Harry P.

RIT dye comes with instructions. Basically you add a specific amount of the dye to a specific amount of water and bring to a boil. Let the water cool a bit (you don't want to put the kit glass into boiling water!)... then just put the kit glass into the RIT/water mix. The longer you leave it in there, the more obvious and darker the tint. Sort of like dying Easter eggs!

Of course, the one drawback to tinting the glass with paint is the chance you'll get some dust or crud on the glass. You can use RIT fabric dye to tint the windows with no chance of getting any dust or crud on the glass.

Not me. I bought my first Pocher kit at Sharper Image (remember them?). This was long before ebay.

The Alfa Spider is actually one of the easier Pocher classics to build. The various Rolls Royce and Bugattis are the toughest, the Mercedes kits next, then the Alfas, and the '07 Fiat GP car the easiest.

Beautiful!

Cool!

Tim... don't know. I'll have to look into it, now that Scott has called my bluff!

I use one of my daughter's bedrooms as the "museum." She is an adult and has long ago gone out on her own, so I'm not taking anything away from her! Just basic shelving units with glass doors to keep out some of the dust. Nothing fancy.

Point taken!

Nice early Beetle. Love the "sickle" bumper guards, which didn't last long in production!

And there it is! It all depends on what your modeling interests are. If you are happy building the latest 1/24 or 1/25 scale kits from AMT, Revell, Moebius, etc... then you can enjoy the hobby relatively cheaply, especially with those 40% off Hobby Lobby coupons. But... if your modeling interests lie outside of the "mainstream" type of kits, like mine do, you're going to have to pay to play, big time! 1/8 scale Pocher kits ain't cheap. And the prices are rising all the time as the number of pristine, unbuilt kits continues to dwindle. There is no such thing as a Pocher reissue, folks. So while many of you would consider $25-40 bucks a reasonable price for a kit, I have to deal with prices in the $500-2,000 range. But even with those insane prices, I feel it's worth it. No model kit can possibly give you the satisfaction, the challenge, and yes, the frustration, than a Pocher kit. They are the ultimate "modeler's high."

Now we come to a real problem. The real car's body has dozens and dozens of rivets visible, connecting all the various body panels. Maybe hundreds in all. The kit body does have these rivets molded in, but they are so small and so tiny that they would be completely lost under a coat or two of paint. In fact, they are almost invisible on the bare plastic body! So the question is... do I spend hours and hours and hours of my life... time I can never get back... drilling out each individual rivet and replacing them all with brass pins that will actually be visible? Or do I just let it go and let all the other detail of the kit carry the weight, and forget about the rivets. Thoughts?

I used the same techniques on the replacement firewall that I used to create the floorboards... BTW... how ironic that a firewall is made of... wood!

I wasn't trying to say your technique isn't a good one... just saying that there is a much simpler way... BMF! Glad to know yo think I'm funny and not trying to dis you, because that wasn't my intent.

Beautiful model! But you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by getting a can of automotive vinyl spray paint. That's the stuff they use on 1:1 interiors as a much cheaper alternative to reupholstery.

Carl, the Goodwill store here has a huge selection of flatscreen TVs. Might be worth looking into.

I use Rustoleum "Specialty Metallic" #1937830 Metallic Copper, comes in an 11 0z. can. I don't remember what it cost; I bought it several years ago to use on my 1911 Christie pumper..

Ok...here's the question everyone wants to ask but is probably afraid to... Why use a complicated, multi-step, hard to learn technique like this, where you need special talents and tools, need to be able to paint the size in perfectly straight lines, and need to be able to handle the very delicate sheets of leaf which only come in small 3x3 sheets (so you can't do the side trim on a 1/25 scale model in one piece)... instead of just using good old BMF, which requires no special tools or talent, and which anybody can learn to do in about five minutes, with results as good as, or better, than your technique? It's like you're building a deck and you're one 2x4 short. You could go to the nursery and buy a sapling, take it home and plant it in your yard, keep it watered, wait about 20 years for it to grow into a mature tree, then hire some landscapers to cut down the tree and cut the trunk into an 8 foot section, then take that piece of the trunk to a local sawmill and have them cut you a 2x4 out of it, then put the 2x4 into a kiln and wait a few weeks until the water content is down to 15%, and presto! There's your 2x4. Or you could go to Home Depot and buy one.

I like everything about it except the blue headlights.

Once I had the floorboards trimmed, I laid out the positions of each brass nail and drilled a hole for each... I think I was able to improve on the kit pieces...

As you can see, the real car has wooden floorboards, and they aren't exactly super precise as far as fit between the individual boards... And this is what passes for "wooden" floorboards in the kit... Obviously this will never do. As I always say, "nothing looks more like real wood than real wood," so I cut a bunch of strips of basswood and stained them. I used the kit floorboards as a template to cut a new piece out of thin cardboard... The wooden floorboards were then glued to the cardboard base... Next I will trim the boards along the edges of the cardboard base, and add the brass nail heads to each board.

After I finished the chassis, it looked sort of "blah" to me... so I took off the front and rear suspensions and wrapped the springs for a little more visual interest and detail. There are several stories as to why they used to wrap the springs... to keep them quiet, to keep grit from getting in between the leaves, etc. Some cars, like Rolls Royce, had leather "gaiters" that completely covered the leaf springs. So since the real car has them wrapped, my model now does, too. The wrapping is heavy-duty carpet thread that I detailed with a wash of acrylics...

And I fully expect to see progress photos! It would be nice to add another Pocher builder to our little club... sometimes I feel pretty lonely...

Not a good topic to discus here.

Forget this stuff and get yourself a spray can of Spaz Stix. You won't be sorry.