time. The cliches and group bourdaries disapear. We had several impromptu face to face reunions, and everyone got along and was happy to see you. I am friends with people that I wasn't friends with in high school. As one person posted on that board, "I now have more friends from high school than I had in high school!" And that sums it up. People grew up. A funny thing is that your own perception of your self back then may have been completely different that how others saw you. Case in point... I was very shy with girls in high school and there was one group of cute girls who hung together that I was into. But of course I never approached them for dates, but there were two girls I always wished I could date. Fast forward 35 years and I'm at a class reunion. It came up what they thought of me in high school... "We would've dated you. We thought you were super smart, aloof and wouldn't be interested in silly girls like us." What!! I find this out NOW! And today I'm friends with three of those girls, bantering on FaceBook daily!

Some things never change... "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277 (1953)." Sometime around 450 BC

Saw this one not too long ago... yea, I was standing on the ground when I took this photo! Photo taken on the gas line on the New Jersey Turnpike headed north. Truck had southern plates on it.

I believe it's videos of kittens. Yea, that's what's so important.

idiots at the post office! The clueless customers who cannot pack a package. I've seen it before but I went to the post office mid afternoon yesterday and there were THREE of them. Otherwise normal looking middle age people, two men and a woman, who showed up there with items, no boxes or packing materials and presented them at the counter as if the postal clerk would be doing that work for them. The two poor souls behind the counter gave them all priority boxes. Now it's my turn and I'm mailing 30 pieces. All my stuff is packed, sealed, properly addressed and all in the box I have facing the same direction. My two international pieces are up front with the filled out customs forms taped to them. One guy then went to the rack where they sell mailing supplies and was toddling off with a box. The clerk interupts my order to yell at him that it isn't a free box. The guy argues a bit, but puts it back and the clerk gives him a Priority Mail box. Now the lady comes back to the counter, bypassing a long line like she's still at the counter, and hands the clerk her completed Priority Mail box. The clerk shakes it and it's evident that there is no packing what so ever. The clerk shakes his head and tells her that her item is going to get broken. She screws up her face and yells at him, "Then what are you going to do about it?" He just sighs and tells her that people throw out junk mail newspapers and to go to the big trash barrel over near the post office boxes. She storms off. We finish my 30 pieces quicker than any one of these dolts gets their package mailed. The clerk smiles at me and thanks me for being so prepared and shakes his head the other direction. I let him know he's a saint. I leave. Who knows what happened after that. I cannot believe that the general public doesn't have the very basic skill of placing an item in a box! It's just so common sense. i know... (Anyone waiting for anything from me... it all went out yesterday afternoon!)

Jim - Just a thought. Instead of scratch building the door panels, maybe vacuform them with thinner plastic? This project does look good. I can see the quality in the ROG Mini. I haven't got one yet but I just got the Trabant wagon and the quality is excellent, also pressed in Poland.

How about this one... I was so excited to get a first generation Capri in 1/24 scale... So good so far, body looks great! Then....... Bam! I pull this interior out of the box. Yup that's it! Makes Johan tubs seem luxurious! And why, so they could fit the little motor and batteries in it!

I think we have established that people are self serving idiots. The one that bothers me a great deal is at our show. We realize that we have a good many handicapped folks in our hobby, and many more than the hall's handicap spaces accomidate. So our club bought and owns an additional 10 handicap parking signs. We nievely thought people, especially folks within our hobby would respect that. Nope. Idiots park in the spaces and throw our signs aside. We now have 8 signs because 2 disappeared. This past year we had a handicapped guy pull up to the front of the building, and we checked and 2 of our 8 spaces had non-compliant cars in them. We announced the plates in the hall, but of course nobody came out to move the cars. I had asked the fellow to stay there, and we'd sort it out. By the time I found one of our staff who would move their car from a prime space, he had left. That truly ticks me off!

To add a thought... model building is my sanity... The other day I got a new kit and couldn't wait to start it. So yesterday morning, I cleared off my bench and started my Trabant wagon. Just the morning of carefully removing the parts from the sprue and cleaning them up relaxed me so much that my little aches and pains went away. I came out of the room happy, with a sense I accomplished something, mentally refreshed and ready to enjoy the evening out with my wife. You can't beat that feeling!

Great progress and a lot of work to make those tiny little hinges the size of rice grains! Kinda like neutering fleas! And going back to the thread about how much you'd charge to build someone a model... well those hinges are worth hundreds of dollars at shop rate.

Guys.. too much drama. The way it probably went down: 1. Car gets stolen. Thief gets rid of it to unsuspecting buyer almost immediately as a 'drag car- no title'. 2. Car goes through several sets of hands 3. Car winds up inoperable and sits 4. Current owner buys inoperable, no title car with the vision of getting the title (several services are always listed in Hemmings to get titles for cars with 'lost' titles) and restore it someday. He puts it in a storage facility, time gets away from him. 5. Storage facility loses record of who owned it, so they go to DMV for info, turning up the original owner. (ask me sometime how a bank lost my in-laws safety deposit box) 6. Storage facility contacts original owner, in the meantime currrent owner redeems car and takes it home. I honestly don't think the current owner is involved in any big plot with stolen cars. He seems to be wealthy (his house is described as an estate) and had no idea the car was once stolen. He's probably as shocked as anyone.

I once was at the supermarket, and was standing on a long line with a mess of stuff. Not a full cart, but enough that I wouldn't dream of going to the absolutely empty "15 Items Or Less" checkout next to me. A store manager comes out, accesses the long lines and directs me to use that checkout. I'm about half way through, that manager has walked away and a lady with a few items walks up and immediately starts screaming at me! The cashier just ducked for cover and left me to defend myself!

I don't get these either! I don't know where it started, the first time I saw them was on an Audi. It was behind me and looked like an evil 59 Buick headed at me. Now nearly every car is sporting them... I dunno I call them 'carnival lights'.