Harry P.

And finally... got the crank handle and the steering assembly installed. And yes, the steering really does work through the steering wheel! Once my Grandt Line drive chains and sprockets arrive, all that's left is to install them, install the hood, the wheels, and the seat, and this baby will be finished!

One of the very few details not included in the kit is the radiator overflow tube. Going by my reference photos, I used copper wire to represent the copper tubing, and some soft, flexible rubber tubing that I found at Hobby Lobby in the jewelry aisle for the connector. Also in this photo you can see the scratchbuilt attachment bolts for the wooden frame rail "caps," which I had to scratchbuild because I replaced the kit's molded plastic caps with real wood caps.

For those of you who have been following along on this project, you'll remember that when I left off I was trying to build the kit drive chains. Because of the tiny size of the individual links, and the fact that the links are designed to be "riveted" together by melting the tiny protruding pins on each side of the chain, building the chains is not hard... not challenging... not tricky... but literally impossible, as I described in a previous post. So I decided to go with aftermarket chain and sprockets, which I found at Grandt Line. I found drive chain and sprockets that are probably within 5% of the size of the kit parts... and at 1/12 scale, that difference will be all but invisible. But until my chains and sprockets arrive, all I can do is a few "baby steps" until they get here. First, the kit windshield. I have no idea why this car would even have a windshield, as all it does is add wind resistance... the driver's goggles would be all the "windshield" the car needed, but there is one. The frame is on the "aluminum" tree, so I toned it down by spraying it with Testors Transparent Black Window Tint, and then blackwashed the adjustment wing nuts to bring out the detail. The "glass" is a kit-supplied piece of die-cut acetate that I attached to the frame with Future...

Possible stupid question here... but is this the finished model? All in one color? White tires? Shouldn't the tires, seat, and handgrips be painted some color? I guess I can see an all-chrome frame fork, fenders, etc... but I think this model seriously needs some color added to it. Just one man's opinion...

Ok, if I understand this correctly (and I think I do)... the kit includes only the "engine" parts that are actually visible when you open the hood. So why bother tooling up an entire engine assembly if 90% of it can't be seen on the finished model (or the real car)? I don't see the "problem" here.

Pretty nicely done, but you would need hands the size of a gorilla's to make those shifts! Also... since you added graphics to the underside of the hood, you really should have dealt with those ejector pin marks.

Ron... I don't remember ever seen a MOPAR hood like that. Is that a stock piece? Or custom?

Beautiful! How did you do the red piping on the seats?

OK, here's an interesting sidebar to the whole MRI story... My crapola insurance plan (thank you, Obamacare) didn't have even ONE orthopedic specialist in their network to see me. But I was (and am) in so much pain that I had to see one... so I found one "out of network" and figured I'd just have to pay for his services out of my own pocket. He was the doc who wrote up the MRI order. Well, it turns out my crapola insurance company refused to cover the cost of the MRI, because the referring doc was "out of their network." After several phone calls between my crapola insurance company and the imaging lab and the orthopedist, Michelle, the admin at the imaging lab, was such a sweetheart! She knew exactly the insurance BS I was going through, and she told me not to worry... they would do the MRI for free as a courtesy to me to make up for all the red tape I was going through, even though the imaging lab was in no way at fault for the mess. How about that! There still are good-hearted people out there who respond to a patient's needs, not to money. I could hardly believe it. God bless her.

Mine was written up with no dye. I have no idea how they decide that, but I didn't have the dye injections.

Boy, ain't that the truth!

Wow, you guys are weird. My mom always found our food at the supermarket.

Looks like a very well designed and engineered kit. A lot of time went into this one. My only negative comment would be that while a nice idea in theory, the defroster lines look heavy-handed and way out of scale. Would have been better to just engrave thinner lines into the glass and leave it at that.

There's gotta be an easier way to make a buck. Whatever happened to good old fashioned purse snatching?

The Sciatica alone is killing me. I can't even imagine adding shingles pain to that. Wow. I hope you have gotten over both.

I googled it. I see where you are... way down south. As far as giving each guy his own ball... don't they already have two of their own?

Bill... yeah, they asked if I wanted to hear music during the scan. But with how loud the machine is, I would have needed Metallica or something like that going full blast to mask the MRI noise! And to tell ya the truth, I prefer the MRI noise to Metallica!

Un-freaking-believable how loud the thing is! I assumed the thing is silent, like an X-ray. But I tell ya, laying in that tube with the surface right in your face and and all the banging and clanging can really freak you out. I tried to think about other stuff to keep my mind occupied, but it didn't work. I just had to lay there until it was over.

No, they gave me a CD. I have to follow up with the orthopedist and the CD.

Richard... that is a very cool garage diorama!

Ok... I tried building the chains today and quickly discovered that it's impossible! The way they designed the parts, the individual links are spaced out in a line on little individual parts trees. You stack them in the correct order (four layers) and then you're supposed to do the "flatten down the extending pin with heat" thing. Problem is, at 1/12 scale, it's impossible to heat those tiny extended pins enough to flatten them without also "merging" them into the faces of the links themselves. And that being the case, when you cut the links free from the trees, the chain wouldn't be flexible, and would break in a million places as you tried to shape it around the sprockets. The individual chain links, in 1/12 scale, are just too thin to withstand the "flatten by heat" method. Impossible to do. So I'm going with Plan B: Plastic chain and matching sprockets from Grandt Line. The chain is designed so that you just snap the links together to form any length of chain you need. I found chain and sprocket sizes that are not quite exactly the same as the model parts, but very close... the difference should be invisible to the casual viewer. Not exactly cheap (the amount of chain I need plus the four sprockets comes to almost $30), but it will work, and look good. This is the way the kit chains should have been engineered! http://www.grandtline.com/products/mrr/mrr details/transmission_components_sprockets.html

How close are you to Rio? Are you going to see any of the Olympics?

Some of you may know that I have been diagnosed with Sciatica (severe pain in the sciatic nerve, which runs from the bottom of the spine down each leg). The pain can be intense... it'll completely shut you down at its worst. So the doc ordered an MRI so he could get a look inside and try to see exactly what the problem is. Well, for those of you who don't know what an MRI is, MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It's sort of like an X-ray, but where an X-ray shows your bones, an MRI shows your soft tissue. Again, for those who don't know what an MRI is, lemme tell ya... it's creepy! You lay flat on your back and then they slide you into a tube that completely surrounds you. But the surface of the tube is like 3-4 inches from your face. Very claustrophopic! Then you have to lay perfectly still for 20 minutes as the thing makes all kinds of loud noises... sometimes it sounds like a jackhammer, sometimes like some sort of weird machine. It makes a whole lot of different noises constantly. In fact, the noises it makes are so loud they give you noise-canceling headphones to wear, but even with the headphones on, the sounds were really loud. I can't imagine how loud that thing is without the headphones! Anyway, between laying in that tube that's literally 3-4 inches from your face, having to lay absolutely still for 20 minutes, and all the noises, it's pretty hard not to get a little nervous. But I got through it. Wouldn't ever want to do that again, though.

Tulio! Wow! You wired the engine!!!! That is an absolutely beautiful model of an absolutely beautiful car, one of the best looking big Fords ever.