Ace-Garageguy

I haven't used Smooth-On products. I have, however, used a number of products made by Freeman Manufacturing for professional model building, prototyping, and mold-making / casting. If you need information, they have a FREE online series of instructional videos, here... http://www.freemansupply.com/video.htm Smooth-On also has a collection of how-to videos here... http://www.smooth-on.com/media.php

Agreed 100%. I want to maintain the instantly-recognizable A roadster shell this thing would have been built on. SCTA did actually have some rules as to how much a "roadster" shell could be modified before it became a "streamliner", and I'm already pushing what I remember as the limit to cowl mods as it is. I probably ought to look it up.

I love high-performance, whether packaged as hot-rods, exotics, tuners or Euro sports and rally cars. I even like lowriders and trucks, and certainly respect the work and skill it takes to make ANYTHING that's well-done. I could never possibly build everything I'd like to have available to drive, so modeling lets me mediate that disconnect somewhat. I don't think of myself as a collector, but when I look at my shelves, it's pretty obvious I'm more collector than builder. I just must like having all of that potential waiting for my particular muse to turn it into part of my creative vision. My own 1/25 scale junkyard that covers acres and acres... Kinda like having a gun...better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

Thanks again, everyone, for your continued interest and comments on this one. No toe-stepping going on Tim. I appreciate input and ideas. There is actually a reason I won't be blending the hard tonneau into the helmet-fairing. The tonneau is going to open, as is the hood and deck. The parts will be pinned together with the pins hidden. The story is that the tonneau would have to be hinged to enter the car (which it may actually be) and that the helmet-fairing would make it unwieldy for the driver to handle alone, if it was attached and faired in. The helmet-fairing is also kinda intended to represent an addition that the builders might have added to mediate some buffeting you could get with the windshield the way it is, at very high speeds. Might also pick up a MPH or two from a little more drag reduction. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Thanks for the interest on this one too, gennelmen. Last time i worked on her, I decided to replace the hood sides and make a factory-looking insert for the underside of the decklid. Got the pix for the decklid from a real car, and started drilling the valve covers for plug wires...broke my .015" drill bit. Once the '49/'50 lakes '28 has some primer drying, this one is first in line to re-boot.

My guess is that the Ecto wagon would have started life as a custom stretch-job in real life. Independent coachbuilders used to do limo and ambulance conversions of the big Caddys. You can stretch ONE chassis like Tom shows with cleanly-done sheet styrene parts and achieve an effect very similar to what a coachbuilt stretch job might look like underneath.

Man, I'm just not getting where this hostility comes from. Originally all I said is, for the last time "IF YOU LOVE OLD PORSCHES...", never "YOU HAVE TO LOVE OLD PORSCHES OR YOU'RE AN IDIOT", which is apparently what some of you perceive my meaning to be. Now it's been turned into a "love fest". Gosh...I didn't know that that was the thread I started. I think it's sad to see ANY cool old car left to rot. I know that old cars will run forever if maintained and repaired correctly, and if stored with just a tiny little bit of applied intelligence, they can last outside for many many years until somebody gets to them. Senseless destruction is stupid, wasteful, and sad to watch. Just my opinion. Yours may vary.

Thing is Snake, I KNEW the problems with the old AMT 4-eyed Corvettes, and bought it anyway because I LIKE the box art. I just might have had second thoughts had there been a pic of the model on top to remind me of its shortcomings, rather than the illustration. After the second thoughts, I probably would have bought it anyway. The kit WILL become something I've been thinking of for a while, without having to hack up a nice Revell '62, which would have cost a lot more than the $11 I paid for the AMT kit on the clearance table. I'm HAPPY with the AMT kit, as it has some kool old parts and very nice tires. And I like the box illustration so much, I'll probably cut it out and frame it. EDIT: Thanks Greg. You posted just before I did.

What he said !

This is an interesting two-sided thingy. On the one hand, I prefer the stylized illustrations from an aesthetic and emotional standpoint, BUT (big but) I prefer to see how the model actually looks from a "how hard is it going to be to get it to look like the box-art" standpoint. No way I would have bought the AMT "Sock it to Me" Corvette (expecting it to be a good base for the results I want, anyway) if there had been a decent photo of the front of the thing, and the chassis, on the top of the box. No matter how cool the illustration is, I'd really appreciate seeing a box-stock photo of the built model, big enough to tell how good or bad it really is, on one of the long sides of the box. This was the last one that really p'd me off. You can NOT build the box-top version shown without aftermarket parts...like wheels and tires. I'd expected everything necessary to be in the box. Nope. Not in the one I bought, anyway.

Thanks Scott. This is another one I'd build in 1:1 if I had the resources. Thank the gods for modeling.

So...this is pretty much what I had in mind at the beginning, a cross of an old asphalt car and a dry-lakes roadster, and about as slick as you could get without building a belly-tanker or streamliner. There's some tweeking to be done, but this is the look. The only real deviation from this mockup will be to a switch to skinnier front tires, for a little aero-drag reduction. This is where the "work" part of the build starts for me, and where I usually flame-out...doing all the less creative final fitting, sanding, detailing, etc. Gonna try to keep her going this time. We'll see.

I got Lefty to sit in the car while I started mocking up the wind-screen. I'm going to copy the way Monogram did it on their old Kurtis Indy car, so it snaps into place. Nice engineering there, so you can only put a dot of glue on each end to keep it from coming out, and you're done. Being an inanimate object, Lefty has infinite patience. He didn't mind sitting in the car while I started building up a helmet-fairing from sheet and strip styrene. (Lefty got his name after a near-tragic bench mishap, during which his right arm was lost. It reappeared as I was cleaning and packing to move, and was re-attached.) While I was in Bondo mode, it seemed like a good time to take the center bellypan, fixture it to a good '29 shell, and begin the final shaping so it will actually fit well. The helmet-fairing is progressing here too. For the rear bellypan, I'll be using sections from the unit under Revell's classic Orange Crate kit. I had a painted glooey one, so I'll cut that up instead of a new one. Here's the rear pan in progress, with the louvered center-rear section cut from another original Ala Kart gluebomb. I actually bought several of them specifically to salvage the louvered bits for this project.

Thank you ALL for the interest. This version of the very nice Revell '50 Ford F1 pickup includes the Ardun parts

Wow. I'm sure he liked it much better cruising in top gear. The first one I had was a '58 A coupe, bought for $600. It was relatively solid, ran fine, and had tons of previous bodywork, bondo, and a puke-yellow enamel paint job. I started restoring the car in my complimentary bay at the shop where I worked, but after the owner was arrested (by the Justice Department, for federal parole violations...I had always wondered how we could support a racing team on the volume of work we turned out, but "don't ask, don't tell" was my motto those days), I lost my shop space. I put the disassembled car in the basement of the grandmother of a good friend, and worked on it on weekends. Stripped to bare steel. Then there was a flood. A "100 year event". Body, engine, leather interior, instruments, everything submerged in muddy water for some time. It became a body-parts donor for several others. Everything else was destroyed.

Very interesting project. Do you have a link to the article? I'd like to see how they've dealt with the uneven-fire problem encountered when building a V-12 on 90 degree V8 block architecture.

And let's add that there's no accounting for taste. That should settle what is somehow on the verge of becoming contentious, when all I intended was to say "hey fellow Porsche fans, isn't this sad ?". Never was my intent to attack what someone else may like, nor was my intent to start another idiotic "mine is bigger" argument. But feel free to feel slighted or threatened, please. In this PC world we now live in, even the most innocent statement offends someone. I guess I should have put in a disclaimer... "In no way is this post intended to imply, even a tiny little bit, that Porsches are in any way special or better than other cars, even though they have a stellar history of high-performance and competition success. All the nothing-mediocrities sold by the millions as passion-free transportation have exactly equal value as Porsches, and should be lamented equally (or not, depending on the personal perspective, lifestyle, sexual orientation, gender, ethnic background and culture of the viewer) when seen to be rusting away, unnecessarily, due to neglect and stupidity. And as cars are all equal machines of equal emotional value to everyone, it is expected that they will all rust and rot away and no one should care, unless they want to (again depending on the personal perspective, lifestyle, sexual orientation, gender, ethnic background and culture of the viewer)." Everybody happy now?

No feathers ruffled. I see some cars as rolling appliances with zero soul. Junk 'em, crush 'em, melt 'em down and recycle the materials. I see other cars as kinetic sculpture, with the passion and genius of their designers apparent in every line, curve, and mechanical sound. it would be kinda sad to see a Monet leaning against a tree covered in bird crapp because the clueless owner couldn't make the distinction between a picture clipped from a magazine, and art.

Me too. The not-so-hot front end scaling and proportions on this kit just scream for some streamlining to hide the flaws. Ought to look great as a lakes car. That one-piece blobular chassis could benefit from a full bellypan to hide it too.

Black's bad rep is more misconception than anything else. What makes black "tricky" on real cars or models, is that when it's very glossy, it shows EVERY flaw or wave in the underlying bodywork. Also, it shows surface imperfections like orange peel. White, on the other hand, minimizes the visibility of flaws. Get your prep right, get your bodywork straight, and get a good smooth finish with a clean gloss and your black paint will be fine. A flat black basecoat with a clear topcoat can look great. So can a straight gloss black. This is cheapo Ace Hardware gloss-black rattle-can lacquer, sanded and polished...

Ummm...see guys, what the title said is "IF you love old Porsches" etc. It doesn't say everyone has to weep and wail and wring their hands. Nor does it say Porsches are exempt, or anything of the kind. I happen to love Porsches, own several, and the convertible up top would be worth well over $100,000 restored if it's a Speedster. That's all. I don't give a tinker's damm about boring 4-door Buicks left to rot or melted down to make boring Toyotas. But Porsches are kinda special. Last time I looked, I wasn't the only person who thought so. I would be just as sad to see a bunch of once-savable FireDome hemi DeSotos and finned Red Ram hemi Dodges in the same condition...especially if the location was, as here, supposedly on the grounds of a "restoration" shop. Guess they couldn't afford concrete blocks to get the cars out of the mud, and cheap tarps. As usual though, it seems I've offended some delicate sensibilities. My most sincere apologies.

I build hot-rods for a living now, and still enjoy working on my own stuff. 'Course, when I worked on production cars, I pretty much didn't want to even see a car after I left the shop.

Is that an SR-III Motorsports chassis, or something else?

Quite a few got painted. It was really tricky to buff out minor damage on the brushed stainless, so some owners opted for paint. Getting paint to stick to it was problematic, too. To see a bunch, Google "painted DeLorean" . Some got hot-rodded too, and then there are these...

I was really rooting for John Z there at the outset. Unfortunately, the car got compromised WAY too much, and became a slow, too-costly pig in the process. Lotus did the best they could with it, but from the beginning, there was no real clear vision of exactly what the car would be...only that there would be a car to poke GM in the eye with. I think if he had been just a little less ambitious, and had been content to start with a limited-production car that was completely developed and performed very well, he might have made it. Better to employ 100 people for a long time and build the business slowly, adding to the workforce to keep up with demand, than to try to bite off half the elephant immediately. Hard to chew such a big mouthful, you know? The price the thing finally came in at...well, it was delusional to think there would be as large a market for the car as was projected. At any rate, I'm glad he got off the drug charges. That always smelled too much like a setup to me, even at the time.