Tom Geiger

The military was also a big buyer of crew cabs. I don't remember any Chevys, but as a military brat I remember seeing Dodge crew cabs on base. And since then, every one I've seen in the hobby started out as a military unit.

We seldom stop to realize its a miracle that the tooling of the kits of our youth still exist! Tooling that's survived in unorganized warehouses, untouched for 30-50 years. Business must have been very disorganized for this to happen. It wouldn't occur today with business benchmarks of managing every dollar of asset and square foot of facilities. And I don't think that we'd all be involved in the hobby today if this didn't happen. We all have rebought the kits of our youth, it's all about nostalgia and reliving those old days!

That is an R&D chassis. I got it second or third hand so it was all in the one box when I got it. I didn't know if it was all one kit or separate components.

Thanks Chris. The only thing I'd be worried about would be making sure the body color paint got inside the handle. Any wisdom?

That body looks great already!

Richard, in the USA your fire extinguisher would be mounted right next to the exit door. That's so someone wouldn't be running deeper into the building to get it if there was a fire. There would also be two extinguishers, one chemical and one water. Nitpicking!

Scale Motorsport did a decal sheet that was the Mexican blanket seat pattern. Ken Hamilton did a tutorial on how to make your own from thread in the other magazine a while back. As others said, you can look for suitable fabric, but realize that the patterns we need to work on a scale seat aren't that plentiful in full size fabrics. You can always find pictures on the internet and print your own. There are printable miniature sites for doll house builders. There are carpets and wall paper that can be done in 1/12 or 1/24 scale there. I printed the below carpet on regular printer paper and used it in this interior:

1950 Ford large truck cab done by SJS Details. It came with a chassis. I also have his Studebaker Champ pickup and a laser cut kit of a phone company pickup box. Accu-Pro 40 Ford Standard trans kit with the photo etch grill. Accu-Pro Zipper Roadster with their metal chassis. I'm pretty sure they're no longer in production. AFX Resin Bronco Kit. Perrys Resin '53 Plymouth wagon body. I don't know if he's OAB, hard to get at any rate. This is just stuff that I had photos handy. A lot of the early resin I collected was rendered obsolete by new kits that came out or were reissued. For instance I had Mad Dog Resin's 66 Cuda Funny Car body, a thick slush cast thingie. Once the kit was re-released I sold it as a slot car body on eBay. Same with Mike's Miniature Motors '56 Nomad, and my R&R '50 Ford pickup, once the Revell kits came out.

At least my silly dog is stuck on the ground and can't get up high enough to damage models!

Nice tip! I hadn't tried this yet, but I will. I have some models where I just blacked out the area with flat black paint. I usually cut them off and add resin handles or those Owencraft metal ones.

It's all three models currently on my bench. I felt cursed the other night and just turned off the lights and walked away! Here at the very final stages of the builds, I'm breaking things! As I am fixing something I broke, something else snaps! Argh! I'm not going up to the model room!

I think short looks fine. It changes the over all look from stock. It may look good with a wood side piece to take the bed up to the level of the hood. Wood side piece like in the 50 Ford kit below. I'd make it from bass wood.

Wow! So much prattle about a minor issue on a model that's already better than 90% of us could build. The original vehicle is 'over the top' and no doubt was built in 1:1 just to be that. You certainly wouldn't forget it or confuse it with anything else! I'm enjoying watching the build and can't wait to see it finished! And maybe in person someday!

Since stamps were mentioned... the price of a letter rate stamp in 1962 was 4 cents, and it's 46 cents today!

Cool. I look forward to watching the build. I have the kit and hope to build mine someday too. The last time I remember seeing one of these on the road was on my way home to NJ from Toledo one year. There was a rusty old VW van with Vermont plates lumbering up 280 through Pennsylvania. I passed him like he was standing still. Every two hours I'd stop at a rest stop, and then I'd pass him again. I got home faster with pit stops than he did driving straight through!

Of course I know it's a fiberglass body. It's a theme car. Note that the primed fender is just edged with paint. They mold dents into fiberglass and put faux rust on rat rods and such. And that's not real rust, it's chalk!

There is no quick way to do it good. Quick looks quick. Ebay is littered with guys who thought they could smear a little dirt and rust on an old glue bomb and sell it as a beater. Let's just say I see a lot more cars done wrong than right. I'm so tired of seeing models with rusty tires and seats! If indeed you wish to do it right, follow the build threads on this board and learn it step by step. As said above there are a bunch of different techniques and you'll figure out your own style. Like model building itself, weathering is an art. And any art takes time and practice to master.

um, no!

Rigged Contest !!!! Congrats Rich! Glad you had a terrific day. The Mercury interior reminds me of the flocked interiors you used to do in the old days! It's perfect my friend.

This year at NNL East our main theme is 'Resin Rules', anything built from a resin kit or body. That would work for your show as well.

This was my entry in the 24 hour build last month. I pretty much wrapped it up by 5am (I had until noon) minus some details I knew would take some time. Howard had warned me that the exhaust was an issue, so I didn't even try during the build. I also didn't like the fake foot push bar, so I left that off as well. The blower top had a really bad sink mark, so I figured I could do that later as well. I gave it a nasty gasser look, and again, didn't get to the rust part until later. Front chassis view. I actually started with the sponsor decals on the firewall to hide a couple of holes. Came out well and I like it since that was just a blank panel. The blue wires were used because I had the prewired distributor in my hoard. I did build the kit headers (plate plus 4 individual pipes to glue together on each side) but they didn't fit at all. So I hit the parts box and came up with this pair, which I sanded and bent up a bit to fit. Forget that they were RED and bled through a few times. Not perfect but they're on there! Rear view of chassis, I used some photo etched gauges because I thought it would be quicker than trying to detail what was molded onto the firewall. It wound up being a draw, time wise, but I like it. The kit had no seat belts and I think it would be too much trouble to do it correctly now. I did find a good blower top that actually mated fairly well with the kit bottom piece. I sanded the new assembly to shape and BMFed it since I am out of Alclad. Rear view uses the back bumper from the '53 Ford pickup kit in place of the hokey foot thingie that came in the kit. Much, much better in my book! Right side shows more rust and damage. That's always the fun part for me. Not bad for the speed at which it was built! I did learn a lot on that 24 hr build and I noticed that my building has sped up a bit with the new sense of organization it gave me. And it was fun to build with guys across North America! And for those who haven't figured it out by now, "Miss LED" is just a jumble of the kit "Miss DEAL" decal. I did a little logo for the 24 Hour Build that is on the back of the car! So I'll always remember that day!

I will spend a lot of time on my builds. Some of my unfinished projects are 20 years old! But I did the 24 Hour Build on-line this year with Gary Kulchuck and others just for the fun of it. I took the Miss Deal Funny Car, a model I had several of and always wanted to build, and went for it. I learned an awful lot in those 24 hours. First, we don't realize how much prep work we do on the average kit. I had started at noon and by six pm I only had primed parts to show for my efforts. And that was working continuous at a fair clip. In the evening, I got the body in color and the now painted chassis (I used mainly Duplicolor to dry quickly) together and up on wheels. I still tried to maintain a good degree of quality. I screwed some stuff up and redid it. That cost me time! By five am I had the whole car done enough to call it quits. It still needed some details like adding headers, a rear push bar and some other stuff. That was at the point where I was so tired that I wasn't focusing right and was dropping things. So I called it done. Aside from doing this as a challenge and having fun with some buddies across North America (yes, Canadians were involved) I learned some things about my building. Since then I notice that I work a bit more systematically and am getting more done in an evening. I did the build solo at my house and communicated with everyone else (Gary and Bobby Boggs had several guys at their homes) every time I'd stop to post some progress shots on their Facebook site. Next year I may try to get a couple of recruits here at my house for the fun! My Miss Led funny car at the conclusion of the 24 hr build. I spent some more time on it since and will publish the finished model later.

it's a real shame to put paint over your work and hide all the details! And Murphy says as soon as you finish this model, Tamiya will announce the kit!

Simplicity and Volume! Most of the junk you see is very simple and doesn't have to be specific or to scale. Thus, the tooling would be much cheaper than a scale model where everything in the details (both in depiction of the subject and the fit between those parts). A lot of the consumer stuff you see is all straight lines and it doesn't matter if there are molding flaws. A long while ago when my daughters were kids, they got this little merry go round for dolls. They wanted me to put it together and when I pulled out the instruction sheet, it looked awful familiar... then I checked and yes, it was made by Ertl. I then looked over the toy. It had maybe a dozen parts that were very simple and not well molded with flash, ejector pins and seams visible. Then I realized the price of it was double that of a model kit at the time. I asked myself (and shared with my club) why a company that could sell simple toys like that in great volume would even bother with model cars?!? And for volume, the junk you see in the dollar store is in every dollar store in the country! Grand volume. One time I was out in Colorado on business and in the morning I drove past a school bus stop with kids all standing there ready for school. I spied that one of the kids had the very same lunch box that my daughter had in New Jersey. Think of the volume that they must have sold to have covered the entire country!

Slant six looks great too! I like the motor mount. Getting a slant six oriented in a kit engine bay is always interesting! What year air cleaner are you replicating? All the ones from that era are just round with "Super 225" on the top.