Ace-Garageguy

Saw my first BMW i3 today while I was walking to the grocery store. Neat looking car. Seems a lot more purposeful and adult than some eco rides out there. I could enjoy having one of these for reality, and a full-boogie 2002 tii for weekends.

Feelin' it at the moment. Intended to get up and on the bench early, when it was too cold to work comfortably outside. Got on here and blew most of the morning instead. Now it's warming up, and I've got big-boy things that have to be done...now. Bugger.

Yeah, poor little car.

I have several of those from the many different issues, and that's about the worst one I've seen. It IS correctable and will certainly help to build your skills if you decide to fix it. Kind of a PITA to have to do that much work on a "new" kit, but if you take it back, it'll just get trash-canned. Somebody here might be willing to trade for something else. I've saved a LOT worse...but I'm kinda weird.

Love the Pinto wagon. I bought a '74 big-bumper 2.3 liter automatic car for $100 long time back. Poor little bugger had oil-fouled two plugs, was running on 2 cylinders, and would barely move. "Mechanics" had diagnosed the problem as everything from carburetor to engine needing a full rebuild. Put new valve stem seals in it, drove it for about 6 months, and sold it to a new home for around $600. Good little car.

Well, if they've got the tooling in good shape lying around just getting rustier and dustier, running off one run of kits to test the waters for a potential market for others in the series makes pretty good business sense. IF it's a decent seller, more in the line can be put out. IF it's a flop, the expenditure can be written off. WAY cheaper to test-run one of these old tools that probably didn't get too many runs in the first place than to restore the tooling for something lots of US might want.

Correct. If you look carefully at the door details like the handle recess, its relationship to the character line, the shape of the side windows, and the shape of the windshield, it's pretty obvious what Zimmer started with here. The Revell kit would give you doors, roof, front and side glass, a firewall, floorpan, etc. Most of the rest of the body is fairly flat panels relatively easily scratch-built from sheet styrene. Even the grille shell is pretty simple. The fenders, as suggested above, could be sourced from a cheap Ebay gluebomb "classic" and modified to look right. Zimmer has also used other Mustang tubs for the basis of their gaudy, tasteless cars.

This question has come up before when a member was trying to model a particular Anglia gasser that ran Crower injection. There's lotsa Hilborn-look BBC stuff out there, but to the best of my current knowledge, the only 1/24-1/25 Crower-look injection setup is in the Accurate Miniatures 1/24 McLaren kits. They're kinda big for a 1/25 model. The slightly splayed injector bodies of the Crower units make tooling more difficult, in order to get the parts out of the dies after molding. Most of the "Hilborn" units in models have straight bodies (and many lack detail too) that makes them easy to de-mold from a simple die. The Accurate Miniatures injector bodies are molded lying on their sides in a split-die with details on both sides. This requires very accurate tool registration, and accounts for what passes for Hilborn in most kits being much simplified.

Excellent procedure, Barclay (road). I've used a very similar method several times and got results I was happy with (and I'm a picky SOB). What you say about "extreme caution" is true. Warm the model too fast or unevenly, or get it too hot, or tie it down too tight...plenty of ways to do more damage than good.

Great looking projects, both. Love 'em. Glad you're feeling somewhat better. I've had a few times when it seemed like a real challenge just to make it through the day, and getting back to modeling always gave me something to look forward to that didn't involve pressure, deadlines and other people's needs. Hang in there. I really like the old Offy powerplant.

Man, that is some rework. Looking great. Like the folks say, this needs to have molds pulled when you're done. Way too much work on this to be only a one-off.

I kinda like these Buicks...

So there's, like, a lot of quality and reliability differences between GM's lines? Really? Oh, riiiiiight. The people who answered the POLLS said so. Gee... how we perceive reality boggles the mind.

70 deg F yesterday, 23 forecast tonight. And most of the early daffodils didn't make it through the icy snots last week.

该死的是别克车在中国畅销。我们正变得跑狗胖屁股资本家就像你一样。

Lots of clean looking mods and fabrication going on here. Reminds me of a John Teresi project or two, and that's a good thing. You seem to have an eye for symmetry too, which is somewhat unusual.

What he said. I have an old corded variable-speed dinosaur, and it's great for removing a lot of material fast...which is helpful if you do heavy mods. The very thin composition cutoff wheels get a lot of use here too. But you DO need to kinda work up to using the old corded units on models. They're powerful for such small tools, turn fast even on low speeds, and will do a lot of damage very fast if not precisely controlled.

I'm sure you're right Steve, but for only $495 you can have your very own model of the current production (unbelievable) 4-door beauty. http://www.zimmermotorcars.com/index.php?page=your-very-own-model Wow. I want 3 of 'em.

Hmmm...unless I'm reading-impaired, the OP doesn't want a kit of the first car...the Panther DeVille (crapppy Bugatti clone). He wants a model of the second car, the one his nephews saw on the TV series "Once Upon a Time"...which is a Zimmer (post 6).

Hows 'bout a custom halftrack without the tracks?

Beautiful, beautiful work.

And now the engineering spec is for a lifespan of 90 days past the end of warranty.