Ace-Garageguy

Every time I've looked at swapping Revell Boyd T bodies on to AMT fenders, it's worked fine. I've measured the things and they're really all pretty close. The turd in the Buttera and Buttera-derived kits (the itty bitty '34) is the Ford engine and automatic gearbox. They ARE significantly underscale...which is unnecessary, as a correctly-scaled smallblock Ford 289-302 etc. will fit. It's tight, just as it is shoehorning a little Ford V8 into a real T, but it goes in there.

'32 rails under a '26-'27 has been a popular look for quite a while... You can build jus' about anything on '32 rails...

Everything looks really good from here.

Yup. Real silence would be nice. Oh well.

Cool tip. I see it's time for more experimenting. How many coats of metalizer are you using to allow this?

Beautiful model of a beautiful car. Love the colors. The classic Packards are the epitome of understated elegance to me. Not flashy or showy, just clean and rich looking. Always loved the '41 180 Darrin (Banacek's car), too. Almost bought a running 110 sedan, cheap, thinking I'd rebody it from the cowl back and do a Darrin clone. Then found the 180 wheelbase and front fenders / hood are longer on the 180. Plan abandoned.

I'm thinking this new kit may get a lot of guys doing mods they might not have thought they could tackle earlier. Just like in building real hot-rods, what you can do with this new kit will be limited only by your imagination, and your willingness to step out of your comfort zone and do some hack-n-whack. Researching how it's been done for 60 odd years on the real cars will go a long way towards getting into these things, too. One of the big hard parts, narrowing a '32 chassis to work under a '28-'29 shell, has already been done apparently...and the other Model A frame comes pre-zeed. Those two kinda big-deals remove a lot of the critical alignment issues new scratch-bashers may have trouble with, and make it easy to focus on other stuff. Building a hood for an A with a '32 grille shell is just about the perfect introductory project for someone interested in getting into scratchbuilding body parts. The hood needs no compound curves, and if the body and grille are firmly jigged, it's easy to make a VERY accurate pattern from card-stock or masking tape. Then just lay the pattern on .020" styrene sheet, cut it out with a sharp X-acto, and bend it under hot water to shape. Done. I'm wanting a boxcar load of these kits, frankly. No more endless scrounging other kits and gluebombs. Happy modeling !

Thanks for the link. Great quality stream. I vividly remember the day Bruce McLaren was killed while testing a CanAm car at Goodwood in June 1970. Appropriate they're racing McLarens on this AM's stream. Got to remember to get set up to get the live LeMans feeds this year.

Yup, and it's probably been done ten thousand times in steel or aluminum, full scale. You'd think that "modelers" might be able to handle the job in a 1/25 scale piece of plastic.

The Barracuda the Barris Fireball 500 is based on is a 3000+ pound car. The Barracuda had higher-horsepower optional V8 engines to handle towing, and there was a factory towing package as an available option too. The race car and trailer combo probably exceed the recommended factory tow weight limit, but hey, you could get away with it if you're careful. Disc brakes and a limited slip diff were also available in '66...good for towing too.

I'm certainly not trying to get a flame war starting again, but I just don't get that attitude. If I told my employers or clients that...you know, people who PAY me to do a job... I'd be out of work and on food stamps. Last week I cut a piece of hose 1/2 inch too short on a custom AC install I'm doing in the '47 Caddy. I also decided I'd rather have a 45 deg. #8 service-port fitting at the compressor than the 90 deg. fitting I originally specified. Who do you think pays for the replacement hose, the new fitting and shipping? I do. Who does the rework for free? I do. Voluntarily. Mistakes happen? Yeah, they do. And I eat my own. I don't try to pass off half-assed work as "good-enuf". But maybe I oughta try it. Seems to be "good enuf" for so many of you all here. Nah. I'll do it right. There's a principle here. Remember those?

Hmmmm...not saying you're not correct, but I'm still peripherally in the body-shop biz, and the paint stores around here have a minimum amount they'll mix...because it's done to a formula by weight. Usually a quart, sometimes a pint if you're lucky. Probably a minimum of $50 US here. Some paint stores MAY be able to mix very small modeler-friendly quantities, but I haven't found one in 40 years (that doesn't mean they're not out there).

Frankly, my own criticisms of shoddy work are backed up by a career often heavily involved in developing and manufacturing parts for the high-performance automotive and aviation industries. I didn't have something to copy, like the kit makers do. I had to start with a need, and a clean sheet of paper. Make it work, make it economically, and make it on time. And look good. I simply did not have the option of multiple re-works and re-designs, and often when I was doing freelance design work (which I still do) if my first design had deficiencies of any sort, I'd be held accountable for the second and subsequent prototypes, and corrections to tooling if necessary. We're talking serious money out of my pocket if I didn't hit it dead-on, first time. Personal accountability and just giving a damm, and putting more effort into providing job-one quality than excuses when it's lacking...that's what's necessary. And one more time: I LIKE the Revell '57 Fords I have multiples of. Overall they're very nice kits. I'll correct the flaws when I build them. BUT I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO.

Well, I'm retrofitting my old '89 GMC shop truck with a carb and HEI distributor after the computer and associated bits went belly-up. What looked like a real piece of cake going in has turned into a loose-ends fest, with the EGR location needing to be turned into a heat source for the automatic choke, a bypass fuel pressure regulator that avoids having to drop the tank to change pumps, all weird and wonderful fittings on the GM fuel injection supply and return hoses that don't screw into anything I have for old US or Euro cars...so I'm having to make up fittings, the fact the pump is computer-controlled, so I have to bypass that circuit too...it's gonna be a while. Still, it's mine, and when it's done I don't have to worry about ancient EFI electronics failing on the road...and anything that DOES fail is an easy parking-lot fix.

It's warm and dry. Walked to the bank and the grocery store, started working on the 10-speed bike. Sat in the sun for an hour and got caught up reading my Desktop Engineering and Design News mags. Had a great tuna / tomato samwidge, now working outside on some of my own vehicles and projects. No huge deadlines hanging over head at the moment, and all fires, if not out, are at least under control. Some days it's actually pretty nice to be alive...even though the pretty Russian girl at the bank wasn't there today.

The whitewall slicks for the Orange Hauler also came in the Hurst Hairy Olds (4 of 'em). The slicks and the same front tires as the OH are also in the old Monogram Modified kits. The wheels are different. The front tires for the Orange Hauler also appear in the Predicta kit, and all 4 wheels in the Predicta are the same design as the Orange Hauler too. The whitewall inserts in the Predicta and the wheels MAY NOT exactly fit the OH slicks though. The front tires in the Orange Hauler are also very similar to those used in several other Monogram kits, like the '56 T-Bird, but the wheels are different.

I'm really at a loss to understand how the other company could just refuse to pay the claim if you refused to let them total the car. I've never had this happen in my state...SOMEBODY HAS TO PAY...and if you elect to retain the vehicle and accept the maximum amount the other company will pay for repairs, even if you have to kick in the rest, it's your right to do so. In about 2003, one of Allstate's insured hit my '89 T-bird that was a creampuff I'd bought from an airline captain. He bought it new, cared for it, all-highway-miles blablabla and at 130,000 miles was virtually a new car. I paid well over book because the car was so nice. When it was hit (still drivable, safely, by the way) Allstate wanted to total it. I negotiated the 99.9% payment they'd go before totality, and used the bucks to buy first-quality parts. Did the repairs myself, and returned the car to pre-loss condition.

Because, simply, and like so many other players in American business, they USED to give good service and value. 2005 was the last time I had to deal with automobile insurers on a profassional, daily basis. At that time, State Farm was still one of the best, but the nit-picking on paperwork and nickel-diming on collision repair costs was beginning to change the game, and they went the way of the cheap insurance providers, requiring either aftermarket or junkyard (LKQ for the PC industry euphemism..."like kind and quality") parts for cars over 1 year old, etc. I actually had one State Farm weenie-swinger refuse an estimate because the way I'd written it resulted in a 12 cent discrepancy from what his own preparers came up with when they "checked" it. "Checked" by idiot "associates" with no field experience and zero knowledge of how a car even went together. TWELVE CENTS. When I was offered a job back in the general aviation industry, doing structural-composite repair design-and-development, I jumped at it. The legions of moron MBA holders who've taken over US business and don't give a rat's buttocks for service or value, and ONLY see shaving costs to pump today's bottom line...and the people in "management" who encourage them...well, "there's your problem". Business should be about more than just profit. When it isn't, this is what you get.

Ohio's government Department of Insurance has a consumer hotline number: 800-686-1526. You might want to call them. Mary Taylor, your Lieutenant Governor, is also the head of the Ohio Dept. of Insurance. This is their website (unfortunately it appears to be down at the moment): http://www.ins.state.oh.us/ PS: It's been my experience that vehicles in a garage are not usually covered by homeowners insurance, and other valuable items like art, antiques, firearms, tools and models often need to be listed specifically on the policy in order to be adequately covered. Getting dumped for "too many claims" in the circumstances you describe is BS however, and that's why states have insurance regulators to call.

Absolutely correct.

I've experimented with the stuff enough to find it works best for me to shoot it over a gray primer that closely matches the base color of the particular metalizer you're using. I'll sand the primer surface to about 1200 grit wet. ANY flaws in the prep will show in the final product. Metalizer fills absolutely nothing. That's why the 400 / 600 grit sanded surface works for the "brushed" effect. Then, for a convincing polished finish, shoot the metalizer as wet as you can without running it. It will slick out and lie very flat with no visible grain (at least, not visible without magnification). 3 coats, with plenty of flash time in between. Let it dry and harden up at least overnight. Then polish it with a VERY soft cloth, and it looks exactly like almost-full-polished metal (not quite...full-polish is as glossy as chrome and metalizer just won't do that). The gray primer gives you a little cheat room if you happen to polish it thin on edges. That's the reason for shooting 3 coats, too. If you shoot it grainy and dry, you can NOT polish the grain out. It will look like a cast metal part that has the peaks of the rough-cast surface polished, but the grain will remain.

I don't know what your state's insurance laws allow, or if things have changed here since 2005 when I was last in the biz, but I've many times successfully negotiated with insurance companies to pay the client the maximum for repairs (just under the "total" threshold for the particular vehicle), and let the client / owner of the vehicle make up the difference. One shop I ran put together a low-interest financing package to help people who didn't have the ready cash to jump the gap. Timing is critical on deals like these, because once the car is declared a "total loss", it can be very difficult (if not impossible) to go backwards. "Stated value" insurance can also be useful if you have a particularly nice example of an older vehicle. In many cases, if you shop, you can get no annual mileage cap, and it's surprisingly affordable, as the actuarial tables show this type of client has far fewer "accidents" than the norm.

Yup.

Here's the 2015 FIA regs and classifications for vehicles attempting world records... http://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/basicpage/file/20141218/Appendix%20D%20-%202015.pdf Here's a recent overview of the SCTA class breakdowns http://www.hotrod.com/events/coverage/hrdp-1301-salt-101-bonneville-racing-guide/ And this from the horse's mouth... http://www.bonnevilleracing.com/find-your-car-classification-for-bonneville/