Jdurg

Mine is pretty easy. First initial, middle initial, first three of my last name. Been using this since my AOL days as it's easier to remember one username, or variation of it, than to try and remember thirty different ones.

Thanks guys! In the mail today, I got the MPC 1/16th scale 1988 Corvette Convertable. Came in about a week earlier than I expected it to. I know what I'm doing this weekend. (VERY happy that it has opening doors already built in. I may spend the time and open up the convertible top hatch on it and use some fabric I have to construct a "stowed away" convertible top since the only time it would be open would be when the plastic kit top is off). Looking forward to building this as I really like the larger scale models, and so very few of them are modern era Vettes. Plus, the '05 I built showed me that I still can do this. Taking a look at my real car ('09 Civic Hybrid), there's FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR more orange peel on my actual car than on my model car. I love the way the blue turned out. Now I'm trying to figure out what color to paint my '88 model Corvette. I'm thinking of a Dark Red Metallic with a Black/Saddle interior. Still not sure yet. Have plenty of time to think about it. And yes, this hobby is like model-kit crack.

Looks fantastic. The nice thing about the '53 is that it's nearly impossible to make it look ugly. I like the red color of the frame in contrast to the black underside. I know it's not factory stock, but it looks really good there. Got to love any Corvette out there.

Yeah, if superglue was giving me sinus issues I'd stop using it too. I guess the only other way to avoid that would be to use small bits of painters tape on the areas that will receive glue? Not sure if that would be fully possible for really small parts, but at least those really small parts won't need much scraping.

I've always liked the way bikes look and sense of freedom they provide, but it'll be a cold day in Hades before you see me on one. I have a nasty habit of breaking bones and getting hurt doing simple things like stretching, taking out the trash, or walking around. (For a little background about me, a few years ago I was stretching out my right calf muscle before a cross-country flight for work. I had previously strained the calf while skiing a few months earlier, and after the torture that was physical therapy, I was told that I needed to stretch it out before the flight to prevent it from tightening up again. Anyway, I was stretching the calf using the stairs in my house as extra leverage to get a full stretch when the calf muscle seized up. I dropped down the two steps onto a hardwood floor with my full body weight on my right foot. I instantly shattered the 6 bones in my right foot in 8 spots. The three cuneiform bones, the navicular bone, the cuboid, and the first metatarsal in two spots. Went cross-country for work, walked on it for a couple weeks, then finally listened to everyone who saw me limping and saw a doctor who did x-rays and told me they were broken. Right after that injury healed, I had my 30th b-day in NYC with some friends and after a long night out I didn't pay attention to the curb and fell forward putting my hand out in front. Shattered my scaphoid. Then, this past October I was taking trash out when I slipped on some wet leaves and tried to regain my balance instead of falling into the street. Trying to get my balance back I rolled my ankle and cracked my right medial malleolus. The knob on the inside of your foot. That finally healed, and I discovered today that the pain I still have in my right ankle is a stress fracture of that same bone caused by the 5 miles or so I walked while out in NYC last week). Anyway, rant aside, you won't see me on a bike as it would just be too expensive. (The hospital bills, funeral bills for the family, insurance rates, etc. lol). But I do recognize beautiful bikes when I see 'em and I see some beauties here.

Now I am admittedly just getting back into the hobby so there may be bad things about how I do it, but using cyanoacrylates (superglue) I have found that there is no need to scrape the paint. With typical "model glues", you need to scrape the paint and chrome off in order to let the glue "melt" the plastic to the plastic and basically weld them together. If there is paint or chrome in the way, it won't work. With cyanoacrylates, there is no need to scrape paint/chrome since the glue doesn't need to dissolve the plastic in order to work. Just make sure you use superglue VERY sparingly. It does not take a lot in order to get the job done, and overuse of it will fog up clear plastic amongst other things. But if you use small amounts it won't cause this problem and will save you the hassle of having to scrape all the paint off. A nice added bonus is that it "sets" almost instantly. Just make sure you don't get any on your fingers otherwise you'll truly be "one with your model."

Okay, I was able to get a better looking photo of my completed Corvette that really does a good job of showing off, what I feel, is a great paint job. It's not perfect, but I'm quite happy with it.

Haha. I'm like a bad song from the 1980's. Once I get into your head, you can't get me out. "Taaaaaaaaaakkkkkkkkkkkkkkkke onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, Take On Me.........."

I can't stand fitting the body onto the chassis. That part always makes me the most nervous as I don't want to break anything I've spent so much time building, or find out that there was a hidden fit problem I couldn't notice before because it wasn't a problem until paint was applied. I just hate it because this is usually where my mistakes are made. Either having the paint job of the chassis or, far worse, the body of the car getting messed up because a fit was a bit too tight, or the glue that I had applied got onto my hands and now my paint job has a huge fingerprint or glue smudge on it. Since the body is now glued to the chassis, I can't easily strip it and repaint it. It's this part of the hobby that is so frustrating for me. The actual act of painting the body is what I like the most. I like having to spend time prepping everything, applying the primer and sanding it down, applying a VERY light top coat and sanding that to see if everything is smooth. Then applying the color coat is so great because all the prep work on the body makes the color coats go on quite easily. The end result is very cathartic. That's what makes attaching the body to the rest of it so frustrating.

Okay, so it's been nearly a decade and a half since I had built a model car. After going away to college and then having a 40-hour a week schedule, I found myself not really wanting to spend the time, or finances, on model car building. So I simply lost interest in it. The fact that my parents threw away all my completed kits and all my equipment while I was away at college didn't help either. Heh. (Thinking back, I had a LOT of photoetch sets, paints, brushes, instruments, etc. that were thrown away. Thankfully, I had my SAE and Car Modeler magazines stashed away for posterity). About 5 years ago I was finally able to afford to leave the abode of parentdom and bought my own place. My creative arts wound up going into work around the house. Building a poker table, building speakers for my modest little home theater, repairing plumbing, etc. It wasn't until I was involved in a car accident this past January and found myself wanting to do something to get my mind off of that accident that car modeling came back to me. It helped that my digging around in my home office and finding a box filled with car modeling books and magazines happened as well. I don't have any "in-progress" images of this build, and the image quality is a bit poor as I had to take these photos using my iPhone. (Strangely enough, on my iPhone the images look much crisper and cleaner and less blurry). I finished the kit just a few hours ago, and in the images you may be able to see where there is still some white glue showing as I used that to glue the clear plastic windows and lenses to the model so that there would be no crazing of the plastic. (In my supplies I only have cyanoacrylate gel, testors liquid cement, and white glue). Aside from flocking, this was built box stock. Photos are below, and the details of the build are as follows: Body Color: Rust-Oleum ATU6027 Medium Quasar CC. Primed with PRI2000 gray primer, and then finished with CC1000 Clear Coat after blue color coat was polished with polishing compound, washed thoroughly with soap and water to remove any wax or polish, and then applied decals for the front logo, rear logo, and license plate. Interior Color: Testors Model Master Flat Interior Tan, and Testors Model Master Semigloss Black. To achieve a consistent semigloss tone, I then coated everything that needed it with a clear semigloss finish. For the dash, Model Master Chrome Silver Trim was used for the parts of the dashboard that should be silvery. (For reference, I went to http://www.corvetteimages.com which is a bible of images for anybody building a Corvette model kit). Interior Details: After painting, I went and applied black flocking for the black carpeted areas, and tan flocking for the tan colored areas. It turned out quite nice. It's a shame the photos don't pick up on this as well. Exterior Details: Nothing too fancy here. I used Testors Black Chrome Trim for the exterior parts that needed to be painted black (Windshield frame, underside), and used some Bare Metal Foil to cover the front and rear sidelights. After trimming the excess away, I went and covered the front foil with MM Turn Signal Amber, and the real foil areas with MM Stoplight Red Metallic. Engine Compartment: Engine area was painted according to the images I saw over at corvetteimages.com. Only additional detailing here was the addition of another Corvette Logo from a spare sheet of decals that found its way into this kit, and the addition of an oil dipstick made out of flattened and curled solder which was then painted yellow and black as per the photos I had seen. Otherwise, the engine compartment is box stock. Chassis/Wheels: No real details here other than building and painting it box stock and using lots of shades of black. I did, however, remove the chrome from the wheels and painted them MM Chrome Silver Trim as I thought that matched the photos I had seen much better than the bright chrome from the standard kit build. For the photos, I again apologize for the quality as photography is not a big talent of mine and I had to take the images using my iPhone while standing up on a broken leg. (Told you I'm dedicated to this. ) The pics were taken with the car sitting atop one of the speakers I've built and am using since it has a nice gloss-black finish. Sadly, that also shows a lot of dust on this. A light is directly overhead which may be causing problems too. In the light, the blue is fairly bright and nicely metallic. Without direct light on it, the car really has a nice, deep dark blue metallic look to it. I quite like this color.

Thanks everyone. Sorry I haven't responded in a while, but I've been super busy at work. (Had to do some travelling and have finally gotten settled back down). Recently discovered that I have a stress fracture in my right ankle, so much of my time is now spent on the couch. Haha. Might as well read through these forums and the old boxes of Scale Auto Enthusiast and Car Modeler that I found tucked away in my office. Anyway, I have been able to get some great ideas here in the forums, and did finally get my 2005 Corvette kit finished a few hours ago. The 1963 is painted and 99% completed, but good god that old kit has some horrific fit issues with the chrome bumpers, the body/chassis, etc. Not looking too great, but it was my first kit built in a long, long time so I'm pretty happy with it. What has me the most happy is the paint job that came out on my 2005 Vette. At first, I wanted to do a Daytona Orange Metallic like it showed on the box, but when I went to my local automotive store their pain supplies were drastically reduced as they are remodeling the place. So I had very limited choices. I ended up settling on Red for the 1963 and metallic blue for the '05. I'll be posting a thread in the Under Glass forum shortly to show it off. Didn't take any in-progress photos, and was forced to take photos with my iPhone so the quality isn't that great, but I think it shows off the paint job well enough. I did find my way back to Model Car Garage and the offerings from Detail Master. I even picked up the photo-etch detail set for the 1/12 Scale Monogram 1967 kit in case I ever find it for a good price. But this hobby is like crack. Last night I was able to get an MPC 1/16 1988 Corvette Roadster kit for only $45 including shipping after looking around for a bit. I have always wanted to build a larger scale modern era Corvette, but never could find the kits when I was younger. Seeing this one out there is great as this scale is the same as my 1963 Coupe kit that I have, and now I have the patience back that is needed to build it properly. I'll be taking progress photos of this one as I build it. Thanks for the warm welcome everyone.

Hello Everyone. I am just getting back into the hobby of building model cars after a 14 year absence. While living at home with my parents in high school, I built a LOT of model cars. I have always loved Corvettes (thanks to my father telling me about them) and build Corvette models exclusively. While in high school, I tried building models of every year of Corvette. I had a large number of them and was proud to have built a model year from 1953 through 1959 by using various kits out there. Back then, it seemed like there were a TON of Corvette models available. Local stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R' Us, etc. stocked tons of kits. I went off to college and stopped building cars as I was constantly away from home and just couldn't do it. After graduation, all of my supplies had been "disposed" of, and other things took over. About a month ago, I was involved in a car accident and while recovering in my own house, I decided to get back into the hobby. (I own my own house and am on my own now). Building model cars is helping me deal with the PTSD from the accident, and the upcoming lay-off I'm facing at work. Anyway, I now see that local stores no longer stock model car kits so I have to go to the only hobby shop in my area and buy kits there, or buy them online. (I recently got a 1963 split-window Corvette kit on E-Bay and a 2005 Corvette kit as well for a good price). I'm mostly done with both of the kits and currently have the bodies on both cars drying after coats of primer and the first color coats. (I use automotive touch-up lacquer paints since they are "harder" than enamel paints and easily available at my local automotive store). Since I'm getting back into the hobby after a LONG absence, I'm trying to figure out what has changed in the past 14 years. I already know that local stores no longer carry model kits, as well as the fact that there are VERY few Corvette model kits still in production. I'm just curious about what else has changed in the meantime. Any advice or information is greatly appreciated.