Ace-Garageguy

Long as whatever they put in it is accurate, I'll be happy.

Check out the minuscule belt-wrap on the pulley of the SCoT blower on the top photo in post #30. That's really gonna slip. And that's not gonna make any boost at all. Notice that even the centrifugal blowers in the lower shots have 3 and 4 pulley sheaves.

Yup.

Isn't this the stash of Ford flathead industrial engines that came to light quite a few years back?

The Duplicolor products are lacquers unless specifically labeled "enamel". I don't recall if Duplicolor does a straight black, but they do at least one metallic or pearl black. And yes, they do a good clear too. BUT...Testors lacquers work perfectly over all of Duplicolor's primers mentioned above. This is one instance where mixing products from different manufacturers works well. Lotsa guys here use Testors lacquer colors and clears over Duplicolor primers...like this one of mine.

Yeah, more people than ever before expect to get paid for knowing nothing and doing nothing.

'33 Plymouth chassis just back from paint shop, going together. A tiny sample of my plumbing (I've built 90% of this car). The engine (which I did not build, though I did the FI and all the plumbing and electronics). Complete chassis, awaiting painted body.

Interesting little cars, very nice work. That red interior looks especially good.

Nice project, looks great so far. I don't know if you've driven one of these, but they're really great little cars. Fast, handle very well.

I guess the segment of the industry that's on the verge of printing living replacement organs for humans is "a step behind" then. Nah. I certainly don't deny that individual tinkerers and the "open source community" make a LOT of strides, with little funding. But to write off what's happening among well-funded R&D professionals is just as misguided as missing the point of what you're doing. Nothing is developed in a vacuum, especially these days, and everyone's work is somewhat dependent on the developments made before them, by others...whether garage-geniuses or industrial R&D worker bees. And it will be industry and crass commercialism that puts $200-retail, plug-and-play machines with resolution better than yours on most modelers' workbenches.

Got a little sumthin' from Hong Kong, and another one from Japan yesterday. Soon to be moving into entirely new subject matter for me.

It's like, really hard to know there's a customer, like, when you're so busy checking your texts and facebook all day. You'd have to, like, look up from your iPhone.

Yup...the road surface looks kinda like fabric, the tire sidewall bulges don't really show, the soft-focus-poor-depth-of-field image...all make it look model-like.

I paint a lot of small metal parts in the big-car shop. Nick is right on about self-etching primer. It comes in rattlecans (Duplicolor green is my favorite...and it's VERY thin) at the auto-parts store. Clean your bare metal parts with isopropyl alcohol to get any oils or coatings off of them, and spray away. If you need a surfacing primer, any of the Duplicolor products (including their paints) can be used over the self-etch. Testors lacquers will work fine too.

Yeah, I know exactly what you are. You make it very obvious. What a nice fella.

Actually, I'm seeing rather a lot of people, both young and older, who are looking forward to the possibilities this tech promises (including me, because I've been watching the industrial development of this stuff for years), but saying it's just around the corner is pretty far off of the mark. People saying the model companies will be printing in-house seem to miss another mark, too. It takes only a few minutes to cycle an injection-molding die to produce one kit. It takes hours of printing to produce one decent frame. Yeah, that's cost effective manufacturing at its best. And being able to text incessantly, scroll through pictures on your iPhone, post useless social crapp on fazebook etc.etc. may qualify even ol' Presbo as "tech savvy", but it just aint. What percentage of modelers actually DO SOMETHING with tech? And I don't mean gaming, socializing and being entertained...or marketing. One more point that's been brought up before...how many modelers today have mills and lathes, even small ones? How many scratch-build ? How many do the actual hard stuff ? My point is that until this tech becomes almost idiot-proof and CHEAP, it's not going to be on many modelers benches.

Semantics. Word usage. Accepted meanings. "Traditional" is simply used these days to describe a build-style of subject matter that was popular in the defining days of the hot-rod and custom movement, post-WW II through somewhere in the '60s. That's all it means.

You're far from the average modeler. Can your machine be duplicated for $200 ? (I don't mean build it yourself, either).That's what it will take to put them in just a small percentage of home workshops. And you do your own digital modeling, right ? How many modelers are going to learn that ? Many of them don't even understand the concept of "scale".

That diagram is pretty old-school, though. Still running pills for mixture adjustment, and basically the same setup as cars of the '60s (with the addition of the port distribution block).

There's no question it's coming, but we're still waiting for good enough print resolution from an "affordable" consumer-level desktop machine large enough to print a 1/24 scale body shell. That's really the only holdup at this point, and it may be a while. As easy as many folks prefer things to be, they're going to want this stuff to be no-effort. The days of simple "select model, press enter to print it" aren't gonna be here any time real soon. And what do modelers consider affordable? $2000 ? $200 ? I still think it makes more sense to deploy commercial-quality printers in hobby shops, and do the printing there. That would eliminate the need for inventory of anything other than the print materials, but still create retail traffic while the tech filters down to the desktop level. Remember the days before everyone had a desktop 2D printer / copier? Yeah, like that.

In all honesty, I'm just not familiar with plumbing on fairly recent top-fuel cars. Here is what seems to me to be a good intro into the function of fuel systems as they now are, or were fairly recently. http://www.competitionplus.com/featured-stories/10631-mike-kloebers-nitro-university-course-4-fuel-management-systems

Exactly. And the reflections in the glass, and the dangly bits under the car.

Well, the CAD work will still have to be done first, and done ACCURATELY, or the printed models will suffer from the same maladies that the injection-molded ones often do...mistakes, poorly-measured and incorrectly-represented parts, wrong curves and proportions, etc. The point...in order to have an accurate printed model, you have to have accurate CAD work to start with...and that means somebody has to measure and / or interpret dimensions and shapes of the real vehicle correctly first...just like in injection molding.

Sure has a strong resemblance... ...or maybe some bizarre headrests from a way-out kustom??