Mike999

Good job on a notoriously bad kit. I'm surprised you didn't throw it against the wall. That poor thing has been re-issued so many times, the molds must be nearly worn out. And as you found out, nothing fits like it should. Some very brave people have tried to update it by crossing it with the Revell '66 GTO. I saw model kits in a TJ Maxx one time, many years ago in Los Angeles. The Maxx near me had a stack of the AMT "Pro Shop" '57 Chevy. The kit with the photo-etched metal parts and opening trunk. Most of those kits were open, but I remember they were really cheap, about $5.00. Now I wish I had bought all of them.

Awesome build of an awesome car! And being a card-carrying geezer, it reminds me of seeing that album cover in the stores.

That might be Simon Rivera's build, from 2012. Link below. It includes many close-up photos of the real car and its parts. He even contacted Aston-Martin to get the right paint codes. Turning a DB-4 into a DB-5 will take some serious body work on the front end. But you already know that...

Testors is always discontinuing paints or changing their names, which gets annoying. One they seem to have killed is Light Rust enamel #2177, in the 1/2 oz. bottle. That was not only good for painting fresh rust. Since it was a yellowish-orange, it was also a great base for many light wood colors. Like the cherry-wood used on early Ford Model T's and Speedsters. If they replaced it with another enamel, I can't find it. I have some left, but went looking for more. Discontinued at all the major online stores I checked. On Amazon, one opportunist was trying to sell a bottle for $8.06. No thanks! It's still available for $3 to $4 on eBay. Though probably not for long.

Links to a couple of reviews. As Martinfan said, these are pretty easy to find. I bought the Protar version at a kit swap meet for a reasonable price. A mystery: apparently some of these Alfa kits have engines and some don't. The Fine Scale reviewer built Revell kit number 07316, which had the engine. It seems that Protar kit number 231 also had the engine. Italeri kit number 3691 did NOT have the engine. My kit is Protar #224 and it doesn't have the engine. Just a chassis plate with the bottom of the oil pan. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/airfixtributeforum/1-24-alfa-romeo-giulietta-spider-by-protar-t17540.html http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/4/t/157198.aspx

Hopefully not to confuse things further. But Priority Mail Flat Rate boxes are NOT the same as the free Priority Mail boxes you can order from that link I posted. The Flat Rate boxes say "Flat Rate" on them in big red letters. When you buy a Flat Rate box at the P.O., you're pre-paying for the shipping and they are costly. The free boxes at the link are regular Priority Mail boxes, not Flat Rate boxes. Warning: the boxes from the link only come in packs of 10 or 25 boxes. So if you're not selling on eBay or doing a lot of trading, you might not need that many boxes. If you can't find a free box, you can pick up a plain brown box at places like Pak-and-Ship, Staples or Wal-Mart. The shipping stores will also ship Priority Mail, but they charge a lot more than the Post Office.

Impressive work and painting, especially in 1/72 scale from that company. I'm surprised it has interior detail. But SME(A)R produced a lot of kits from other companies, so it probably originated somewhere else. Egypt still had Mi-8's in service when I worked there from 2005-09. One day I saw an Egyptian Air Force General getting out of one. He came out of that door on the port side, just behind the cockpit. Two enlisted men ran up and dropped the boarding steps, which were covered in red carpet. A nice touch, I thought.

I don't know why anyone would warn you away from Priority Mail. It's a pretty good deal and you get a Tracking Number and insurance. What you have to be careful of is the "Regional" boxes. I got some of those by mistake once, thinking they were regular Priority boxes. They have different rules. There are 2 different kind of Priority Mail boxes. As NiteOwl said, the post office usually just carries the flat-rate version. If they have free Priority boxes at all, they generally only have one or two sizes. But at the USPS website, you can get all the FREE Priority Mail boxes you want, in a variety of sizes. The square 12x12x8 box will take 2 kits easily, unless they're a weird size. The flat "shirt boxes" will take most kit boxes sized like Italeri or Tamiya. You can also get the "shoeboxes" that Iborg mentioned free. You just create an account, order the boxes you want, and USPS will ship them straight to your front door. All absolutely free. I'm getting ready for an eBay sale and just recently ordered a bunch. This link will take you to the official USPS site for free boxes. Beware of any other "USPS Shipping Supplies" links. They might link to private, third-party shipping vendors who will charge you for boxes. And everything else. https://store.usps.com/store/results/shipping-supplies/_/N-7d0v8v

Stopped at Hobby Lobby, hoping for new kits. Nope, none. Mostly for old time's sake, I used the 40% off coupon for a Round 2 "Pepper Shaker" '57 Chevy. And for storing tires and small parts, some little plastic Ziploc bags. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I swear the HL employees look at me funny when I buy those. Like they suspect I'm Walter White or Jesse Pinkman...

I remember Rainbow Ten and those days you're talking about. Great that you got to visit them. According to a quick search, they shut down their online store in 2012. Armor modelers really loved R-10. They sold individual sprues from Tamiya 1/35 scale kits, so the builder didn't have to buy a whole kit for conversion parts. When I made some biz trips to Japan back in the 1990's, I hit all the hobby stores I could find. One Tokyo store I visited was the jaw-dropping, 3-story Tenshodo Ginza Honten, in the famous Ginza district. That's where I found Dave Worrall's book "The Most Famous Car in the World," about the Bond Aston-Martins. I still have it, and a Gunze Karmann-Ghia with the Tenshodo sticker on it. Another was Yellow Submarine's main store in Akihabara, the "electric city" giant electronics market. That store was stacked floor to ceiling with kits. Yellow Sub was famous for its obscure garage kits, many never released outside of Japan. Mostly figures of horror, sci-fi and...interesting people. If you wanted a six-foot tall vinyl Godzilla or a "racy" figure of a Japanese TV actress, Yellow Sub probably had it.

Same here. And I resisted for a long time. Being a contrarian, I was the guy who refused to buy an iPod. I bought the Creative Zen version, which was a constant source of aggravation and had to be returned for repairs twice. When it came time to get a smart phone, I decided not to fight City Hall anymore and got an iPhone. When I'm stuck in line someplace, I love being able to read this group and other stuff on the internet, check e-mail, get the weather report etc. As for that annoying AutoCorrect, I just turned it off.

The USPS Shipping Calculator should answer all your questions. Enter the 2 ZIP Codes, the weight and the size and it will show you the different shipping options. https://postcalc.usps.com/

"Another interesting feature is front-wheel drive. Some recent rumors from Detroit indicate that this set-up may become common in domestic cars within a few years." From Motor Trend's review of the Citroen ID-19 station wagon, February 1961. MT also said: "Six passengers can be seated on two bench-type seats that are comfortably padded for long trips. Two more passengers, preferably small Frenchmen, can be accommodated on two facing jump seats that fold easily into the rear cargo floor." At a flea market a while back, I found a big stack of Motor Trend and Classic Cars magazines from the 1960s. It's a blast looking thru them.

Thanks! I think we talked about this before, and you linked to (or posted) photos of the B-10 Target Tugs. Anyway, I have some pix of them on my hard drive, and I'm pretty sure I stole them from you. So thanks again.

Me too. But we're more likely to see a 3-in-1 kit of a 1925 Moon or a 1915 Jeffrey Quad truck first. Back in the 80s or 90s, somebody did a resin 1/25 scale Greyhound Scenicruiser. I think it was mastered off a promo that Greyhound commissioned back in the 1950s. I had one for a while that I got in a trade. I realized it was far beyond my resin-working skills and sold it on eBay. The corrugated metal skin didn't translate very well to resin and varied from fairly sharp in some places to nearly non-existent in others. The body was very thick and would have needed some serious grinding to look right. It did come with seats for the interior. LOTS of seats.

Ha! "Amish rocket launcher." Thanks. Great review of something really weird and obscure. I'll be painting some wood and metal parts today (I hope), and stole a couple of your ideas to try on my latest weird and obscure project.

Also slightly off-topic. I won the old Williams Bros. 1/72 scale Martin B-10 bomber on eBay for $9.99 plus shipping. Nobody else bid on it. It was in a very ratty, water-stained box and looked really ugly in the listing pic. When it arrived, TWO kits were stuffed in the box. It had 2 of everything except the instruction sheet, only one of those. I didn't mind...

Flea Market: a guy was selling home-made wooden spice racks that will be great on the workbench, holding tools and paints. Thrift Stores: a double-sided DVD of "Hot Rod Girl" and "T-Bird Gang." Also a book entitled "Rural Cuba," written in 1950. When 24-yr-old Fidel Castro was still in law school. Hobby Lobby: a set of the Testors Lacquer Metallic paints for "Fantasy War Game Figures." Includes Flat Brass, Aluminum, Steel, Gun Metal and Burnt Iron (a good engine and exhaust-pipe color). And a bottle of lacquer thinner. $14.99 with the 40% off coupon. This HL still does not have any of the new kits. I think the newest one it has is the '71 Duster.

That one is a curbside. No engine. Most Aoshima chassis are still fairly well detailed, with separate brake drums and other parts. Their racing version of the Mazda Cosmo had separate exhaust pipe, rear/front axles with poseable front wheels, and even the racing-only skid-plate under the front.

Here's another old thread with answers to many '32 Ford questions. I think it also has photos of the Revell chassis, modified to take the AMT "buggy spring" crossmember.

One of the better chrome sprays I've used is Valspar Metallic Silver. But now I might be in the market for the Krylon. Shown below, the Valspar used by an artist (not me!) to paint a little guy who showed up just in time for Spring. The pic is from a site for artists, not modelers. And the page is suspicious; it keeps running a script that hangs it up and removes the Scroll bar, so I won't post the link. The user compared the Krylon and Valspar silvers with Krylon Chrome, and said this: "The Krylon Silver is flatter than either the Valspar Silver or the Krylon Chrome. There's really no reflection to it. It's ever so subtle, but the Krylon chrome has a bit smoother coverage than the Valspar Silver, which gives it just a bit more reflection/shine."

I was in Japan when the trains ran late, but nobody minded. That was not long after the horrible Kobe earthquake in January 1995. The govt. would seize trains at random, stuff them full of medical supplies and rescue workers and send them to Kobe. We had to take the trains from Tokyo to Gifu Prefecture (the big Kawasaki Heavy Industries factory). I had a lot of empathy for those earthquake victims. I lived in Los Angeles at the time...just a couple of miles from the epicenter of the January 1994 Northridge quake. The Kobe quake struck almost exactly 1 year later.

Even worse worst - one Hobby Lobby near me seems to do that by mixing different kinds of paint, enamel and acrylic. I found that out the hard way when I grabbed a bottle of paint from the rack that said TESTORS ENAMEL in big letters on top. Got home and it was acrylic. The next time I went in that store, I looked and found several other bottles in the wrong rack. Now I look at the label very closely before buying.

Here's an eBay listing for the Aurora "Phantom" customized Cunningham. Same kit, with EXTRA CHROME PARTS!!! The listing shows all the parts. It's a simple 1/32 scale kit with a multi-piece body and no engine. Typical of all the Aurora 1/32 scale sports car kits first released in the 1950's, then updated later with the chrome bling. Still, if you must have a Cunningham for the shelf, this is probably the only kit available. Unless somebody did a slot car body or a rare resin kit. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-7-Cunningham-Phantom-Customizing-Kit-Aurora-Vintage-1960/202643579966?hash=item2f2e7fa43e:g:ivUAAOSwx9lb9OQB

Looks that way. Monsters In Motion straight-up calls it a "Lindberg Re-issue." Shipping May 30, 2019, so it doesn't seem to be a hoax. "At this time we are not sure if it will come with a clear plastic canopy or not. The canopy was painted silver in the film but the original Lindberg kit had a clear canopy." https://www.monstersinmotion.com/cart/model-kits-aurora-model-kits-c-271_285/plan-9-from-outer-space-flying-saucer-model-kit-by-polar-lights-lindberg-re-issue-p-26368