Tom Geiger

Nice build Tom!

Aha! I believe I saved the photos of that when Lyle Willets showed pictures from one of the Central PA Club meetings! Very cool rod that has that 'just right' look!

I don't think it's all tires, just tires from a specific era that had that chemical make up. Someone once said you could avoid the melt down by putting a layer of BMF on the inside of the rims and then just painting over it. I haven't had this experience with any of my good builds, but I have noticed some tires shrinking on their rims over time... cars I built 15-20 years ago.

I have friends who score big at flea markets, swap meets, car shows and thrift stores. My friend Gary and I can walk the same car show flea market and he will find some neat old kits and I find nothing! LOL My own luck is along the lines of this... I am at a flea market and I spy a model box on a vendor table. As I get closer I see it's just one of those AMT snap truck kits done from the last generation promos. You know, the ones that are still plentiful in the hobby for $5-10 each at shows. Of course this one looks like it's been sitting out on a vendor table in the sun for the last 20 years. The box is all faded and sunken in, with a dented corner. The shrink wrap is waving in the breeze. The vendor spots me looking at the kit and tells me, "Dat Dere is a geniune antique! They don't make 'em anymore. Gimme $50 because dat's whut I'd get on eBay". I walk away chuckling to myself.

I remember seeing it advertised as a kid, but I wanted all car kits and the clubs seemed to mix it up between cars, military, space and other models so I never signed up, I do have a couple of the Revell kits from a club like that. They were full glue kits but came in a flatter heavier mailer type box. I have two cars from the custom series with Corvair engines like the Patent Pending and the T-Bone. I bought them unbuilt at shows in the last 20 years.

Nice Valiants! And a great story about how things can work out on eBay.

Great work on the upper level! Turn the desk around so the boss is looking down on the shop floor. Then he can sit up there and yell at the workers

Thanks Mike! Casey almost had me with that Photoshop! I love the look of your '32!

There's a TV commercial for a company called "We Buy Any Car" which says they'll buy anything from a '63 VW... and they flash a picture of a 1970s VW convertible.. and they're ads are soooo annoying!

Here's two of those with the garages. I got these at Toledo a while back for $5 each.

The Ollie's closest to me still has some of the Lindberg stock.

Five years is like yesterday for most of us! We have unfinished projects older than some of the guys on this board!

I got this neat little promo recently. I went to a facility management trade show and the Got Junk? company was there with a 1:1 of their truck right out on the show floor. They were giving these away, that makes them promotional models in the true sense. The truck is Matchbox car size, is an accurate version of their truck, the bed dumps too. The only marking on it is Made In China on the base. I should've passed by the booth a couple of times to grab a few!

When I was cleaning out my parent's house, I found the painting above that I did in art class in high school. I had forgotten all about it until that point. Irony was that I had built the very same car as a kit as an adult! Maybe this painting was in the back of my brain? I remember we had to paint a picture to match one we cut from a magazine. Of course I used any excuse to do something with cars!

When eBay started, USPS shipped Priority Mail for $3.99 for up to 2 pounds. That made eBay what it is today! Then with all their losses, the postal rates have gone up significantly. That killed all the $10 or less items. Swap meets will vary by area, size of show and who is attending. There are dealers who want eBay prices for stuff, but they may take it home with them. And there will be regular builders who are happy to get rid of some extra kits for $5 a piece. Like someone said above, tour the room before buying anything. You'll find the very same kit for $25 at one table and for $5 a few tables away. I love going to swap meets to find stuff I haven't seen before, old built ups and being able to paw through junk boxes. I always come up with something that makes my day. Good luck.

Neat stuff and right up my alley! I know you are local since many of your photos have NNL East cards under the models. I'd probably recognize you if we met. Make sure to seek me out to say hello at NNL East this year! I'm pretty easy to find.

You know how when you go to a swap meet and there's always the one scuzzy little seller that you walk wide around his booth to avoid him? Remember, he's on eBay! There's always gonna be one, but the market does sort out the bad sellers in time. I've been on eBay both as a buyer and seller since it was new. 99% of my deals have been good and some of them have been fun, learning that you provided a needed car part to a guy with a Cadillac in Switzerland or that I sold a bunch of antique postcards of dams to the authority that built and still owns them. Cool stuff like that. I once sold some old medals I found in a junk box to a museum for the black fraternal order that originally issued them. They were rare but I was very pleased to send them home! I'd say overall, hobbyists have been great to deal with. Whether they were modelers, coin, stamp or postcard collectors, there is a camaraderie and sense of fairness between people with the same common interests. Every issue I've had with purchases, I've calmly written the seller and they in turn took care of the issue right away. The problems I've had have been my encounters with the general public buying consumer goods. Once my bro-in-law, in the computer business, gave me a huge box of stuff to sell. Every buyer was a problem, so after I listed the first grouping, I returned the box to him! They all complained like they were dealing with Walmart. No more consumer junk from this seller!

Just call you Casey Dahlmer? I actually felt really bad when I cut the foot off a broken up figure to put a shoe in my camper!

It would be cool if all the 1/32s were there. I've collected a bunch of them. I have the Ford Granada and Cordoba too. I remember the last hurrah for these maybe 20 years ago I found a few in the grocery store. I bought the 77 T-Bird, a Corvette and a Gremlin for $1 each. The Gremlin I got was missing the grill and someone in my club wanted it to make a race car so I gave it away. I still have the Corvette. I don't know if any others were issued at that time, I bought one each of the ones the store had.

John Hanley's primary business wasn't model cars but plastic parts for the auto industry. The "Plastic Products" company at that address probably is his old company. Legend was that in later years Johan wasn't a full time concern. When ever production was needed, John would move employees from his main business over to the Johan building to crank out a run. That also explains the inconsistent and sometimes odd colors of the plastics used. The issue with Johan kits as far back as the USA Oldies series, a lot of the cars issued were incomplete and mismatched between car, interior and dashboard. Someone said the wrong engine was in the AMX and we know that the Scrambler was really a '66 American. So they were piecing stuff together that far back. Aside from the other kits we feel the tooling exists for, there's reasonable expectations that Okey also had molds for the '31 Caddy and '34 Mercedes, at least to make one version of each car. There were several versions of each car, (Phaeton, Cabrolet and Brougham limo on the Caddy and open and coupe on the Mercedes) but I remember on Okey's first sales list he showed a one of each car being tooled as Rat Rods. Another comment on the tools is that the Chrysler Turbine car that Okey pressed was the promo so we know that one exists. I believe the full detail kit was a second tool and we do not know the fate.

When I've gotten an email about tracking I've clicked and looked just out of curiosity. It is interesting to see the path a package takes. What doesn't seem logical is actually darn logical to carrier. In many cases that location is a hub where they have huge resources to take in all their packages from across the country. Let's say that FedEx takes all the packages from across the country and ships them to their main terminal in Memphis. So that's one plane load from Los Angeles of packages going everywhere instead of separately routing say the 50 packages each that would be going to individual states. Once at Memphis, they have enough volume to send all the package from across the country that are going to Los Angeles and fill up a plane. So instead of 50 planes leaving and coming back to LA from different hubs, it's only one. This is a rather simplified explanation, but that's basically how it works. I once toured the FedEx Ground location in Edison, NJ and it's amazing to see the volumes and the automation that handles it. As far as my own packages, my life is so busy that they're all here before I realize. I often will get a package in the mail box and have to open it to remember what was coming. In fact we use the garage and back door daily, so packages have sat by my front door a couple days before we noticed them. Thankfully my entry way is covered and not visible from the street.

I did remove the soft center of the roof tonight. I don't think I'm going for a chop. I took a lot out of the body and I still want the car to be drivable.. plus, the body section worked and I know I'd screw up the chop

That is over the top! It was fun watching the build.

Okey Spaulding does sell at shows as Johan. Part of what he bought was a couple of tools, along with a vast hoard of parts and misc for many other kits. The stuff he sells at shows today is either kits pieced together from that parts hoard or just the parts themselves.

Okay it's sectioned not chopped. When I did the other '34 sedan that I just finished, I took very little out of the body section. I took it out between the two body bands but not the cowl, so the side windows were full but the windshield got a chop. This one is chopped below the two body bands and I took out twice as much plastic... Just to see what it would look like. The blue tape shows how much is coming out. I usually do my cutting with my little battery powered drill. You can see the perforations for the first cut here OOPS! Buncha parts! The band on the right is the section of about 6" in scale. The section on my other car is about 3" scale And here we are glued back together. As I said above, I cut with my small drill, creating tight perforations. Then I score it from the back and it just comes apart like ripping two stamps apart. I clean up the edges, but they actually work well for gluing with Zap-A-Gap and creates a lot of room to bite. Note that I had to cut a small slice out of the door to move it back so the front door line would match. Now we play with putty and shoot some primer to see how we did... A tutorial on this board showed me a neat way to Z a chassis so that's the next step. While I kept the last one at a standard height but sectioned over the rails, this one may go real low! Comments?