Harry P.

If they were on the road, they obviously were road-worthy, legally... unless the guy was driving it illegally, in which case he is wrong to do so.

He sent in renderings, sometimes also elevation views, but he did not "design" the actual kits. He came up with the idea of the car and illustrations of how it should look, the engineers did the rest.

Wow. This topic has sure strayed from the original question posed... I said way back when, many pages ago, that a lot of these "rat rods" or whatever you want to call them, are not built with the intention of being safe, sane, practical, or even operational modes of transportation. They are built as sculpture, they are made to look at, they are expressions of the builder's creativity. They were never meant to be daily drivers! To take offense at these cars is silly... they are what they are, and you either like them or you don't, but I don't see where all this anger comes from. If a guy wants to take an eclectic collection of parts and throw them together to create his vision, who are we to say he's "wrong?" Norman Rockwell created photographically realistic paintings, going to great lengths to pose models in exacting ways and taking the time to get every detail correct and to make his image look as much like reality as he could. Jackson Pollock threw paint at a canvas. Both are considered artists, despite the fact that the paintings they created (and how they went about creating them) were about as polar opposite as you can get. A fan of Rockwell might look at a Pollock canvas and say "You call that art? A monkey could do that" A Pollock fan might look at a Rockwell painting and sneer at its "banality" or mock Rockwell's idealized vision of America. But in the end, they are both artists. They just created different art. Know what I mean?

Exactly! When you pull into the gas station, do you expect them to give you the gas at no charge? When you go grocery shopping, do you expect every item to be free? Ebay isn't a charity! It's a business, and like any business, the goal is to make a profit. Why would you expect them to host and maintain this huge website, with the enormous amount of "behind the curtain" work that's involved in providing the site and facilitating thousands of transactions every single day... and give you that all for free???? That's insane. Ebay has every right to charge fees in order to make a profit. Every auction charges fees, plus a big chunk of the selling price. Why would you expect ebay to provide you with this service for free? Calling it "feebay" makes as much sense as calling it "evilbay." Ebay provides a service. They charge for that service. If you think you can do better elsewhere, go ahead! As far as I'm concerned, there's no better auction site than ebay.

Firemen don't care what's behind them, only what's in front of them. No windshield, either. No A/C, no cruise control, not even heated seats! Those guys had to rough it back then! (although I think they kept a bottle of scotch in one of the storage bins...)

Send me a PM.

http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=81960

Finished truck is "Under Glass." Except for the crew... still have to do them.

This is a 1/16 scale 1914 Dennis fire truck. Lots of scratchbuilt parts, including the ladders (made of real wood) and many other details added. Thanks to Dan Baker for the "spare," and Charlie Rowley for the custom decals. WIP here if you're interested.

That is one sharp looking RR! Very cool!

I applied the custom decals today. Thanks, Charlie! Tomorrow, on to "Under Glass!"

I think you're right. So many of us have seen so much video after the fact that we think we remember it from the day it happened. All I can specifically remember from that day is sitting in class when the teacher told us what happened. For some very odd reason, I distinctly remember that the sun was shining very brightly into our classroom and making shadows on the wooden floor. I have no idea why I remember that little snippet so vividly, but other than that, I can't remember anything from that day. I don't even remember if school let out early or not.

Does she celebrate the 4th of July in April?

East Dakota is looking good to me lately...

Why?

No offense, but can we do one holiday at a time? Can we at least get through Thanksgiving before we start the "Merry Christmas" thing? Seriously. The bell ringers are already standing outside store doors here. It's still a week before Thanksgiving.

The name?

I've been watching a lot of Kennedy specials, there have been quite a few lately... NOVA, American Experience, etc. Still not sure if I believe the Warren Commission. It's possible Oswald acted alone, but there are so many plausible "conspiracy theories" out there... BTW, the new movie "Killing Kennedy," with Rob Lowe as JFK, was on NatGeo a week or two ago. Very good movie. Obviously the movie concentrated on Oswald much more than Kennedy, but fascinating stuff, especially if you're not familiar with Oswald and what he was doing back in those days.

First grade. I vaguely remember Mrs. McElroy telling us what happened, but don't remember much else about that day.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I might have to tone those down a bit. I might go over them with some thinned down white. The good thing is, they don't glue in place, they just lay there on the racks, so I can still work on them.

And blaming ebay for that, as I've seen some people do, makes about as much sense as blaming your car if you get pulled over for speeding.

That opt out lingo I posted was taken right off one of those "targeted to your previous views and preferences" emails... I think that's the kind of thing you were talking about?

Once I had enough length of hose made, I painted the hoses with a 50/50 mix of Future and Elmer's Glue. That was to seal the gaps between the spirals of wire and make the hose look as if it was all one piece. Then I painted the hoses with white acrylic craft paint and added a black wash to dirty them up a bit and make them look used. I also opened up the hose connectors (they are molded closed) and added my scratchbuilt strainer to the end of the longest hose:

Back in the early 1900s, firemen couldn't always rely on a pressurized fire hydrant being available nearby when called to fight a fire. Often they had to pump water from the closest available source, like a pond or stream, especially in rural or semi-rural locations. The end of the "suction hose" that was placed into the water source (to be sucked up by the truck's pump) had a strainer/sieve device on the end, to keep fish or other general gunk from being sucked into the hose. The kit provided this strainer, but the holes in it were not open, just vaguely molded in. I replaced the kit part by scratchbuilding my own by cutting off the the kit part's cap and end piece, and adding fine fiberglass screen and brass wire. Kit part on the left, my version on the right: The kit hoses were a problem, because they were molded in halves lengthwise... which meant a seam all along the entire length that would have been very tedious to try and sand off. The seam would become even more visible after I blackwashed the hoses: So I decided to scratchbuild new hoses. I took a wooden dowel and wrapped insulated speaker wire around it to create the new hoses. I pulled the wooden dowel out and added a little "sag" to parts of the hoses so they would look a little less stiff when placed on the racks:

At the bottom of the emails I get from them: "eBay Inc. sent this e-mail to you at xxxxxxxxxxxx because your Notification Preferences indicate that you want to receive general email promotions. If you do not wish to receive further communications like this, please click here to unsubscribe." Problem solved...