Tom Geiger

Just some neat photos of a truck I saw near my home in NJ years ago. Irony is that East Fallowfield is right near my new home in PA.

I can only imagine how much it cost to build that! New mini, new hemi...

And the passion for the subject matter! Just like there are casters filling niches for 1/25 scale heavy truck parts and even large scale hot rods, there would need to be someone into this kind of equipment.

Cool! I've always wondered why no manufacturer has ever done a split window in 1/24 or 1/25 scale! It's a subject they could easily sell Internationally. I've always planned on building one from the Gunze oval window. I think all the VW kits have issues, so I'm better off not knowing since I didn't notice them myself!

Probably 20 years ago I was sending CAD files to remote printers in other buildings and even to Europe. In my last job I did a lot of work with our European folks, talking with them via phone and video chat in the mornings when they were still at work, and sending them files via email and printing directly to the printer in their office in England. A few years ago I had a real estate broker in Madrid take me on a walk through of office space via the camera on his I phone. I later checked out the neighborhood with Google Street View. These are very cool times!

I also had a 1:1 Monarch back in the day. I got mine in 1981 from a friend whose father had been transferred to England, and left the car sitting. It was a 1977 4 door sedan, v8, that typical silver with a blue vinyl roof and blue bucket seat interior with a console. It was very unusual to have a 4 door with buckets and a console (same console / shifter that was in a Mustang) in those days so I thought that was very cool. I got the car for $600 since they wanted to get rid of it, the vinyl top was bad, it had a dent in the front left fender and the paint suffered the flaking issue that all those silver cars did in the day. I didn't know about paint stripper back then, so I spent the summer sanding the car panel by panel to get rid of all that bad silver paint. It was the consensus of my friends that it all needed to go! So I reprimed it panel by panel, and I sanded the roof and primed it for a new vinyl top. Come fall, I got a better job and we decided to buy a new family car, so I sold the Monarch, in primer, to a guy for $2000. He got it painted dove gray (to avoid the silver issues) and even painted the roof instead of adding a top. Anyway, I love those Lindberg 1/32s especially since they did a lot of cars that were never done in any other manner. I have the Monarch, Granada, T-Bird, Gremlin, Charger, Cordoba and a bunch of others. A few more of the Lindbergs, Monte Carlo, Buick Century and Pontiac Grand Prix

When I moved from NJ to PA, I was fortunate that there was a significant overlap in my ownership of my last house. So I was able to move my collection myself in my Dodge Caravan, bringing a full load to the new house every week after spending my weekend with my family in the old house. For my good built kits, I hand transported them in the same manner that you would bring them to a show. I placed each in a model car box, centered it, and filled it in with peanuts. Those were then placed in Xerox paper cases and I carried those with all the care you'd give to transporting donor organs! I also packed up a lot of my diecast and old builtups, restorables etc as Don described. Each one in a freezer bag (so that if something comes off it stays with that model) and once that was done, I wrapped them in newspaper (the plastic kept the newsprint from the models) and lined them up in those Home Depot medium boxes, or Xerox paper cases. I'd fill in all voids with newspaper, then when I got a layer done, I'd put a full newspaper or cardboard in between. And use common sense not to have a bottom layer of delicate kits and diecast on the top! Plan your box. For the unbuilt kits still in their boxes, Home Depot sells moving boxes in Small / Medium / Large sizes. They are all less than a dollar or two. The small one is good for heavy stuff like your magazine and literature collection. The medium size is good for a lot of your 'stuff' and household goods. I'd say the majority of my home goods got packed in that size. Now for unbuilt kits, the Large box they sell is perfect. You can get nearly a dozen of the standard kit boxes in there. When there was some space on a side or top, I'd fill it in with small flat model boxes and Japanese flat box kits. You can pack these fairly solid, good enough to even have movers handle. Most important - Be mindful as to how long your models remain packed up. Especially with things like packing peanuts, they can react with your paint, tires and decals over time. Especially with temperature changes. Also note that packing peanuts also come in the biodegradable type, that melt in the land fill, but also are affected by dampness and other environmental changes. So never leave your models in peanuts for an extended period of time!

Please do post! True that you would get a lot more response if you were building a muscle car or street rod, but there are small loyal followings for all things model cars on the board. I build mostly old beaters and light commercial and I sometimes get little comment, but those who do become my friends since we have similar interests! Your posting is well done and builds a cool story. I like the project you're working on, if I was going to buy a new car, that would be one I'd be seriously looking at to replace my '95 Celica GT convertible! Now for the comments you request, you are working on a Tamiya kit, which usually very well done, so you shouldn't have any assembly problems. For the most parts, people don't paint things still on the sprue tree for a number of reasons. First, at minimum, you will have a bare plastic mark where it was attached. Often this will need to be sanded flat, and on some kits these are in prominent places. Also, we usually have to clean up molding process imperfections like ejector pin marks and mold seams. That's all best done off the tree. I do spray everything, so I mount the parts on toothpicks stuck into small Styrofoam blocks (taken from old electronics packaging) and spray accordingly. Also, for most kits, you will want to try out the fit of parts prior to painting them in case you need to sand / modify them to fit. You are doing very well for your first kit in a long time! So play through! I'm happy to watch, I'm sure you'll have a fine replica of your 1:1 in the end!

2. And some of the aftermarket guys had a friend create the website as a favor, and don't have the technical expertise to do updates themselves. There's not enough business in the aftermarket to pay a professional company to create / maintain their site. Others like Modelhaus and Replicas & Miniatures of Maryland already have all the business they can handle. Modelhaus has a decent site, but doesn't have photos of the product and such. R&M doesn't have any web presence because they are already working as fast as they can. Having a good site would only increase their volume to as point that they couldn't produce. 3. As said, there just isn't a market for these. It's a regional thing, I see guys in more farm / rural states going to tractor shows and such. I have no personal connection to farm equipment at all. And if you did see it, it would most likely be done in diecast. I was out in Evansville, Indiana maybe a dozen years ago and walked into a Walmart. I was surprised that they had this huge aisle of Ertl farm toy collectibles right up front across from the cash registers. That was farm country and the market for this stuff (note that Ertl was in Iowa!). The Walmarts in New Jersey didn't even stock a single Ertl farm toy.

Isuzu built a tough little vehicle. I had the Geo Storm, which was also an Isuzu. It survived as both my daughter's first car and then a few years as my commuter. In the end we donated it and hopefully it's still running around. Oh, and although it wore those Geo globe badges, it was still titled as a Chevy in NJ.

The tall hood was done in 1978 to allow for a V8 engine. Irony is that MPC declined to upgrade the kit engine to a V8 so you still get the six that was in the previous years kit. Actually that's a good thing, the AMC six is quite useful to modelers. I agree it's not as nice looking as the earlier model, but that's how the tool survives today. Round Two didn't make the investment to backdate the car... at least not yet! I can see future issues of the lower hood and since Tom Lowe has always been about TV and Movie memorabilia, the Wayne's World car. I'd actually be surprised if they didn't do that. The TV and movie hobby is much larger than ours and that one would pay for the tool changes. I haven't looked at my kits, I do have copies of each version, but from my recent experience looking at Chevette kits, the only difference between the early 1977 Chevette and the 1980 era Bear Bait version is the hood and grill. If the Pacer goes the same way, I'm sure a resin solution will appear very shortly! Either way I'm happy to see the Pacer back!

I haven't looked myself but I believe the things you list. Note that this kit was released in 1978 and is the last of the Dodge pickup line that spanned through the 1970s. Back then model companies were selling kits mainly to kids, so they weren't all that careful with minor details. You may even find a kit that has an automatic transmission but a clutch pedal in the interior. The good part is that most of what you listed can be fixed by swapping in the correct parts. I'm sure the guys here will assist in identifying sources for those parts.

Great moments? 1. The invention of the Internet! At first thought as something that would kill the hobby, it turned out to be the exact opposite, putting modelers from around the world in daily contact through message boards and email exchanges. Never before was so much collaboration and research material available. Have a question? Get almost instant response from knowledgable modelers. Need a rare and obscure part? Just ask. 2. The invention of digital photography. It gives everyone the ability to take good photos and share them with the world. Some of us never got the hang of old film photography, and those who would take pictures at shows could only take 24 or 48 due to the size of rolls and expense of processing it. Now we take literally 100s of pictures at shows! And that information is on the Internet that very evening! And we never had the ability to take in progress built photos. Now we can follow along and watch the masters build, step by step. Amazing. 3. eBay. A funny thing happens when you take all the collectibles in the world and put them in a single searchable database. What was once rare and obscure is now obtainable if you are patient and bid high enough. We all own kits we never saw before in person due to eBay.

Instead of just a little TAXI sign, I decided to make an advertising billboard like I see on the local Dodge Caravan Taxis. It was very easy to do. I made it from some thick Evergreen sheet pieces that were in my scrap box. I used the thick stuff so that I could sand down the edges to give it that rounded, translucent blown plastic look. I have the sign sitting on the kit roof rack that was an option on probably 90% of the Caravans. My 1:1 doesn't have one since it's an aftermarket high top, but my previous two Caravans did have it, not that I ever used it. There will be a TAXI decal on the front and rear triangle along with a yellow light on the front and red on the rear. Here it is with a sample sign just taped to it for this photo. My printer isn't working well, so I may see if I can get it printed nicely elsewhere. I'm just planning on doing these on paper and gluing them down. And as all roads lead to eBay, I searched "Taxi Meter" and got a bunch of them for sale. Surprise! Modern meters don't have a flag on them. This is a current vehicle electronic taxi meter photo I swiped and photo reduced to make one for my project. So I photo reduced the meter down until it looked right. I glued it to a small piece of thick Evergreen. Once dry, I cut the piece down to the right size with my Chopper II cutter and painted the unit edges black with a Sharpie. It's mounted on a bit of straight pin projected from the dash board. Not shown are the two tone seats. I'm still going overboard and am carving the missing seat arm rests and probably making seat belts. I've already sketched out the masks for the rear windows so it will be one of those few Caravans without the tinted glass, but the correct black surrounds on the glass.

I think you described every American car of the 1970s-80s. In 1981 I was licking my wounds on the huge nightmare of owning a new 1979 Mercury Capri V8, and decided to buy a new Nissan Stanza 4 door hatchback with a five speed, sunroof and a/c. It was at a Ford / Nissan dealer so I looked at the new Fords in the showroom. I thought the new LTD was good looking (the small one) and upon looking over the one in the showroom, I saw that the chrome bumpers ended in misshaped burrs, the fit and finish was awful and even a seam in the middle of the front seat had been missed by the needle. There was nothing holding it there. Seeing that quality on the one they saw fit to showcase, I decided to pass. I proceeded to buy the Nissan that served us well for the next decade without a whimper!

Nothing here in Pennsylvania. It wouldn't help me much anyway. I don't buy much in the way of current releases and the Testors display is dismal! Overall, we can rant that this hurts local hobby shops, but I think it's grabbing a different audience, those who haven't been exposed to models. So it's probably good for the hobby.

I kept getting ads for Harbor Freight in the mail and thought it was just for the mail order operation, but I recently discovered that I have a local store in Downingtown, PA. So I'm in big trouble

Thanks Fred, Ironically I'm thinking of this Chevy as an Aussie outback vehicle and the dent may just represent a roo deflected! Part of heating up a body is making sure that you have a very narrow flame (that's why I use a small birthday candle) because it's too easy to heat up a large area and the edges you aren't watching are shriveling up. I've had that happen. That's when you wind up with body damage that's way too intense. Also once I have made my dent, I may put putty in it and carve it out. Melted plastic tends to have soft edges where actual dents have creases and rough edges, so I may create those with putty. And the sermon... know the materials of the actual car you are modeling! Fiberglass parts and plastic grills don't dent, they shatter! Can't tell you how many times I've seen rusty fiberglass fenders (like a Chevy Cameo pickup bed sides). That's why I did the rusty Corvette model as a spoof!

Cool job so far. I have a thing for the early Novas. Back in the day around 1975, my buddy Mark had a '62 Chevy II 2 door sedan. It was a hand me down from his sister and had been brush painted white with house paint. The back seat was from another car (someone missed tossing a cigarette out the window and the back seat bottom had caught fire) that wasn't tied down. It had no seat belts and virtually no floor, but it was Hell on wheels! The crazy things we did in that car. I'm amazed that we didn't get killed. Mark's father eventually made him junk it since he feared that the body was barely attached to the chassis due to the floor rust. Mark got a '66 Mustang coupe with a six cylinder / 3 speed as a replacement. And that's another story! Yes, I'd love to add both of those cars to my shelf someday!

It's okay to fail. It means you tried to do something. The only people who never fail were those who don't do anything at all.

That's pretty cool! I have an old All American Metro van like that one. I need to do something with it someday.

How many modelers does it take to change a light bulb in a ceiling fixture? THREE. One to hold the bulb and two to turn the ladder round and round.

I keep my finished models in a display case I made from an old china cabinet. I got the cabinet for free (I have a second bigger one I paid $100 for). The china cabinet has shelves spaced far apart, so once I have enough models to display, I'll add a glass shelf between each existing shelf. Here's my original case. You can get these for free or very cheap at garage sales or on Craig's List. Here's the display case I bought at a second hand store for $100. It breaks down into two parts for transport, but is huge. The laminate on the two curved round panels on the bottom has hazed, so eventually I'll paint it.

A bit of history. The Germans used the freezer trick to demolish bunkers left over from WW II. You couldn't blow them up or hit them from outside, since those are the very things they were designed to fend. They found that if they made them watertight and filled them with water, the expansion as the ice formed in winter would force the walls apart. So it should be good enough for plastic model cars!