Bugatti Fan

Bach's Tocatta being given some welly on a big cathedral pipe organ !

Super Bowl looks like a form of Rugby but played in armour to me !

an impatient diner

Maybe time to get 'The Donald' on postal service case. !! Lol. Our UK post office is gradually going from already bad to a darned site worse. We have First Class letter post that one has to pay a premium rate stamp for, and a Second Claxs that should in theory take longer. The whole thing is a joke! No matter what you pay there is no guarantee what will get where first. Our post office delivers more advertising junk mail to us than proper mail.

There are many products that black washes can be made from. A number having already been described on here. Revell's Aquacolour has not been mentioned yet. They include some shades of black too and thin well with water. Getting away from washes, their Anthracite shade is really good for simulating the look of rubber mats in car models. Back to washes again, I have also used thinned artists acrylics from their various black shades and Paynes Grey. Some artists acrylics are available in liquid form in small bottles, presumably for airbrush work. Come to think of it artists waterproof inks could be used as a wash for filling in on grilles etc. Proprietary dedicated washes can work out to be quite expensive when compared to making up some of your own. This applies to colour washes for other stuff too like weathering for example. Acrylics dry quite quickly, so going over the high spots with a cotton wool straight after should work to remove any unwanted excess.

Another nice one taking shape here Matt.

Could not agree more Ace. I was an apprentice back in the 60's at a pump manufacturer. No NC or CNC machines back then. The most valuable thing I learned from that experience was getting a 'feel' for how different metals machined as we used to work on Stainless, Mild Steel, Gun Metal, Cast Iron, Aluminium, Brass and White Metal Lined Bearings. No substitute for using manually operated lathes, mills, borers and drills first off that will give invaluable experience to those young engineers before being let loose on CNC equipment. Nowadays I have a small lathe, bench drill, toggle press and milling machine for my model making. Enjoy using all to make stuff. Having used 3D CAD before retiring I have no desire to sit at a PC knocking out designs to be made on a 3D printer. Don't get me wrong as I admire the things that can be made by that process and the programmer's skills in designing them. Call me old fashioned, but I like the actual 'feel' of physically working in metals, woods and plastics and get more satisfaction model making the old school way.

Must admit I am a bit sceptical. But then again have not had any personal paranormal experiences of seen aliens or UFO's either.

Back in the 70's I was taught to program numerically controlled sheet metal punching and nibbling machines. Thinking back one had to be able to develop sheet metal parts from drawings of already formed up components into the flat. Work out the tool paths using offsets to the tool centre lines using trigonometry. Once that was done the program for the m machine had to be written in machine code and finally typed on a machine that punched the codes into either paper or Mylar one inch side tape. Now a machine program can be produced directly from a 3D CAD file and run through a processor to develop the part, and produce a program in code for the relevant CNC machine. Certainly takes all the slog of developing and code programming away. Shortly before retiring I worked in a local high school that had some small CNC lathes and milling machines. The screen always showed the lines of machine code being worked at the top. Often the students would ask what it was and when I explained to them what the M and G codes actually meant and did gave them a better appreciation of what the computer was doing for them. They were amazed when I explained to them how NC machines were all programmed in code many years before and how I did it for a living back then.

You obviously don't watch 'Help, my house is haunted', watch programmes on TV about aliens or the unexplained Slusher, so would you really feel comfortable about staying alone overnight in a building generally known to be haunted by a malevolent presence ?

Very impressive duo Thomas !

Really taking shape now.

Nice to see models of standard small commercials that have been around the block a bit. Very nice build here. Captures the clapped out look well.

Ace just about sums it all up ! Good quality skilled craftsmen and women gain their skills through years of practice, dedication and the right attitude. Seen it all. The know it all guys fresh out of university who may have a degree and still wet behind the ears who over value themselves, when in reality they are just starting out in the real world but still don't have the intelligence to realise that !

Not a lot !

I recently treated myself to a Micro Table Top Circular Saw. Originally I was looking at the Novel Life saw on Amazon. I found quite a number of them that were of absolutely identical specification but sold under other brand names at various prices. And of course there were other makes of micro sass on Amazon too. Currently working on a model that necessitates a lot of accurate wood cutting of panels and strips etc. It has saved me hours of work of sawing by hand. I have tried cutting plastic sheet and extrusions, aluminium tubing and clear acetate. One has to remember that the motors on these machines are designed for light work and ideal for model making, dolls house and craft type work. Cannot understand why I did not get one years ago.

More good info from you about the rig wheels Hakan. I see you are in Sweden. Visited Stockholm once some years ago and as my other interest is historical ships so I made sure I visited the Vasa Museum. An incredible experience !

A really lovely scale old timer model !

Haken. From your very last post you have shared a great deal of information to would be builders of the Duel rig about various items so that they can source the parts and make a model for more correct and accurate than my ancient old build ! You mentioned having difficulty in obtaining front wheels. I read somewhere that someone else building the Duel Rig obtained them from an AMT Fire Engine kit. You will have to check if that info is correct or not. I look forward to seeing your Duel rig some time in the future. With all the information and parts you have sourced it will probably be the definitive scale model of this subject. Funnily enough, this thread reminded me of a Disney attraction in Florida named Catastrophe Canyon I took the kids over to Florida when they were still at school in the late nineties and saw that attraction.There was a full sized tanker trailer pained black that tilted over amongst a lot of flames etc. It actually looked like one of the Duel rigs, a needle nose Pete with that distinctive trailer. Maybe pure coincidence ! Or did Disney deliberately put a replica of the Duel rig up as it would be recognisable as a movie prop ? Things change at Disney, so maybe that attraction has been replaced since. Anyone on here remember that attraction and have a photo of the rig used? I am only going by memory !

That made really interesting reading Hakan. As you have demonstrated, you know far more about the rig than I do. Looking at that side view of the real thing that you posted I can see what you mean about both the length of the tractor frame and the length of the trailer. That view will certainly help other model makers looking to build the Duel Rig. All the different wheels used is something I learned about from your post. Much easier for someone to produce as 3D prints now. Actually, with the advent of 3D Printing the Duel Rig cries out for someone to develop conversion parts as no manufacturer ever made a full kit in polystyrene of it. This thread just goes to show that you cannot have enough reference material !

Since my last post I read a two page article in the Daily Mail, a British national newspaper. It was all about the wealthy including business people and various celebs holed up in the most expensive hotels in Los Angeles after being advised to evacuate their homes. Still living it up in the lifestyle they are used to. Rich women getting botox and other beauty treatments done discreetly, wining and dining like first class passengers on the Titanic, and feigning faux distress when the reality is they probably have other mansions all over the place to go and live in. A bit of an inconvenience if the mega rich lose a property that they can afford to have rebuilt out of their spare change. They can afford to fiddle in a posh hotel while Rome burns. Not so for normal folk who's one home was their main possession lost in this catastrophe. My sympathy goes out to them more than the mega rich who can recover fast from this. It will be interesting to see how much the mega rich celebs genuinely help others less well off rather than use it as a means for self promotion. Maybe I am being a bit cynical ?

Thanks to the likes guys. Sean. My build was done using sketches I drew up to scale after constantly watching rewinds of an old VHS tape (remember them?). Living in England it was all I had to go by at the time. I built the model in the mid 80's I think using the tape to get a sense of scale. I converted the tractor unit first getting the extended chassis and nose looking right and sort of worked it out from there for the trailer. Accuracy therefore is probably not 100 per cent, but it looked visually ok eventually. Since building the model I have found out that the front wheels from the kit are incorrect. Over this last couple of years I found a set of the Duel rig licence plates on the web to print off and replace my original hand painted ones.

My thoughts go out to all those folks who lost everything, and I mean everything in that devastation, including some poor souls who paid the ultimate price for getting caught up in it all. Rich and influential or just a regular citizen, events like this do not differentiate people by status this has shown. It does not bear thinking about losing all that one has worked for like your family home and those irreplaceable precious pieces of personal family memorabilia lost that cannot be handed down to following generations. Things like this bring out the best and the worst in society. Those who go out of their way to help practically by donating things like shelter, clothing and various items to help others now in dire need through no fault of their own. And then of course the bottom feeders of our society, looters trying to take advantage of other people's misery. The blame game for this utter devastation needs to wait for a while. This tragic event really puts into perspective the heated discussions on this forum about our hobby that pale into total insignificance compared to the magnitude of something like this disaster.

A few pictures of my Duel Rig. AMT California Hauler modified and scratch built tanker trailer. Imagine seeing this in your rear view mirror ! Hope you like them.

Having looked at quite a number of various different subject scale model themed videos on YouTube. Many of them appear to be more about where the emphasis tends to be more about the presenter (look at me and what I do) to gain likes and enough views to gain some sort of super modeller cult status when turning out some quite mediocre models. Don't get me wrong, there is some superb stuff out out there on YouTube like the A4 Garage videos for example that are well worth taking the time to view that one can actually really learn something from. But there is also a lot of dross out there like videos of box openings (boring!). How many box openings does one need to look at? Also many reviews that lack substance or any real criticism in their content, presumably to keep the free kits rolling in. One gets the impression that many of those so called reviews are nothing more than PR for manufacturers.