Ace-Garageguy

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??

This doesn't really look like what you've got, but it's about the closest I could find...

Hmmm...these don't look at all like the old-school Hilborn, Enderle or Crower engine-driven fuel pumps I'm familiar with, and they don't look to me much like the pumps on contemporary fuel dragsters either (but in this case that means little, because I've been away from drag racing for many many years). if I'm identifying the model parts you posted correctly, it looks to me like the two pump housings are side-by-side, rather than end to end as seems to be common recently. Do you have a shot of how these mount on the engine?

Y'all musta had some big monitors. ...and pretty soon, we'll live in a world where nobody has any actual physical skills at all, because everything is designed in virtual space, mostly by machines, and made by other machines. People can become entirely fat, lazy and totally unproductive, and exist solely to be entertained every waking moment. Just watch...

Not if I buy one. Guaranteed to be worthless...until the year after I sell it, when the prices will skyrocket.

When very young, I always claimed I was reading the articles when I got caught with Playboy...

First car I've really lusted after in a long long time. You can still see the GT-40 DNA in there, but wow...!!!

That Nismo mess is the friggin-ugliest thing I've ever seen.

Ummm...why take a cool old Mopar and make a stupid turd, when you can take a cool old Mopar and make something...cool?

Couple things nobody has mentioned yet that are important... 1) Until the advent of the big Gilmer belts for top-mounted blower-drive applications, the only other choices were multiple V-belts or a chain. V-belts slip, getting several of them EXACTLY the same length and tension is almost impossible, and when they slip, they heat up and disintegrate...or you don't get full design-boost at a given engine RPM. Chains are heavy, they stretch, and they're really kind of scary. Ever see a chain blower-drive fail? I have. Cut right through a frame tube. The Potvin setup avoided all of these problems. (Potvin made the drive setups, but the blowers themselves were mostly GMC units). 2) There ARE considerable pumping losses with the long tubes to the manifold on a front-driven blower setup (mentioned above). However, with direct-port fuel injection, fuel mixture disturbances can be overcome. 3) Do the numbers on the drag of a big ol' blower sticking out of the hood at 200 or 300 MPH, as opposed to the same car with a front-mounted unit. While you may lose a little power with the front-mounted setup, the savings in aero drag, and the resulting horsepower freed to make the car go faster, is considerable.

Wow. That's a new one on me. I had no idea any kits ever came with records. How cool.

Sounds exactly like me in 2005 when I started thinking about getting back into this. There are STILL a lot of techniques I haven't even begun to master, but my work has improved considerably over the years. Key words here (for me, at least): " Willingness to re-do things helps a lot." And the talent to to do this stuff IS god-given, just like musical or mechanical aptitude. Some people are born with more of a particular talent than others. But SKILL is what you make of whatever talent you have, and practice and commitment will very often outperform talent that isn't disciplined...in every field.

Both of those are swashplate compressors. The compressor in your post #13 picture is a piston-type, mounted on its side (similar to the top photos, post #8). Here's a '64 Catalina with another piston-type compressor (aftermarket installation, non-factory).

Normal folks:

I've been working on this for a while...all the parts to convert the Revell '37 Ford pickup to a fairly correct chopped '38... Possibly a radical chopped '53 Ford pickup/ ...or a chopped and channeled body for the Monogram '40 Ford truck?

Just a thought...I distinctly remember that in some jurisdictions, an overhanging load had the be red-flagged at the extreme end. I'm guessing these odd taillights deployed at the ends of the open gate might have been intended to comply with some regional regs. It's only fairly recently that car companies have intentionally over-complicated everything to enhance perceived-value as a sales incentive. When this thing was built, there was a little more rationality, far as silly bells and whistles go. I kinda doubt these lights would have been made like this on sheer whim. The cutouts on the bottoms of the housings are white or clear lenses for doing just that...illuminating the tag. The fact that both light housings have cutouts either means the manufacturer decided to use the same tooling for both sides to save cost (in which case, a tin blanking-panel inside the RH light would stop white light shining down...and showing white light in the rear of a vehicle anywhere other than for tag illumination is also illegal), or the car's got two LH lights. Somewhere around this time frame, cars were only required to have ONE light in the rear in some jurisdictions too.

Hear's a set of R&M DCOE Webers. Though the label says "also usable as down-drafts"...well, not if you care about accuracy.

Definitely NOT. Weber side-drafts are entirely different carbs from down-drafts, they look entirely different, and anybody who's ever seen real Webers will notice immediately. Mount side-drafts as down-drafts in the real world and all your gas will just run all over the engine and into the dirt. This shows 3 of R&M's Webers, definitely side-drafts in this case. Real... ...notice the position of the float-bowl covers. On a Weber down-draft, the float-bowl cover also mounts the velocity stacks...

You're indeed a lucky fella. Nobody around here even HAS lacquer mixing bases any more (because production body shops no longer use lacquer, and there's no point in keeping mixing bases that just sit on the shelf for years and dry out). It's urethane or acrylic enamel (for cheap all-overs) or nothing.

Long as it doesn't have 20deg of negative camber, I'm okay with it...

Still in progress...

Most of the paint formulas in body-shop-supply houses won't do a 1oz quantity of anything. The formula weights are usually set up for standard size cans. It IS possible to do one liquid ounce by weight on the electronic scale most color mixers use these days... if your paint-shop-mixer guy isn't math-challenged. Good luck with that.