Harry P.

He wasn't even born yet when that song was originally written and recorded. A lot of kids who hear songs on soundtracks or in commercials or whatever have no idea that those songs can sometimes be older than they are!

Too bad you don't post on forums. We could always use more work of this caliber.

Is this for real?

Actually from the late '60s...

If you can't see it... I don't do it.

I have two. Maxwell Street Polish in Chicago... Or Jane Krakowski...

That's wax, not polish.

My guess... 1/25 scale motorcycles would sell in pretty limited numbers. And that's where the dreaded licensing costs rear their ugly head. Harley, for one, it notorious about protecting their name and image... they would probably charge a lot to license scale model kits of their bikes. I know there are large-scale Harley kits, but maybe the economics don't work for 1/25 scale?

If I have time, I'll dig out my Sedanca tomorrow and shoot some pix of what I've done with the body. You know, since a picture is worth 1,000 words and all...

Yeah, it wasn't pretty if you're a Bears fan... At one point in this debacle, New England scored three TDS.... in less than a minute! But hey! At least the Bears seat a team record! Most points allowed in a half... in team history! If you're going to be bad, you might as well be record-setting bad!

There's a shelf behind the seats, and a trunk goes on that shelf. When that trunk is there, the seats go practically right up against that trunk and you can't see the seat backs.

That's what I mean, That "latch" is leather.

I'm a HUGE Springsteen fan. And I agree his early stuff doesn't "do it" for me. My all-time favorite albums of his: Darkness on the Edge of Town number 1... The River at 2... maybe Nebraska at 3... Tunnel of Love at 4... Human Touch/Lucky Town ( I consider them one album) at 5. Anything later is hit and miss, although he always has a good song or two or three on most every album. But to me, he was definitely at his peak between Darkness and Human Touch/Lucky Town. That was a pretty impressive string of albums. One of my all-time favorite songs of his that most people don't know: Something in the Night. That song still gives me goosebumps after all these years... PS: Agree on TP. Very consistent over the years, tons of great songs, and Mike Campbell is a great second banana.

Skip... those latches on the door panel pockets... do you think they were leather tabs? Or would those have been chrome-plated pieces?

Moving on to the seats... I added the missing seat piping detail by using suoer glue to glue thin solder all along the seat cushion edges. I used solder instead of wire because solder is so much softer and easy to shape. Now I can go ahead and paint the seats and add the chrome side legs/tilt mechanisms (parts that are included in the kit).

Yes, that's pretty much what I was thinking.

The "problem" with Springsteen is that he's such a prolific song writer that he always had a lot of "leftovers" after recording his albums. A bunch of songs that eventually appeared on "Born in the USA" were actually written during the sessions for "Darkness on the Edge of Town," a bunch of songs that appeared on "The River" were actually leftovers that didn't make it onto previous albums, etc. He always has way more songs "in the tank" than he needs to fill an album. BTW... "Nebraska" was initially supposed to be recorded with the full E-Street Band, just like any "typical" Springsteen album... what he recorded were actually the demos for the band to hear and learn to play... but those "demos" ultimately were released as the final album. And oddly enough, a lot of people think "Nebraska," which in its recorded form was never meant to be released as is, think that it's one of his best, if not the best, album!

Fast forward… the upper door panels were sanded, the top edge rounded over, stained, and "varnished" with several coats of Future. The lower panels were painted brown, given a black wash, and finally a shot of matte acrylic. The "chrome" trim is beading wire from Hobby Lobby. I still don't know how the door pulls will look, or exactly where they will be placed. I'll have to think about that...

Ok... back to the door panels. I used the upper parts that I removed as templates to make new pieces. I couldn't use the same birch plywood as I used for the dash, because the top edges of these panels are visible, and plywood would show that "plywood" edge... so I used a piece of solid basswood instead:

There was some pretty "iffy" engineering on the Pocher "Classics," the Sedanca probably the very worst of all due to the oddball way they engineered the body to floorboard to chassis assembly. But when you consider the complexity of the kits and the huge number of parts (the "Star of India" RR has, I believe, more than 2,600 parts), they are actually pretty amazing. And the "new" Pocher has 21st century engineering and technology available to it that the Pocher guys back in the '60s never had.

"Well I laughed… half the way to Tokyo. I dreamt I was Surfer Joe. And what that means, I don't know."

Is that "Because the Night" by Springsteen? "Desire and hunger is the fire I breathe" sounds right, but the rest of it seems different...

Maybe I can dig it out tomorrow (after the Bears game!)... And yeah... I did scribe that roof off with my X-acto. It took a while, but there's no better way to do it that I can think of. PS... a side benefit of building the body using my technique is that you can grind off those big old bosses on the inside of the roof. I know, they really can't be seen once the model is done, but just them being there bugged me!

Well, I did this all a long time ago, so it's a little fuzzy... but what I basically did is to scribe the roof panels off the body sides with the back side of my X-acto. Then I built the roof into one solid piece, to be covered by fabric and installed last. The now roofless body side panels will need a new way to assemble them and a way for the roof to attach. What I did is use sheet styrene to laminate new interior surfaces inside the body panels behind the rear of the doors and on the back piece, incorporating a system of "tongue and groove" vertical joints that will give me a way to solidly glue the body sides to the rear panel (by running liquid cement into the tongue and groove joints). Also, the new interior panels rise up slightly higher than the edge where the roof was attached, giving me a "lip" all around the body that I can glue the roof onto as the last step of body assembly. Of course, all of this trickery will be hidden by the rear seat. The floor board, as I remember, if built according to Pocher, doesn't actually touch the top of the frame rails. I remember mocking up the chassis. floorboards, body, and rear fenders, making sure everything was positioned so that the rear fenders were centered over the rear axle front to back... and checking how much of a gap there was between the tops of the frame rails and the bottom of the floorboard. I used strips of basswood as spacers... I roughed up the top of the frame rails and the wooden spacers with a Dremel grinding bit, epoxied the spacer strips to the tops of the frame rails, then roughed up the tops of the spacer strips and the bottom of the floorboard within the area that would be in contact with the spacer strips, and epoxied the floorboard onto the top of those spacer strips. Now I had the floorboard solidly connected to the frame, and I can go on to installing the body sides and rear center panel and gluing those together, then adding the seats, and when everything is finished, gluing the roof in place last. I don't remember exactly how I was going to solidly mount the body sides to the floorboards (aside from the Pocher screws), but I know I had it worked out. I would have to dig out the kit and look at it... it would probably all come back to me regarding what I had planned to do as far as connecting the body sides to the floorboard. What really brought all of this re-engineering work on, aside from the flimsy way the body would have been attached to the chassis, was the fact that I had wanted to cover the roof with real leather or fabric... and leaving things the "Pocher way" would have made that impossible to do because of how they engineered the way the body sides and roof go together. It's much easier to "upholster" the roof as a one-piece unit, apart from the body. I suppose it's possible to upholster the roof sides and the roof center panel separately, then assemble the body the "Pocher way," but that would mean upholstering the roof side panels while they are attached to what would be the final painted body sides. Too much chance of messing up the body paint trying to add a covering to the roof if it was still attached to the body.

I make my share of mistakes. I just don't report them all... For example... I put the rear brake rod linkage on upside down. In my defense, I was following the kit instructions. Even though it looked weird to me, and I thought it shouldn't be that way, I checked and double-checked the illustrations and followed them. Sure looked odd. Then I looked at some reference photos of the real car and saw that yes, I had done it wrong (the instructions are wrong). So I undid everything and put it all back together the right way.