Tom Geiger

And wear safety glasses!

The model companies need to kidnap their whiz kid! There has to be some genius behind this revival! wise words. A dozen years ago we'd all have rather died than work on a curbside... a snapper even worse! Now, I'm happy to concentrate on an interior and a body. I'm having a lot of fun with the Lindberg Dodge Caravans.. I am detailing out a Chevette promo... ya know what? The Chevette engine bay isn't interesting enough to spend time on! And I'm about to start a few Revell PT Cruisers!

Then my foggy brain remembered... Hey! I tried that once. Here's a project that I started maybe 20-25 years ago and was overambitious for my skills at the time so it hit this point and stopped. Doors don't fit well, details outta scale... I was looking it over recently and thought I'd be better off starting anew on this project. And at this point everyone is wondering what the heck I was building.... Yea it was a real car. A Frankenstein built by bored GIs in the motor pool late at night from scrap parts. And yea, we had drag races on the Pirmasens, Germany Army Post! It had a V8 (I was a kid I don't know what it was) and it went like stink. It was the only car that could pop a wheelie and was insanely unsafe with stock VW suspension up front. No doubt long gone! And the bracket races pitted cars against each other like no other strip on Earth, It was fun, it was 1970! Photos taken by me with my little Polaroid Swinger camera!

I have a few of the Anglia and Thames panel and seriously need to build one to appease the Model Gods for the one I destroyed as a kid! I do like John's 1:1 because even as a kid I was more apt to want a streetable one than a gasser. Very cool indeed! I've had this hankering to try to do a stock Thames panel, and I would like to do one as a woody wagon... oh the wheels are turning!

Yea, idiots near my car always irked me. I used to take my 1973 Plymouth Scamp to shows and would chuckle at the clowns who would tell their companion that it was a Camaro, a Mustang or even a Falcon just like their father used to have... only his was green, and had 4 doors... But that was still better than the know it all jerks who would walk right up to me and tell me I wasted my time and money on this nothing car. "Should've fixed up a Mustang, THEN you'd have SOMETHING." I don't know what possesses them, that they have to tell people stuff like that. My all time favorite? The guy who strode up, put his coke on my hood then put his foot on the bumper to tie his sneaker... and couldn't understand what was wrong with me when I yelled at him!

That is too cool. And you make it look easy! I had a Raleigh Chopper... actually went through two of one because my original orange one got stolen. I should look into modifying that Schwinn into this... the Chopper is all straight lines. Only challenge would be to make the seat! Hmmmm...

The problem with the Baja Bug thing is that every kit body is molded with fenders in place. So this is what a VW looks like without fenders... Front wheel well... Rear wheel well... and it's all part of the body structure, not a bolt on. And when you cut those fenders off a VW model body, you get this.. I had been thinking about creating a VW body without fenders and with the correct inner fender shapes molded in. I wonder if that would sell in resin??

Just be careful about using shippers other than the postal service. Some of them use a third party customs agent at an extra cost. I'm running an educational program for an international company right now. Our training company had Fed Ex parcels of course materials sit in customs in Ireland for 2 weeks recently. And now I'm crossing my fingers that our packages to Italy will get there in time.

Who said 5000 kits?

and while my Breeze was in the shop getting the a/c charged the shop recommended that I get the air changed in my tires. So I got their special Mobil 1 synthetic air too!

and sometimes simple is better! Very neat look!

Then get a bean bag... unless you like raw beans too!

I've been spraying clear and got a run or a goob in the paint and my immediate reaction was to reach for the model and wipe it off. Wrong! I should've waited for it to dry, access the damage and sand a little. Instead it was into the lake!

I think you just jinxed it! I have two that are cranky and I should just go to Home Depot and get two new ones.

I may have posted earlier in this thread (and I'm not going back 11 pages to see) I'm amazed that nobody has done a 1/25 or 1/24 scale split window! Most obvious company would be Revell of Germany, especially since they did one in a larger scale already! Another bit of Beetle trivia. Prior to the Polar Lights Herbie kit, nobody had done a Beetle with a soft top! That top piece can be used on a lot of older kits too. And I remember a feller telling me that Polar Lights had a Cali Bug version of that same Beetle as the next release but sold the company prior to getting to it! Most of the missing VWs can be found in scale in diecast. That includes the Type 3 notchback and squareback AND the 1969 era Transporter.

What did I get today? A new contract! I'm working as a consultant and was on a 6 month contract that was done the end of this month. I did have some concerns that I'd wind up unemployed and didn't want to go there again. At the end of a meeting today the boss told me to get them a new proposal and they'd cut me a purchase order. Yea! Work is good!

My Plymouth Breeze loses it's charge over the winter. It needed a charge when we took it over from my daughter last spring, and it was blowing warm again this spring. It's not like the a/c isn't used during the system, it's used as part of the defroster system, no doubt partly to keep it in motion. So this spring I had my shop charge it up and add the dye. They did the black light thing two weeks later and couldn't find a leak. So we'll see if the pattern repeats. It does have 150,000 miles on it and we're not planning on keeping it forever so I'm not sweating it.

Geez Nick, I said I can't complain. Only anticipating the future! I'm working for a guy who just celebrated his 42nd birthday and he's whining about feeling old. I told him to just wait! He ain't seen nuthin yet!

Agreed. There are thousands of wackos, and most of them will live out their lives harmlessly. Can't predict which one will explode in most cases. I knew a mass murderer when we were kids. Look up George Hennard. He's the guy in Texas that drove through Luby's buffet restaurant window and killed 24, wounded another 20 before he was cornered by police and committed suicide. His family was military and he lived across the street from me in Germany. Yes, he and his brother were neighborhood trouble makers, but nothing really out of the ordinary and you never would have known this was in his future. There's too much instant media today and it gives way to a lot of monkey see, monkey do crimes. They all want that moment of notoriety.

Throw a big rock in the pond just to see where the ripples will go??

Take a slice of pizza, drop it face down on the ground... now you have Klingon pizza!

I didn't say it was pizza. If you call it pizza at Ron's they'll correct you that it's an 'oval'. And no matter what it is, I'll be eating one in about 2 hours!

I will nominate the 1955 through 1957 Thunderbird as a subject. The 1955 has never been done in scale, while the 1956 and 1957 are very old tools with limited detail. A brand new tool to current detail levels should be explored. The model could be released first as a stock version of each of the three years. Then there are tons of competition options that could be explored, including replicas of actual cars. And the gasser releases would sell like crazy. Yea, this one has Moebius written all over it!

A few ideas... The fender flares could be sectioned in the middle to take a bit of length out to allow for the side door swing, and also for better alignment at the rear. Another idea would be to do a gullwing or hatch style side door that swings up so you wouldn't have fender clearance issues. I'd also spend some time stripping the body better as all those marks could show later. Cool project, I was always a fan of the custom van era!

And power accessories are just the tip of the iceberg! Now we have cars that park themselves, cars that brake if you don't (which I think is actually a good idea, it certainly would've helped Tracy Morgan situation) and even cars that drive themselves are in our future so we haven't seen any end to complexity ! So I guess three on the tree is out of the question!