Ace-Garageguy

Interesting. I'm not arguing, I just personally find that the majority of cars are improved with a chop, so long as the overall proportions are carefully considered, and the result is looked at as a 'fresh' design and not compared directly to the original. The yellow car fails because the lines go all fat and horrible, making the thing look hunch-backed and dorky rather than low and mean. The sail panel is WAY too heavy, the windshield needs to be raked more to flow into the roof, and the roofline itself is bulged and pregnant. The height of most vehicles is determined by practical constraints like the necessity for headroom, etc. In some cases, the clothing fashions of the time determine the roof height. The Model T coupe with a roof that could accommodate a top-hat is one extreme example. Out of curiosity, of the two rodded cars below, which proportions do you prefer?

Welcome welcome. Bunch of good people here, willing to help with tips and techniques and a lot of knowledge. I have a couple of the 1/8 scale '32 kits too. I agree about getting your skills up to speed before doing one of those. They photograph like a real car, and every little flaw shows...which is why I haven't built mine yet either.

The other '70s-Show girl.

Still nobody for this one, eh? Maybe you'd recognize the rest of her. Likely, nobody ever actually looked at her face before.

Bravo Steve.

Nothing at all 'wrong' with the "collector" mindset...it's just alien to the way I'm wired. Though I have a pretty extensive collection of models, to me they're ALL for building or parts, and most of them have already had bits pirated. Same with my music on vinyl. I'll buy a slightly used record and actually play it rather than searching forever for a prefect sealed example and leave its virginity intact. If someone else wants to "collect" simply for the pleasure they get from just 'having' (and pay big bucks), that's fine by me. At least that way, a few unmolested examples of what things were like new will survive.

Posting a negative comment about an ugly turd of a car, especially one that's had a lot of time and money poured into making it ugly, seems to ruffle some feathers around here. It's interesting. Apparently that "everyone's a winner" mindset being shoved down kids' throats is sneaking into and coloring the way people react to carp. Yes, whether you LIKE something or not is entirely subjective, but there are principles of good design that are entirely objective. There are a lot of designs I don't particularly LIKE, but that still work well from a design standpoint (shape and line, proportion, etc.) Calling a turd a turd, especially when the turd-caller has some established design cred, can only make for a better world filled with fewer ugly turd-things. Both that '57 Chev and the Yellow Chevelle are turds, design-wise. Shape, line, proportions...nothing about the modifications even remotely begins to work.

Letraset, Chartpack, etc. in some smaller fonts. I still use the stuff on occasion. http://www.pcbsupplies.com/dry-transfer/

It's not "over chopped" so much as having been chopped by someone with no sense of proportion and line. The yellow thing was one of the ones I tried hard NOT to emulate when I built this back in 2012. This is a 4" scale chop.

Greta Garbo.

469 posts about just this particular topic, only a click away... http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/topic/83153-paint-strippers-what-to-use/

Here's a little history lesson on the midgets and what a huge part of American culture they were for decades. Maybe some understanding of how cool these little cars were will help to bring about another run. http://alblixtracinghistory.typepad.com/al_blixt_auto_racing_hist/2010/03/v860-the-little-engine-that-could.html

Though to some of us old farts the little midgets are important parts of racing history and very desirable models, I fear that for the majority, they're unknown and unwanted because they don't look like anything diddy or momma or brudda ever drove. I'm pretty sure the recent reissue of Thompson's Challenger One was kindof a flop too, for much the same reason...which strikes me as sadly odd in light of the fact that that single car probably marks the absolute high-point of real hot-rodding in America. It was built by one of the all-time great hot-rodders, a gifted practical engineer, and it was built largely from junk. But for all the "nostalgia" running rampant these days, nobody really seems to give a rat's backside, at least in numbers sufficient to sell lotsa kits, what kinds of racing cars are really historically significant. The Offy and V8-60 powered midgets were vastly popular both before and after WW II, but the guys who actually remember seeing them as real race cars and not museum pieces are mostly pushing up daisies now. Not a lot of people even know a V8-60 ever existed, what it is, why it was built, what it came in, and how it proved to be stiff competition for the more expensive little Offenhauser racing engine. The fact that the Offy was originally designed by Harry Miller (and that that fact...and the Offenhauser name being associated with high-performance in the US up through this very minute... gives the little 4-banger a pretty impressive pedigree far as US racing goes) seems to be overlooked by most modelers too. It always strikes me as interesting that there's rather a lot of historical awareness in other fields of plastic modeling, like aircraft, ships and armor, but model cars don't seem to attract the history-cognizant.

Ummmm...3-dimensional mirror-image parts RARELY swap side for side. Turning this thing around would possibly put the attachment tabs in the wrong places, even if the exterior shape did work. Of course, if the shape did work and correctness isn't an issue, the tabs can always be bent or cut off, and the whole thing glued on with RTV. Not the right way to do anything, but if it was done neatly... BUT...the legs of the part in the photo do not appear to be the same length to me. Could be camera angle though.

Here's one some of you might recognize. She had some truly remarkable assets.

Looks like good rat-rod material to me.

Yeah, you can still get them for around $25. Plus shipping of course, if you're shopping online.

There's a lot of that on Ebay. I collect a few things, like old music, and I'll often see an over $100 or more BIN price on the same thing I can get for under $20 with a little comparative shopping. Getting caught up in the "OMG it's the last one in the universe and I have to have it today" hysterical mindset can be very expensive.

Nice work, Joe. Now all you gotta do is enhance the face on the tennis-outfit girl, find photos of the three possibles taken from about the same angle, and run it all through one of the online facial recognition programs. That should kill at least another 6 hours, easy.

I don't think any single small-scale plastic model kit is worth what you can buy a decent (if ratty) running 1:1 pickup for.

V8-60 available in this kit...