Harry P.

That Javelin looks awesome. But keep in mind that's a factory-stock Javelin, with only aftermarket wheels to "update" it. (No telling what's under the skin, bit by outward appearances it's a stock Javelin). My point being... that muscle cars looked fantastic straight out of the factory!

Actually it was finished about a week ago... just now got around to taking pictures.

I'm jealous! I love woodworking, but never had the space to set up a proper shop. (But I did build my deck. )

Maybe if you thought it out a bit more and didn't just throw them all into a box all on top of each other like that, they would have survived in better shape...

210HP and 12MPG? Geez... can't you do better than that?

Beautiful work! Nothing looks more like real metal than real metal. Your scratchbuilding/machining skills are amazing!

Wow. Very nice. You really have some talent. I'm going to guess that you also built the deck...

Still not done. I'll try and take a few new photos over the weekend.

There are endless variations on that basic joke... Asking a blonde if she's heard the latest blonde joke, asking an Irishman if he's heard the latest Irish joke, etc. All with the same punch line... "Oh, ok, I'll tell it really slowly."

This is the Entex 1/16 scale 1905 Rolls-Royce 15HP, one of the very first Rolls-Royce cars. Henry Royce had built his first car, the Royce 10, in 1904. Charles Rolls was the owner of an early motorcar dealership, C.S. Rolls and Co. When he saw the Royce 10, he was so impressed with the car that he told Henry Royce that his dealership would take as many cars as Royce could deliver, and he would sell them badged as "Rolls-Royce." The next year they formally partnered, and Rolls-Royce was born. That first year of "official" Rolls-Royce cars (1905), there were four models, a 10HP 2-cyliner car, a 15HP 3-cylinder car (this model), a 20HP 4-cylinder car, and the top-of-the-line 30HP 6-cylinder car. This model is similar to the Mercer I posted recently as far as detail goes… it's well detailed in some ways, and incredibly simplified in others. For example, the engine. The whole top half of the engine is one single piece, with a handful of parts that get added… but the engine looks very crude and poorly detailed. So much so that I decided not to bother trying to detail it. I glued the hood shut on this one. However, I did add a lot of other detail to the kit. The running board and fender brackets were very thin and flimsy, so I replaced them all with scratchbuilt ones made of brass rod. I also sanded down the interior side of the firewall and added a real wood dashboard, made of birch veneer that I stained and varnished. The windshield frame is also scratchbuilt of real wood to replace the kit piece. The windshield "gasket" is made of Evergreen U-channel, and the windshield was cut from a sheet of thin Lexan using the kit piece as a template (the kit windshield was way too thick and had swirls in the plastic that could not be polished out). The rear-view mirror was also scratchbuilt of styrene, brass rod, and thin sheet aluminum (cut from a pie pan!). The seats have a typical "diamond tufted" pattern, but the molded-in buttons were so small and faint that they were basically invisible, so I drilled out each one with a pin vise and used sewing pins to replace them. The molded plastic convertible top was improved in several ways. First, going by my reference photos, i used a pin vise to drill out holes for each brass fastener that holds the top material to the top bows. I sanded the top to scuff up the surface (inside and out), then applied wood stain to the top and wiped it off, leaving enough on the top to give it a more dimensional look. When the stain was dry, I used fine sandpaper to remove some of the stain from the high points to further accent the top. Finally the top was sprayed with flat clear to get rid of any shine from the stain. The fasteners that connect the top to the bows are tiny brass nails left over from a wooden ship kit (they're actually the nails you use to fasten the hull planking!). I also made new top bows by soaking strips of basswood overnight, then bending each bow over a form to get the correct bends. Once dry, each bow was stained, varnished, and glued to the underside of the top. I cut off the lower parts of the kit-supplied top bows, painted them gloss black, and glued them to my scratchbuilt wooden bows. I also drilled out holes along the lower edge of the top at the back and used slightly larger, round head brass nails to represent the fasteners that attach the top to the body. And the straps that run between the front of the top and the frame rails are made of painted strips of masking tape, with "hardware" scratchbuilt of brass wire. The tool boxes on the running boards are also made of real wood, stained and varnished, to replace the plastic kit pieces. The belts are masking tape and the hardware is brass wire. As far as the wild color scheme… I was going to paint the model a very "proper" and respectable dark green, but I thought the car needed a little more pizzazz… so I went with a red chassis, wheels and undersides of the fenders. It may not be a "typical" Rolls-Royce color scheme, but I like it! Paint is Rustoleum Hunter Green and Gloss Red. There were a few problems along the way… some due to the kit itself and poor engineering, and some were self-inflicted, like my decision to make the fender brackets out of brass rod. It took a lot of tedious trial and error to get the brackets bent to the right shape to hold the fenders in the correct position. Also, by replacing the kit's top bows with scratchbuilt wooden ones, getting the pivot points of the top bows to match up with the holes on the sides of the seats was a real pain… but I like the look of the real wood bows.

That would be great! I appreciate it. There's no hurry... this is something that I want to do soon, but it's not as if it's some sort of priority. Next week would be great.

Will do, thanks!

BTW... the reason for this fairly arcane question in the first place is that I want to do a working top in 1/8 scale... and I want it to look correct.

In the photo above, that "snap rail" can't possibly be the same sort of thing that we've been talking about, because it doesn't extend to the pivot point on the body side, just aft of the door. It almost looks like the snaps are attached to the seat upholstery in some way. Or that rail is a piece that attaches somehow to the body?

Thanks Brett. That answers it perfectly.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went camping. As night fell, they pitched their tent and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes Watson. "Watson... look up and tell me what you see." Watson looks up and replies, "I see a sky filled with stars." "And what can you deduce from your observation?," Holmes asks. "What does that mean to you?" Watson stares skyward for a few moments, deep in thought. "Well, I'd say that the proliferation of stars would suggest that perhaps at least some of them may be similar to our sun, and they may have planets orbiting them, as our sun does... and that there may be a possibility of life on some of those planets," Watson replies. "No, you idiot!," exclaims Homes. "It means that someone has stolen our tent!"

A lady carrying a baby boards a city bus, and while she's paying her fare, the driver says "Geez, lady. That is the ugliest baby I've ever seen!" The woman gives the driver a dirty look and storms off down the aisle, and she finds a seat near the back of the bus and sits down next to a man. After a few moments of silent fuming, the lady can't keep quiet anymore. "You wouldn't believe what that rude driver said to me when I got on the bus!," she exclaimed. The man replies, "Don't let him get away with it. You should go back up there and give him a piece of your mind! Go ahead... I'll hold your monkey"...

Two blonde hunters are walking along in the woods when suddenly one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing, so the other blonde hunter whips out his cell phone and calls 911. "Help! My friend collapsed and he's not breathing and I think he's dead!," the hunter says frantically. "Calm down, sir. Let's not panic. First you have to make sure he's really dead," replies the 911 operator. The operator doesn't get a reply, only silence. After a few seconds, he hears the sound of a gunshot, and the hunter comes back on the line. The hunter says "Ok... now what do I do?"

He's currently working on a series of features for the magazine. You'll be seeing a lot of him in the near future!

Ok, I watched the video (thanks, Brett) and I see now how the fabric of the top is snapped to that "snap rail" at the back, and I see how all the top bows pivot at that one point on the body. But when the top is up, what holds that snap rail down tight against the body? Just gravity? It just sort of rests there on the body?

A lady goes to a pet shop to buy a parrot. She asks the shop owner for a parrot that can talk, so the shop owner sets her up with one of his talking parrots, but warns the lady that the parrot has an attitude. "No problem," the lady says. "As long as he can talk, that's all that matters." But once the lady gets the parrot home, he won't say a word. "Can you talk?," the lady asks the parrot. Silence. "Can you talk???!!!!," the lady asks again, slightly exasperated. Silence. Now the lady is steamed and thinks the shop owner ripped her off. "CAN YOU TALK?," she yells at the parrot at the top of her lungs. The parrot looks at the lady with a sneer. "Yeah, I can talk. Can you fly?"

A blonde was driving down the road when she sees another blonde, off to the side of the road, standing in the middle of a corn field with an oar, pretending to be rowing. The blonde in the car pulls over and yells to the blonde in the field: "Hey! It's dumb blondes like you who give all of us blondes a bad name! If I knew how to swim, I'd come over there and smack you!"

Hint: It's ugly.

Amateurs.

I never considered doing standup comedy... Q: Why was the blonde staring at the can of frozen orange juice? A: Because it said "Concentrate" on the package.