Mike999

Really good panel shading and great overall. Another big fan of the P-39 (and P-63) here. If anybody's wondering, the Accurate Miniatures kit is a re-box of the Eduard P-39. If you're thinking of buying, here's a comparison of the AM/Eduard, Hasegawa and Monogram kits. The Monogram P-39 dates back to 1967, but still holds its own with the newer kits. https://www.jonbius.com/p-39-148-scale-kit-comparison/

This appears to be the version you're looking for, from Carmichael Decals. Currently on eBay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/CF-104-CANADIAN-STARFIGHTER-CAF-I-CAG-CARMICHAEL-DECALS-1-72-/303015201650

Definitely the Rat Roaster. If nothing else gives it away, the guitar does.

MicroScale Decal Sheet #87-938 might work for you. I think they're technically HO scale, but since some of these are intended for the front of a gas station, they're pretty big. If these won't work, plenty of other companies have Mobil (and Texaco) decals. I did a search on "1/48 scale Mobil decals" and found quite a few.

Saw it yesterday. I was hooked while the screen was still black, with the sound of cars coming from all directions. Really good jobs by Damon, Bale and one of my favorite actors, Josh Lucas, as the obnoxious Ford exec Leo Beebe. (Lucas was also great as a raving psychopath in "Wonderland," if you like true-crime movies). It's always easy to nit-pick historical movies, but I thought this one did about the best it could under the circumstances: recreating events from 50 years ago with cars that are very expensive props nowadays. I'm pretty sure I saw an Alfa-Romeo BAT car sitting on a trailer in one quick scene. Now I'm going to read "Go Like Hell" again...

I ordered the Land Rover from Shop4Megastore in the UK. $27.99 with free shipping to the US. https://www.shop4megastore.com/automotive-model-kits/land-rover-series-iii-lwb-124-scale-level-3-revell-model-kit

They sure would be welcome, and you may have found the right path to get them re-issued. Round 2 recently released the Italeri Peterbilt 378 truck kit in an AMT box, discussed in the thread below. A quick search showed that the Italeri '33 Chrysler has also been re-boxed by Academy.

Here's a good conversion project for one of those resin bodies: 1 of 6 Biscaynes built in 1969 with the top of the line 427 L72 engine and M22 Muncie 4-speed. Radio delete and the original spare still in the trunk. A friend's Dad bought a '69 Biscayne new as a work/commute car. It was a Turd Brown 2-door post sedan with three-on-the-tree. IIRC, the only option on it was the 327 engine. https://www.gaaclassiccars.com/vehicles/27937/1969-chevrolet-biscayne-l72

I just went to the local Hobby Lobby and saw a new kit! Well, not exactly new to most of us - the Revell '68 Chevelle SS-396. Those have been around so long, one online vendor was selling them for $16.33 back in July 2019. But I've never seen the kit at this HL before.

I already tried that. It hasn't worked yet. ?

Here's a real Chrysler Fire Power hemi "as installed." It's in a 1952 Imperial with 29,000 original miles, spotted recently at a local car show.

I liked it. I'm glad they didn't take the "Pearl Harbor" approach, with a lousy rom-com grafted onto a war movie. Which is also sort of what the 1976 "Midway" movie did. This "Midway" mostly sticks to real people and events. If you've seen the previews, you already know it covers the Pearl Harbor attack, the Doolittle raid on Tokyo and finally the battles of Coral Sea (very briefly) and Midway. The movie throws in a lot of historical/technical detail about weapons, aircraft etc. All the Midway events are covered: the code-breakers, the desperate search for the fleets on both sides, etc. The famous movie director John Ford was filming on Midway during the attacks, and even that's depicted in a couple of short scenes. Probably the worst thing about it is everybody's gripe, the CGI. Way too many sparkly tracers shooting around, and WWII aircraft didn't zip thru canyons like Star Wars X-Fighters. But I can live with that. On-topic for scale models, sort of: since there are no Douglas Devastator torpedo bombers left in existence, the movie company built a 1:1 scale replica. After filming, Lionsgate donated the replica to the USS Midway museum.

Don't give up yet. After months of reading about the Porsche Tractor in here, I finally gave up and ordered one online. About a week later it showed up in Hobby Lobby. Of course. And you may be covered on the others. I've already bought the BRAT, 78 Dodge PU and '23 T online. So they should show up in HL any day now. ? I had always ignored that '23 T, thinking it was just another variation of the AMT '25 kit. No, it's a totally different kit with a multipart chassis. I have a couple of the '23 T Depot Hacks and am thinking about hot-rodding one.

Interesting. Never used Tamiya #87114 Acrylic Retarder thru an airbrush, but it is really useful for brush-painting Tamiya acrylics. They tend to dry very quickly without it, and leave brush marks. The Retarder smooths out the acrylics and gives them a slower drying time. On various modelling boards, I've read that only one clear paint will not dull Alclad Chrome. That's Alclad's own ALC-600 Aqua Gloss. I recently got a bottle of Aqua Gloss but haven't had a chance to try it out over Chrome yet. One of my more successful experiments was clear-coating a black paint job with about 70% Tamiya Acrylic Gloss Clear, 20% Pledge and 10% alcohol. The clear coat went on smooth and dried quickly to a rock-hard finish.

A very talented builder converted the Jo-Han/X-El '55 Pontiac into a Safari many years ago, in The Other Magazine. IIRC, he also converted a '56 Olds 4-door into a wagon. He used the roof and interior from the AMT '55 Nomad. I have 4 of the old X-El Promo Kits: '56 Pontiac 2-door, '56 Pontiac Star Chief 4-door, '56 DeSoto 4-door and '56 Olds Holiday 4-door. All of those have green tinted glass and no interiors. One Pontiac is in an X-El box stamped "2-dr," but the body inside is a 4-dr.

George Steele: "What kind of a car?" Station Agent: "I couldn't say. I haven't been able to tell one car from another since 1924. They all look alike now, the way they make 'em." From the movie "Crack-Up," made in 1946. A pretty good film noir with Pat O'Brien and Claire Trevor. Turner Classic Movies shows it. I found a mostly built (and glue-bombed) Renwal Packard at a flea market a couple years ago, still in the original box. Notice the dark/light color separation line at the door. That's where the body is split on the model. It's a 2-piece body, upper and lower, molded in Dark and Light Green. The kit engine is a V-12 but looks way undersized IMO. I picked it up because it was fairly cheap and I have delusions of restoring it, some century.

Great job on a kit that's not an easy build.

Definitely a precedent. Many injection-molded, short-run aircraft kits have used vacuformed glass for years. These are mostly from smaller European companies like Azur, Special Hobby, etc. Though as soon as they can afford it, these companies seem to switch to injection-molded clear parts. Here's the really obscure Vultee V-11, a 1/72 scale kit from Azur. It had a huge glass cockpit area, a "flying greenhouse." It also had some flat side and bottom windows, which Azur covered by including clear plastic sheet. Notice it has 4 vacformed canopies. That covers 2 different cockpit configurations, for Brazilian and Turkish aircraft, with a spare for each. The spares are a nice touch, and pretty common for these companies.

Continuing with the Caddy theme..."Gonna ride to your funeral, Daddy, in a black Cadillac." Joyce Green was only 19 yrs old when she cut this awesome piece of rockabilly in 1959. It was her only hit and virtually her only record. She seems to have been influenced by an earlier car song, "Going to Your Funeral in a V-8 Ford." Written by blues singer Buddy Moss and recorded by many artists.

Tom Waits wrote "Ol' 55" about his '55 Cadillac. He also did a pretty funny monologue about it, and buying old cars in general. Since Don Henley had a '55 Chevy, many people thought The Eagles song was about his car. Here's an obscure one: the Darby Sisters, "Go Back to Your Pontiac:"

At least you only have one break in the body. It can probably be fixed by putting a piece of thin sheet plastic under it, glued in with something very strong like 5-Minute Epoxy. And unless you must have an opening hood, gluing the hood in place will add strength to that area. To fix the warping, maybe you can tape the repaired body to the chassis and use the trick of holding it over boiling water. After all that...you still have to cut out most of the roof to use the camper top. Which will make the body very weak and likely to break somewhere else. I found one of these Open Road kits at a flea market once, for a very low price. The body is not broken (yet). But somebody splattered epoxy or something thick and ugly all over one side of it. Whatever that stuff is, it has not come off with alcohol, enamel thinner, lacquer thinner or anything else I've thrown at it. The kit is also missing one curtain, but I can live with that.

Good score! I'm surprised too and hate you. ? I look for AMT Lincoln hardtops all the time on eBay. They're usually very hard to find and expensive. It seems like, for the years '61 thru '64, four or five Lincoln convertible kits come up for every hardtop. The ones with the B-pillar post intact, like yours, seem even harder to find. I'm a geezer, so I remember when AMT Lincoln and Imperial kits were plentiful and cheap. Nobody wanted them. It sure isn't that way any more.

Congratulations! Beautiful baby. Going by the pic, she's probably the only member of the family getting any sleep right now.

Nice Deutz! That one's on the Buy List. I built the Porsche and it was fun. These are simple kits but have plenty of room for extra detailing and weathering. Somebody in here built the Porsche tractor and painted it a beautiful gloss dark blue. That got me to thinking about different colors for these tractors. Maybe a tractor used at a regional German airport in the 1950s, painted blue with "Lufthansa" decals. It might pull luggage trailers and work as a general airfield towing hack. Even scratch-building a trailer wouldn't be that hard. Or a blue tractor from an American air base in Germany, with "U.S. Air Force" decals pulling a bomb trailer or something. Lots of possibilities...

Great work! A nice update on the old Weird-Ohs. Revell should make that as a kit.