Ace-Garageguy

Modeling helps keep me relatively sane, I'm sure. It's usually the only area of life that isn't subject to other people's needs, wants, desires and schedules. It's nice to be 100% in control of the design of a project, and to be able to make all the decisions regarding it...and to work on it at my own pace, without the constant deadlines and cost-constraints I'm usually under.

Welcome to the forum, Josh. Glad you came here to get advice before ending up with a disappointing paint job. Like you, I'm hyper-critical of my own work too, and I don't accept solutions that kinda work pretty good most of the time.. I do a lot of heavy mods using bondo as a filler, get consistently good results, but there are several factors to consider. 1) Some of the more recent kit plastics are a lot softer than they were years ago, and react with the primers...often causing swelling, ghosting, or even crazing. All you can do is to apply relatively light coats of primer, and give it at least 10 minutes of "flash" time between coats. This allows the solvents more time to evaporate out the top of the primer, rather than being trapped where they may be more likely to soften underlying plastic. 2) It's imperative your bondo is mixed correctly, which I'm sure you got right. If somehow it got too little hardener, it will shrink every time primer hits it. I had been doing bodywork for years on 1:1 cars and thought I had it down, but mixing the really small quantities you need for a model can be a challenge 'til you've done a lot of it. 3) When you're filling surface details, it's sometimes best to sand them away, leaving a depression where they were, and to build your filler up to the level of the surface again. This can be a factor because, if you don't thoroughly scuff down inside what you're trying to fill, the bondo may not adhere well down inside the filled detail, and may pull away in places, squirming around and making the surface forever unstable. You can't kill imperfections in an unstable surface. 4) I get ghosting of bodywork showing through, just like you have there, all the time now...again, primarily due to the difference in hardness and shrink between the filler and the kit plastic. All I've ever found that works is to do what you've been doing, but when you sand next time, try to only take enough primer off the surface to eliminate the raised ghost-marks, but don't go deep enough to see the plastic again. Spray several light coats, give them plenty of time to flash, sand with 600 grit wet or finer, and repeat as necessary. When you can spray a medium coat of primer with nothing lifting, you're done. Let it shrink in for a week or so, sand one final time with around 1000 grit, wet, and paint. I chopped the top on the car in this link, and the sail panels and mold seams all over the car gave me the same kind of grief you're having. Patience finally won out, and it looks the same today as it did in these shots taken 2 years ago...no long-term ghosting either. http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=58430 PS: You're going to get a lot of differing advice. The only way to be sure you'll have a solution that works every time for you is to experiment until you have a procedure you're happy with.

Wow. Impressive resto. Very very nice, especially considering you were able to get it to look that good without paint.

Cute little bugger. Nice job. What's the double-blower-sucking-through-Webers-setup from?

"Wrinkling" of enamels is very often caused by shooting a second coat of paint outside of the recoat-window. Most enamels will say on the label something to the effect of: "apply additional coats within one hour or after 72 hours"...or something like that. Re-coating outside of those times, you'll often get the subsequent coat attacking the first coat, and it all wrinkles up as if you'd put paint stripper on it. Variations in temperature and humidity can play merry hell with the recoat window too. How long are you waiting before applying your second coat? And what do the directions on the can say? The most common problem styrene modelers have with Fusion is crazing, as it's a "hot" paint, and will actually attack some un-primered plastic, causing a very fine wrinkled appearance. The wrinkling becomes etched into the surface of the plastic, and pretty well ruins the model surface.

Wow. My cat's about worn out. I'll have to order something from them if they're giving away cute little pussies with every package.

Yes, and the "street rod" variant of the 5-window kit is the same way...only late-model suspension, nothing stock. I would have bought a lot more of each of them (sedan and 5-window) had they been true 2'n1, with both running gear options in the same box, but because they forced the issue, nah. I can't imagine it really would have cost that much more to put both sets of trees in one kit. And I can only imagine having both major options would sell more kits overall, but who knows.

And BMW is working hard to bring down the cost of carbon fiber by 90%, as well as developing mass-production methods using the materials. I'm aware of what's being published, and progress is being made. My point though, which everyone always fails to grasp, is that two of us, working alone in a hangar in Arizona, and with zero outside funding, developed procedures for repairing aircraft a well-funded manufacturer of composite-structure aircraft, with a computer-backed engineering staff, said were impossible. Meetings and conferences don't get this shitt done. Building and testing to destruction in the back-shop is the ONLY way to compile enough data to build CAD programming that's competent to predict structural crash performance. I got out of the engineering consulting business because I got so sick of hearing constantly that every advance has to cost millions of dollars, employ hundreds of people, and is otherwise impossible in today's tech-dependent world. BS. I was introduced to composite aircraft structures in the early 1980s, immediately saw the potential for automotive applications, and have a pretty solid overview of what's been accomplished, and what hasn't, since then. In the mid-1990s, I was attending conferences myself and was very excited about where things seemed to be going. I was one of 5 or 6 companies in the US represented at a conference at Battelle in Columbus, Ohio, in 1996, concerning commercialization of a wide range of composite-material technologies. (5 or 6 companies. Pathetic. That's how little interest there was in developing long-term lightweight solutions back then. It ALL could have been done by now, if anybody with vision and bucks had wanted to do it.) The other attendees included Lockheed, a ladder manufacturer, and a human-prosthetics manufacturer. No car companies. But for whatever reason, the explosion of development I expected in the field never materialized. I guess it was too tempting to go on conducting business-as-usual, pretending that oil would last forever.

And as long as there are more people arguing why it can't be done than are trying to develop ways to do it cost-effectively, well, like the man said...it can't be done. The part of my career I spent as an "aircraft mechanic" revolved around developing non-factory repair procedures for Cirrus aircraft composite structures that the factory insisted were impossible to implement in the field. We proved them wrong, and to my knowledge, are still the only people who have ever spliced the entire empennage and aft fuselage of one Cirrus to the crashed fuselage of another one (3 times now) and achieved full FAA certification and acceptance for the procedure. I have photo logs of all of the work, should anyone feel like challenging the truth of my statements. The difficulty developing crash-worthy composite vehicle structures may stem from the fact that the ones tasked to do so haven't spent their entire lives immersed in gathering empirical results, from hands-on experience with the materials and structures, and lack the "feel" to know which way to head. Computer design does not provide solutions where loads of empirical data is lacking. One of my own vehicle designs, shown in my avatar, has an entirely composite structure. Early computer models indicated its crash performance would be similar to that of a small conventional car, and "back-shop" testing of sample structural elements backed that up.

As David said, it depends on what kind of headers you're wanting. The AMT Phantom Vickie headers David mentioned come from this kit ... They look like this from the side, and are the old-school short-primary, megaphones with a dump for a full-length muffled system underneath... (NOTE: The red Vicky below is NOT MY BUILD. I need to make sure nobody thinks I'm trying to take credit for it. ) The headers in this particular build (the one I'm doing here) are made for a Lincoln but have primary spacing suitable for a Chrysler 392 also, and come from this kit...

You missed the point. My response there was targeted to a remark made by another poster that the wiring and computers that support all the onboard bells and whistles in contemporary cars are in large part to blame for the excessive weights. My point was that the aircraft referenced has a lot more onboard capability, but the wiring somehow doesn't make it too heavy to fly. Cirrus doesn't use any magical helium-filled wires or titanium computers. The wiring, connectors and computers in the aircraft are no more expensive than the comparable bits in an automobile, other than the added cost of being FAA certified for flight applications. That certification would not be necessary for surface vehicle use, naturally. Lessons can be learned from looking at the way other industries deal with weight-saving, just as Cirrus could have built a better, cheaper airplane had they studied the way the Germans perfected fiberglass aircraft manufacturing many years ago (The Cirrus design requires many many hours of hand fitting and finishing, filling, fairing, painting and polishing. German sailplanes come out of the molds needing only very minor light sanding and polishing of the mold-seams. The German production methods could easily have been adapted to the Cirrus, shaving considerable cost from the aircraft. In the same way, looking at the way aircraft electrical systems save weight, car builders might find ways to cut weight without adding cost.)

I've heard several versions of the story over the years. This one seems credible... http://www.sportscars.tv/Newfiles/66fordbuyferrari.html Here's a slightly different spin, from another angle, and after the deal fell through... http://www.automobilemag.com/features/racing/0909_henry_ford_ii_vs_enzo_ferrari_great_rivalries/

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet " Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet And I'm pretty sure dog vomit would still smell like dog vomit even if its translation in another language meant "essence of springtime in paradise"

Just beautiful !! Biggest grin I've had all day.

Are your great "Betty" decals going to be available, or is this a one-shot deal for this model only?

I have a recently acquired female friend who's into the '50s look, but she does the big-girl, grown up and sophisticated thing, like this... rather than the poodle-skirt thing, like this... The whole nine yards too. She makes me very happy I can still see. Oh yeah...and smell her Chanel.

LeMans was a tough nut to crack when Ford went up against Europe's best back in the '60s too. GM's best guys have done a pretty impressive job steamrolling everything else in the Corvette's class for years, and one big reason I'll probably try to find a clean-one-owner C5 in not too long. It'll be great to see what kind of rabbits Fords magicians can pull out of their hats with the new GT.

Really nice. Love seeing somebody take time and effort to save a nice old model rather than just tossing it. Looking great. (I have one too, just for a diversion).

I used to have a split 55 gallon drum lying on its side, 3/4 full of the solution, behind the resto shop. Lockable, hinged steel lid. Used it to strip grease and paint from ferrous parts prior to bead- or sandblasting. Wonderful stuff...if you're careful with it. Destroys aluminum, though.

Poor little car. That's about the worst I've seen.

Yes. But definitely worth a Google search, you know, just to make absolutely sure... PS. You guys know there's a full-scale flying replica of the R2 built in 1991, right? Also, the Lindberg / Pyro kit that is listed as 1/32 actually scales out to about 1/26 (only the pilot figure is 1/32). The L/P model has some glaring inaccuracies like ribbed wings, but it's a great starting point for a fine model.

Made me smile too. Cute little bugger.

Alex, try clicking this link. It should give you a bunch of topics to read on ways of doing these things. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amodelcarsmag.com+opening+doors&oq=site%3Amodelcarsmag.com+opening+doors&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.5932j0j8&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

VERY nice.