Tom Geiger

Hmmm... I've always had a cup holder since I started driving in the 70s. It sold for about a dollar at K-Mart. There's probably still one or two out in my garage. You put it on your door and a flap tucked into your inside window ledge. Only we called them beer holders back then.

There's something to be said there! Those 1960s working hinges are oversized (look at the photo of John's 1:1) and never worked right anyway. I just glued the doors shut on my Lindberg / IMC Little Red Wagon Dodge pickup. I filled in the slots left behind once the hinges were omitted and then I glued on some small Evergreen round to simulate the hinges on the body. Worked very well and they look to scale now.

I got the Polar Lights Spider-Man VW Beetle. It's actually pretty cool once you toss the stickers and remember that this is the California Custom Beetle version that was supposed to follow the Herbie Love Bug release. It just didn't get done when PL got sold back then. It has several sets of custom wheels and the correct VW emblem hub caps. It has other neat options like custom buckets and steering wheel, custom exhaust and two sets of mirrors (round or rectangular) to choose from. I will be doing a kit review later on.. already have it written, just need to word smith and take some photos. But it's too nice out today to do that now!

Last weekend I was traveling on Route 202 back to Pennsylvania from Delaware and my wife says, "That car has no driver!" so I look and it's a 4 door Suburu Legacy tuner with RHD! I don't know if it is an import of a Japanese market car, or just one of the RHD units that Subaru sold here for postal contractors to buy. Either way it was cool! You could also get away with yellow Sharpie.

You can still do it! I recently did the same operation on a 1962 Valiant annual that I already painted. Just be careful and the new bare edge you create will be covered with BMF. Just whittle the top windshield line up to the top if the existing chrome. Then you could risk chipping paint by scribing in a new trim line, or just add new BMF with a clean line at the top and let that be the top of the window trim. It does look sooo much better!

It's actually not a good idea to sell fireworks at all. Idiots buy them and hand them off to kids, the little folks with even less sense! Many states don't allow sales of the heavier stuff, and some not even the very light stuff like sparklers. I currently live in Pennsylvania and this state irks me. They do not allow fireworks sales, although I do see racks of poppers and sparklers at Walmart. BUT, there is a loop hole. Near state borders you'll see big fireworks stores and the catch is that the law says they can only sell to out of state residents. I haven't tested this, so I don't know how well enforced it is. The irony is that all these stores are set up on the NJ border where no fireworks of any kind are sold. So the state of PA is promoting that NJ residents break the law. Very, very poor. I have been told that NJ police watch these stores and pull cars over when they enter NJ. Good for them! And per worse case scenario, last season we were going to visit my bro-in-law in NJ. He asked me to stop and buy big fireworks for his then 12 year old sons. Idiot. So I told him that I was a PA resident and wasn't allowed to enter those stores! Done and over with!

I've always said to go to Hallmark and buy their car calendar. This is the one that Aunt Bessie will buy for her nephew who likes cars. It will have the most recognizable cars, those that the general public will be familiar with. It will be the usual Camaro, Mustang, Lambo and Ferarri mix. There certainly won't be any Hudsons or 50s Dodges in it.

Very cool model which stirred up this memory for me: Back in 2002 a guy I worked with had to clean out the property of his late uncle. He told me there was a Model T that had been in the garage for 60 years and I was welcome to it for free. So I got my tail down to the property, a two hour drive and this is what I found... It wasn't a T at all, but a Model A that looked like his uncle had it sitting out in the yard for 50 years and recently pushed it inside. I had no use for it, but you don't turn down a free Model A. Certainly a case where you take it and figure out what to do with it later! So I started to arrange transport, and then I got the dreaded news. His cousins thought the car was gold... how much would I pay for it?? Well, I didn't want it in the first place, so I declined to make an offer. Especially since one cousin thought it was worth $10 grand. So I walked. In the end, they had a race with the sold property's closing date but did get a few grand out of it. Oh well! More photos at the link... http://public.fotki.com/ModelCitizen/11_car_reference_library/the_free_model_t/

Okay... lots of pictures, I'm doing this once, take notes! Here's my cockpit.. the shelves above the bench are important to me. I currently have three lights clamped to the lowest wide shelf. Most of the boxes are my unfinished projects. It's important to me that I keep them visible so I don't forget about them. On the wall end of the shelves you can see two of those 50 drawer units, all small drawers. They're all marked with categories of parts. Need seat belts? Need an antenna? There's a drawer! There are two narrow shelves at the bottom, the lowest one has a lot of paints, glues and supplies. The one above that has a lot of staged bodies. Some of the boxes are parts categories. Note "custom body parts", "headers" and seats.. both a full shoe box of bench seats and buckets. My strategy is to keep a combined box, and separate it down further when it over flows. There once was a box of "Seats". And this being an old photo.. "Tires" has graduated to a large tub. Inside that tub are tons of loose single tires, as well as sets held together with tied twine, and sets in small plastic bags, some complete with wheels and wheel backs, ready to use! And all those blue boxes come free! My wife is a Swiffer fiend so I have a regular supply of these boxes. They come in two depths, the deep that you see here and a more shallow box. The deep one is perfect for keeping a project together. The narrow one is more a parts box. Best part is that they have a clear lid, so you don't have to open every box to see what's in it. Tubs.. the $3 kind from both Walmart and when Giant Supermarket had them on sale. I just pushed my cart to the shelf and bought all they had. I probably have two dozen of these at this point, and old photo.. all those new ones are now filled. They stack nice, so I often have two or three of them stacked next to the workbench as a reference table. Contents can range from "Tires", to junkyard categories of "1930s Fords", "VWs", "Dodge Vans", "Valiant", "Falcon" and many others. There are also boxes for specific kits I use a lot like "1955-57 Chevy Pickups", "1950 Ford Pickup", 1953 Ford Pickup" and "1957 Chevy". Some of those have new parts kits. When I discovered I had over a dozen of the pickup kits, I just took the unsealed ones and dumped them into the tubs for parts and projects. My model tool box. This is a seriously cheap tool box that my father had that is way too flimsy for garage tools, but perfect for my use in the model room. It rolls so I pull it up to the bench when needed. Lower cabinet has air brushes and Dremel tools etc. This little 4 drawer unit was at Walmart for about $8. I use it for my sandpaper squares and the bottom one has Q TIps and sanding tapes. I buy the 3M sandpaper sheet packs. I own a cutting board so I slice those down to 1"x1" squares for use. I made a cardboard divider for each drawer. It works well, sandpaper always a reach away. I used to have them all in envelopes in a drawer and always had to hunt for the right grit.

I was hoping to persuade Round 2 to release the Caravan with my Taxi and CV versions. It would pretty much be a decal set, with a few new parts... taxi meter, taxi ad topper, maybe a set of plain wheels and a ladder for the CV. Problem is that they are very busy with their current program and have many kits with more profit potential ahead of this! And for the PT Cruisers... I saw this one in a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop and can't get it out of my mind... I don't think I'd try for an exact replica but I have ideas of beer livery... stay tuned!

Ah procrastination is my friend! I've meant to do the kombi conversion from the old curbside kit after seeing one done, but never got there . Now Revell has done the heavy lifting so I need one of those. I only recently got the newer Trabbie with engine so this is a real treat! I love the work you did on it, especially leaving the roof as removable. Great build!

Nice clean work John!

For small trim you can just BMF it in minutes. I've been meaning to try Alclad for a convertible windshield frame that's molded along with the body.

I tried working with Fred years ago. The problem I had with Fred was his antiquated business practices. For some reason he favored doing business with people who ordered by mail. He said he mailed out his flyers by sending the ones that traveled furthest out a few days before the near ones. That sounds good until you realize that the USPS will deliver something from NY to California sometimes faster than NY to NJ! Then he wouldn't put his list on his website until way later than the lists he mailed out. Then for the kicker, if you emailed him an order, he didn't check his email regularly so someone could phone in or mail in an order and beat you. After laboring through several of his lists and picking out 10 or more items each time, each and every time it was all sold. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't buy anything from him so I just gave up!

There's a reference work you can consult.... watch the movie Forrest Gump! The thing that really irked me was when it happened I was thinking old lady or young girl... someone who wouldn't know better. But when I got up alongside the car to glare in, it was a middle aged guy just sitting back numptying along. So you know he's been ticking off people for decades, and probably caused a bunch of accidents in his wake (they never get in them!). And the sad part is at his age... he's never been a decent driver and won't improve any either!

I dunno guys... this is a very nicely done kit, probably the best VW chassis etc ever done in 1/24 scale. And Revell is selling it at US prices, I think I paid $19 for mine. For that price it's worth buying just to be able to grok the kit up against other VWs. There are certainly US style bumpers in the Revell kits, yea they're 1/25 but that's not saying the bumpers won't be close enough. You can also look at the Polar LIghts Beetle that has US style older bumpers. That would give you a close US 1967 car. I've had this Euro VW Beetle brochure since I was a kid. I got it in Germany when I lived there. Here's a scan of the product line, my scanner wasn't long enough to capture them all, so I scanned the important end. This was a 1970 model year brochure so they were still doing the 1200 with the old style bumpers that late.

Very nice! I like the way you weathered the exterior but left the red paint on the interior as normal! And don't think I missed the RHD. That is the coolest option and possibly the first time in a VW kit. I've been planning on using it in a build myself! Maybe use the UK oval decal that came in the kit along with the D (Deutschland) one? It does look like a car that a someone shipped to the US. When I lived in Germany my father had a similar red Beetle so this one is near to my heart! Ours was most unusual since we probably had the only US spec Beetle on the army post. Story was that someone bought it in the USA, then got orders for Germany and Uncle paid to ship it there. And of course they just sold it upon leaving. We may have been the 2-3rd military owner. Our car had the US spec bumpers with the over riders. Yours has the Euro spec single strip bumper. While we owed the Beetle, it got tapped in the back pushing in the bumper. It was easy to find a Euro bumper to replace it and my father never did get to installing the over riders back on it, so it had US bumper on the front and Euro bumper on the rear. When we left I sold it to a military officer who had just arrived, repeating the ownership cycle one more time!

Hmmm... maybe crayon won't stick to the body?

Yesterday on my way home from work... HIghway 95 has a long acceleration ramp so you can get up to speed and slide into the moving traffic. Numpty in front of me lumbers along and gets up to maybe 45. He gets to the end of the ramp and STOPS. IDIOT! Now we're both sitting there stopped with cars whizzing by! So this idiot is just frozen there. I'm waiting for him to find an opening.. when I notice IDIOT NUMBER TWO... a high 4x4 pickup that's gotten impatient and is now trying to pass both of us in the shoulder! So IDIOT NUMBER ONE finally gets a brief opening in the traffic and starts out... does he floor it? No, he just meanders out and almost gets rear ended since traffic is running at 65 plus and he's going 20. That got me wondering if he did that there every day!

That's because it's a Revell of Germany Euro model car. The low end Beetle didn't get the new bumpers in '68. I have the kit and it's worth the price of admission just for the chassis and drivetrain. And it has a right hand drive dashboard. That's cool.

A funny thing John... I have my Caravan Taxi and CV with the metal sides. Once I screwed up the CV paint job I wanted to keep it for now, and start again with a fresh body. I checked my stash and I had no more. Checked eBay and there weren't any for sale that week, so I dumped the body in the drink. Then I did a deeper dive into the stash and found 3 more unbuilt kits. So we will be seeing more Caravans from my bench. And that will include a replica of my 1:1 high top.

I'm a scale bigot too. I always want my American cars in 1/25. So I won't buy those Monogram Mopars etc. You really need to look at each car individually especially since a lot of older models are 'box scale' and may or may not be 1/25 or 1/24 at all. I do buy kits in 1/24 that I cannot get in 1/25 and follow that same reasoning... kit first, diecast if no kit is available. BUT, I'll accept my International cars in 1/24 since that's the way of the world! And the 1966 Camaro? Grab it, that's the rare prototype. We'll have to get Gas Monkey Garage to restore it! LOL

I think it needs a turret!

I always wind up filing in multiple states and each gets a chunk! When I lived in New Jersey, I worked in New York state. Then I started working in Pennsylvania and that year I had THREE state returns. And the tough part... each one wanted a chunk of my entire income, not just the part earned in their state. In fact for a while NY state wanted a chunk of your entire joint return, and my wife worked in NJ. I did get to the point where I lived and worked in Pennsylvania for a few years... but I'm working back in New Jersey this year so here we go again! And people in Pennsylvania always bragged about their low property taxes... then you find out that every town gets income tax too!

Many years ago in Scale Auto Enthusiast, Terry Jessee (who is retired law enforcement) recommended using rolling papers for random paper in a model since it's thin and fairly in scale. I have a pack up in my decal box just for that reason! I too was always a manual trans kinda guy. When I bought my Geo Tracker (Suzuki Vitara) 4x4 convertible in 1991, I had a hard time getting one with a five speed. All the ones on the new car lots had automatics! Probably the reason I still have it, is that I changed jobs and took the New Jersey Garden State Parkway to work. This becomes an hour to two hours of stop and go traffic during rush hour. After a few weeks of driving a clutch, my left hip started to ache all the time, so I stopped taking the Tracker to work (except when it snowed!) and drove my 1990 Crown Vic instead. The Vic is long gone, but the Tracker soldiers on as a leisure vehicle!