Ace-Garageguy

I "got" finished with my Christmas shopping. Done and dusted. Fini. Concluded. Etc.

Buy War Bonds...

Friday and Saturday nights: home made pork tenderloin tikka masala with seasoned whole-grain brown rice w/peas, lightly toasted flour tortillas standing in for naan, apricot preserves standing in for chutney, Sutter Home screw-top Merlot (cheap but pretty decent, especially with hot taste-bud-numbing dishes). Fresh blackberries for dessert.

Pet the living things you love; research has proven that besides being comforting for the object of your affection, it has health benefits for the person doing the petting too, like lowered blood pressure and stress-hormone levels.

Avoid juggling porcupines.

Very nice. I really like seeing hard working trucks modeled so well.

Scrambled eggs and brains is a hearty, protein rich breakfast.

Life is what gets in the way of hopes and dreams.

Part of the reason I liked styles in the '50s was because you could usually tell in an instant, from any angle, if people were women.

Are you referring to the 1964 Chrysler powered Tork Master Special driven by Kenny Safford? Do you need pix of the trans or the fluid coupling or the car? Just trying to get clear in my mind. EDIT: Daddyfink beat me to it.

Models of the 1950s, and the clothes they wore, appealed to my aesthetic sense much more than today's do.

It is often less difficult to actually do something than we worry it will be, but it is also sometimes much harder.

For dead-flat, I tend to rely on SEM self-etching black primer, mostly because I always have some in stock for real cars. Only problem is that it's pretty hot, and will easily craze SOME kit plastics. To get a little "sheen", rubbing it with skin oils from your fingers or a little fine compound will do well in some cases. I did some testing with Tamiya XF-1 flat black acrylic fairly recently, because I've never been happy with the black washes I've tried. It works great for me as a brush-applied wash for grilles and similar things, and with their X-20A thinner it airbrushes nice too. I bought some F-1 acrylic gloss black to try mixing custom semi-glosses, but haven't tried it yet. Dumbguy me ruined a nice brush though, with only half my brain in gear thinking I could clean out a "water based" paint after it dried. Nope, and no excuse, as I've used lotsa acrylics for painting paintings, and knew better. EDIT: As an aside, though I haven't tried Tamiya's rattle can semi- and flat-blacks, I've been pretty happy with everything I HAVE tried.

WWII ended shortly before I began.

Constant whining about the same old thing, practically every day, sometimes several times a day. I'm NOT referring to anyone here, but some people it seems would rather wallow in self-pity and waste time placing blame on others for relatively minor issues that any adult should be able to take in stride. 'Bout the only place I whine is right here, where I know nobody's day will be spoiled by me letting off a little steam.

I've been driving for something like 60 years, and this has been going on for as long as I can remember. I've only seen one spectacular head-on as a result, and barely avoided getting caught in it as the car shot off the corner of the oncoming semi like a billiard ball.

Cars and trucks made fairly recently often have door hinges that are welded to the body, and are impossible for the majority of DIYers to replace.

Getting the wheels in the dead center of the openings is something modelers often fail at, and few things jump out at me in a negative way like poorly-centered wheels. It takes a little effort to ensure wheels are centered in custom openings for drag cars, but to me it's entirely worth it. Most plastic molded axle housings you'll use on a drag car can accommodate the "wire" axles common in older kits...which means they'll also accommodate 1/16" brass or aluminum tube or brass or steel rod stock that's a little longer. If you carefully mock up the chassis with the rear suspension in place, and assemble it to the body being careful to get it in exactly the right position, then you can use the longer metal axle protruding from the axle past the body side to center the wheel/tire you want to use, and carefully trace around it on the body with a fine Sharpie or #2 pencil. Presto-chango, you now know that when you're done, your tire will be correctly centered in the wheel opening. I usually use a Dremel with a barrel-sander to rough-cut the marked wheel openings, then finish up with sandpaper wrapped around something of the correct diameter for the final opening I want, as described by several guys above. NOTE: It's considerably easier and more accurate in the long run to center the body cutouts to the rear axle, than to try fiddling with the rear axle later to center the wheels in the cutouts. The model below was heavily modified with all custom rear suspension, but even so, I was able to center the wheels in the openings by using the method above. NOTE 2: Though the tires may not appear to be dead-center because of the angle the photo was taken from, I assure you that, when viewed from the side, they are dead-on. NOTE 3: IF your tires protrude past the body sides like on this model (allowed in some classes, so do your research), for a realistic appearance, be sure to make your openings large enough and with enough clearance on top, so that your suspension could move sufficiently when the car "squats" under hard acceleration. Otherwise the body cutouts would cut right into the tires, and the car would have a very short and probably disastrous trip.

Late is better than never, or so I'm told frequently.

I've been kinda working on that since somewhere around the turn of the century, starting with what was back then open source code for an award-winning chatbot, and a mannequin rescued from a dumpster. Unfortunately, not something I've had enough time to devote to.

Exhaust gasses from burning coal for generating electricity in a power plant have been successfully cleaned of CO2, with the "greenhouse gas" used as a food source for algae that produce a green goo that can be further converted to diesel fuel, all yielding carbon-neutral energy sources.

Miles Davis is one of my all time favorite musicians.

Behavior is often interpreted differently by different observers.

I scramble chunked 1/3 lower sodium Spam with eggs and serve it on toasted everything-bagels smeared with cream cheese. Pretty tasty.

Just opened a jar of nuclear tuong ot toi Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce that's well past its use-by date. So far it hasn't killed me, but the stuff is so hot it practically glows in the dark, and I doubt any Earth bacteria could live in it.