Ace-Garageguy

Semantics...word definitions, and understanding of word definitions. Once a candy reaches its ceiling color, it's not going to get "darker" any more than putting on more coats of bright red is going to make dark red. Excessive coats of candies simply become less and less transparent, (more "muddy") eventually hiding the reflective quality of the basecoat entirely. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Color holdout" is generally understood by paint manufacturers to be a quality of primers, surfacers, or sealers that go under the color, and is a measure of how well a particular undercoat keeps the topcoat from "dying-back" or losing it's gloss as it "shrinks into" the undercoat, or loses its solvents into the undercoat...which produces a "flattening" or loss-of-gloss of the surface. Paint "dieback" is prevented by using undercoats that are very resistant to the solvents contained in the topcoats. Color "dieback" (poor "color holdout" under this definition) can happen almost immediately or over a considerable period off time, depending on a variety of factors.

Building Model Cars 101: STEP ONE: Determine whether or not you're smarter than an inanimate collection of plastic bits. STEP TWO: If the answer is "yes, I'm smarter than plastic", build the model, doing what's necessary to put it together, fitting and correcting things as you go if required If the answer is "no, I'm not smarter than plastic", give up, declare the model unbuildable, and complain about it.

Mos' likely "done been worked on" by experts.

Well, ya know, it kinda is anyway...no alien invasion necessary.

Yup.

I tried to smoke a trout once, but I couldn't keep the damm thing lit. Must take a real man to smoke a ham.

That was my initial thought too, but a top insert that size looks to me to be too small for a model A coupe bodyshell (almost the entire model A roof is built-up from wood, padding and fabric) though it looks to be about the right size for a '32 or '34. If it IS a teaser for a '30 coupe, then...WHOOPEE !!!

That's one happy looking Dad. Congrats.

A 9" has ho diff cover. It has a separate chunk, or "pumpkin", that carries the gears and bolts in from the front, which is what you're seeing. Rear "cover" is integral with the housing. Frankly, I was happy about getting a Dana. Would have been nice to have had a well-engraved non-Ford unit to use in kitbashing. A set of stock valve covers would have been a real treat, and would have broadened the kit's appeal as kitbash-fodder for guys doing ratrod builds. Overall it looks great though. Put me down for several, at least. The brakes, tires and headlight lenses are just about worth the price of admission, far as I'm concerned. The FI spider is a nice touch too.

That's cool. Kinda like an ultimate " '29 Street Rod / Hot Rod Parts Pack". Only immediate gripe I have is the 4 big rectangular holes in the block sides. I don't recall seeing those on any nailhead I've ever worked on in 1:1, and they're gonna be a bugger to fill. If they're for placement of engine mounts (I assume) surely a less invasive solution could have been devised...like little dimples, or even bosses like the real engine has.

That's getting dangerously close to a religious question...

How many times has your personal computer crashed? Or if not yours, how many of your friends' or acquaintances' computers crashed? Ever have IT problems at work? How many of you have had "computer" problems with your newer vehicles, or how many times has your new car been back to the dealer to have it's computer "reflashed" with software updates to fix glitches that were missed during development? Even with the triple-redundancy of the computer-flight-controls in the F-35, if they all fail, the airplane falls out of the sky, as there's no way to fly it otherwise. We're talking military-grade, combat-hardened stuff here...not some doofy little system in a car. Somebody has run the numbers, and anyone living in reality KNOWS there WILL be failures. The real disquieting thought is that what's considered "acceptable losses" will probably be lower with machines doing the driving than with easily distracted average humans in command. So rather than focusing on humans taking personal responsibility for driving themselves around, once again we're being "saved from ourselves", and as the man said, it's one more step into a future where a human is a waste of space and resources...because EVERYTHING can ultimately be done better by a machine...simply because WE got so lazy and dependent that we let it happen.

Sure is swoopy-slickly-molded, whatever it is. Looks like a '30s Batman's car for chauffeur-driven dates. Pretty cool.

It's a WHOLE lot easier to make 2 sun visors out of a little .020" or .030" styrene than it is to cut and splice in a windshield frame...a job that requires extreme precision to get acceptable results.

Yup, the Revell '32 3-window is the ONLY serious contender.

If I'd had my way, we'd have begun converting the vehicle fleet to CNG in the mid-1990s. An IC engine optimized for CNG can produce more power, with better fuel mileage, making fewer emissions than gasoline. It's cheap, plentiful, and we have a lot of it right here in the good ol' USA. The infrastructure to refuel cars already widely exists, as any house that has natural gas for cooking or heat can be easily equipped with a compressor to fuel a car overnight. Engines also last much longer running CNG, because there's no cylinder wash-down or oil dilution like you get with liquid fuels (gasoline or diesel). It's not particularly difficult to convert a car to run on the stuff...people have been running vehicles on propane since the 1930s...and it's a natural interim segue into the replacement of hydrocarbon fuels with pure hydrogen derived from wastewater, rainwater, and solar-derived electricity. But the momentum to do it petered out when it was discovered by utility companies that it was marginally cheaper to build nat-gas fired plants than clean up existing coal-fired plants, and trade carbon credits like monopoly money. So now, instead of running our cars on clean and plentiful CNG, and getting a large part of our electricity from clean-coal, we're burning nat-gas in prodigious quantities to produce electricity...to, in part, recharge electric vehicles. Stupid, and wasteful.

Very nice work indeed. I was hoping we'd see this one sometime soon. Looking great.

Interestingly perhaps, my own knowledge comes from hands-on experimenting with alternative fuels and an almost lifetime involvement in the field. Propane dual-fuel systems in the 1970s. An alcohol fuel pilot program run by Ga. Tech in the '80s, during which time I ran my own Triumph GT-6 daily on alcohol distilled by solar energy. In the 1990s I was heavily involved with a push to rationalize the use of CNG (compressed natural gas) as a motor vehicle fuel. I've run a cobbled-up Geo Metro on the bottled gas you get for running barbeque grills, and got over 65mpg (equivalent) in steady state cruise with nothing more exotic than a crude vaporizer / regulator / converter. I've been a loud proponent of rooftop photovoltaic-powered hydrogen-producing, household-sized units for powering vehicles. And I did some pilot work on the concept of leasing back photovoltaic rooftop power-generating units to electric consumers by public utilities...a concept that is working profitably now in several areas. I can say with some certainty that the "100 mpg" carburetor, supposedly able to get that kind of mileage from a 4000-pound V8-powered barge, is bunk. I can also say with absolute certainty that a LOT of promising technologies have been allowed to languish, or have been ignored entirely by the business-as-usual fraternity that's pretty well run things up until now. I think this last sentence pretty well encompasses the subject of your "diatribe".

Certainly no disrespect intended, but really, before you can make valid judgments about anything hinging on science, you have to know some science. You also have to know what's accepted as scientific fact, and WHY, before you're in a position to change the knowledge base by doing something new. And to change the knowledge base, you have to be able to repeat your results, openly, repeatedly and transparently. Just saying you have a magic carburetor and hiding it in a box doesn't cut it...even if you DO have a magic carburetor that somehow defies known physics. Real science is not absolute...it changes every day, and at any moment "as far as we know right now" is the qualifier of scientific "fact" that any GOOD scientist will insist on. And just an FYI...faster-than-light travel, "known" for years to be completely impossible and only fit for science fiction, now looks very much like it IS possible. It'll be a while yet, but the numbers are looking...interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

I really have to agree strongly with Snake on this one. I do a LOT of slice / dice and heavy mods, and though I haven't done a Corvair convertible conversion, doing just as Snake suggests makes the most sense. It's relatively easy to remove the hardtop portion of any model and leave the windshield frame intact. The Corvair convertible in 1:1 uses welded-on, painted A-pillars, with a stainless cap where the top seals. Cutting the roof off and retaining the existing windshield frame is without doubt the smart way to go about getting a convert.

Going by known principles of physics (inconvenient little things like how much of the energy produced by burning fuel in the MOST efficient IC engine is wasted as exhaust and cooling system heat, and how much actually makes "go"...something the most wonderful carburetor in the universe could not have ANY effect on whatsoever) and the amount of energy contained in the bonds that are broken when fossil fuels are burned, the 100mpg carburetor is total BS, perpetuated by people who want to see conspiracies everywhere. It's actually good to have a strong background in engineering, mechanics, and science (which I happen to have) in order to know what is baloney and what is not. Things like this do no good for the reality of the situation, which is quite bad enough without overblown claims of shadowy criminal exploits among the oil and automobile companies. And one part of the truth is that it IS possible to get much more than 100 miles from one gallon of gasoline. I believe the current world record is something like 12,600 mpg, set by this little beauty. Somewhat impractical for real-world conditions, it's still on the leading edge of demonstrating what IS possible by shaving weight, improving light vehicle structural performance, enhancing vehicle aerodynamics, and optimizing engine design.

Very interesting. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What I'd REALLY like to see from both Porsche AND Corvette would be de-contented cars without all the silly bells and whistles that get in the way of the pure driving experience. An entry-level Porsche or stripped Corvette that were once again about driving as opposed to posing while you talk on the phone while sitting in rush hour traffic would certainly get my interest.

Sounds like a rough few months. I can identify. It also sounds like you have a good attitude for moving forward. Stay positive, and good luck.

Good comments above, and I hope I didn't sound like I was trying to discourage you. Many of my period builds are of things that could have been done, but to my knowledge, weren't. A custom "53 with the Ardun conversion is a natural, really, and to do it in 1:1 would be far simpler than swapping other engines from different manufacturers.