Ace-Garageguy

The real '36 Ford hood opens like this...not easy to do with a model in 1/25 scale. One of our members built the model in this video, and if you watch, you'll see that if you fit the hood sides carefully and glue them to the hood top, you can remove the entire hood assembly to view the engine.

Well, Casey makes some of the best looking, cleanest, most defect-free parts I've ever seen, period. I make fiberglass parts that are pretty nice too.

If you look around a bit, you'll see that just about everything on the forum between Nov. 25 / 26 and yesterday is gone. Hopefully it will be recovered shortly.

Google "model railroad snow". Everything you could want to know. (That rhymes. )

If you're interested, this company (that makes a full line of the products professional tool and model builders use regularly) has produced an excellent series of FREE videos on master and mold making, including release agents, available to watch online HERE... http://www.freemansupply.com/video.htm

SiliconE. SilicoN is sand. Don's absolutely right by the way. The mold will duplicate even the TINIEST flaw on the surface, including talcum powder, and transfer that flaw to every single part you make from the mold. My own molds will have a 400-grit-sanded surface if the final sanding of the master was done with 400, a 1000-grit-sanded-surface if the final sanding was done with 1000, or mirror-polished if the master was mirror-polished. The parts made in the molds duplicate that surface as well. Baby talcum powder most likely also has some kind of skin conditioner like lanolin in it, and unknown chemical contaminants should be avoided.

Maybe all the forum posts after Nov. 25 or 26 have fallen under somebody's bench, and the cat ate them.

Yeah, they can take the whole idiotic "black Friday" concept and flush it. There's no WAY I'd get in that milling pushing glazed-eyed grappling greedy hoarding horde just to buy gifts supposedly to celebrate...''Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men". While we're flushing things, throw the terminally stupid "internet of everything" in there too. Who comes up with this tard stuff, and thinks it's good marketing to repeat it constantly over and over and over and over and over?... It's as pathetically overdone mindlessly driven-into-the-ground...already...as "awesome". A Space Shuttle launch was actually "awesome". Not a lot of other stuff really is, now is it?

Oh man...when I read the topic header "why are you here" I thought we'd get into some deep philosophy. Oh well. Seriously, most of the cars I build these days are things I'd like to build in 1:1 if I had unlimited time and money, or just wild-hare (hair?) "what if?" concepts. Welcome to the forum.

Very true. The cellulose fibers in model airplane tissue are relatively long, and when wet-out with epoxy or CA, perform exactly the same function as the glass fibers in fiberglass.

Micro works fine as a filler to bulk something up, but has almost no strength. Just remember that if you're going to be doing more heavy shaping on your part, you might like something with more reinforcement.

Gary, I noticed you recently checked in on my Phoenix project over at http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=58538. The nice thing about the f'glass technique is that you form the new part right on the car, using the mold you made from the donor. That's my preferred technique. This has the two advantages of 1) letting the new part be made in absolutely correct alignment and 2) you don't destroy the donor in the process. BUT...If you need to replace a large area and elect to splice in good styrene from a donor, it's easier to replace an entire quarter panel or fender, where the seams can be hidden on door cut-lines, etc. Just like on a real car, you don't have to get into making, shaping and finishing splices in the middle of a panel, so doing a much larger section is often much less work, with better results. If you have a smaller area, say just the lower rear section of a quarter panel, cut your donor a little oversize from what you think you'll need. Neaten the edges up, and then trace them VERY carefully on the body you want to repair. Make your cuts undersized on the receiving body, and slowly file to fit your patch panel exactly. I agree that using liquid glue or the combo you've mentioned is better than using CA for the initial placement. Once you get some practice doing these splices, you can pretty well gauge how much your seam edge will "melt'in" when you glue it, and you can get just a little molten plastic squeeze-out as you put everything together. Be sure to let it dry COMPLETELY (and be sure to check your alignment carefully before it sets up; the glued joints like that become quite strong). I also often use plastic strip "guides" on the back sides of joints to get panels aligned, but I also usually remove them after the splice is completely set-up. Even when splicing styrene panels in, I usually use fine fiberglass on the back of the splice for strength. Running a bead of toughened CA (like Loctite Ultra Gel) along the outside of the seam has worked well for me too. If you fit your parts closely enough, you may not need any additional filler. But if you DO need filler, I'd tend to use a 2-part polyester like Bondo Professional Glazing Putty (avaliable in small packages, cheap) The one-part putties like Squadron shrink (in my experience) and eventually, you'll see a seam ghosting through your paint.

I would absolutely positively recommend at least 30 minute epoxy and fine RC model plane glass cloth. Definitely stronger than glass and CA, or straight resin. I frequently reinforce seams with the stuff, and it's just about bulletproof.

Yup, a chisel-tip X-acto and some fine motor control, and you got it. Still a PITA.

Thanks for dredging this one up, gennelmen. Since last September I haven't had much modeling time at all. Real-life has been, as they say, too much with me. But I DID find a resin kit of this experimental prototype OHC Hemi at the recent NNL South event, and it's bumped the Phoenix to the first in line...when I get some more free time.

McKendree Spring, the first album. 40+ years later, it still means too much to me. '69 acoustic. Anybody remember Fairport Convention? British late '60s, '70s electric folk rock, they sometimes sound a little like early Airplane... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMrW46qP4mw

The GMC 302 cubic inch inline 6 was similar to Chevrolet 6-cyl. engines of the period, and was built between 1952 and 1960, if I recall correctly. Though the 302 block is taller and probably longer, in general the Chevy sixes available in 1/24 in the Monogram '53 Corvette kit (a Chevy 235) and the Monogram '53 Chevy kit look much like a 302, and should be a good starting point.

To swap a unibody shell on to another unibody chassis takes fabrication and engineering skills FAR beyond the abilities of most shops. I've seen a couple of attempts that were scary hack jobs under the shiny paint. Yours looks great though. Sure like to know the shop that did the job.

Forgot I had a Goya flat-top mahogany steel string acoustic back in the '60s. Beautiful guitar, but I never got much past playing a bunch of chords. And my fingers were a little too short for the width of the neck.

Exactly. It's a Google search instruction, not a web address, and has to be placed in the Google search box to work. An alternative is to open www.google.com, and place the site:modelcarsmag.com whatever term in the big Google search box there in the center of the screen... You're not going to the Model Cars Magazine site with this search instruction (which your browser thinks you want to do if you put the term in the site url window, and it doesn't recognize "site" as a valid prefix). What you're doing is instructing Google to search the modelcarsmag site for entries relevant to your search terms.

I used to play trumpet but lost my chops about 15 years back. Looked into a reed mouthpiece but never followed through. Sang and played a little bass with a couple high-school bands. Always wanted to play keyboards, bought a teach-yourself rig for the computer as a self-gift for this Christmas. Got an Irish tin whistle and a harmonica too.

I've been experimenting using frisket film for masking, cutting it into perfectly circular masks with a cutter tip in a compass. Rattle-can white vinyl spray made for car interiors works great on soft tires. I've also had decent results using an acrylic gesso and a good quality paint brush, putting a cut down wheel or wheel back in the tire, with an axle of some sort to slowly rotate it with a rechargeable drill. Gesso has very good coverage, will dry on vinyl tires (enamel will stay sticky) and dries to a flat finish. It takes some experimenting to get it thinned just right, but when you hit it (if you use a good, soft camel hair brush) the brush strokes will flow out as it dries, and you can control the edges of the whitewall quite well. All of that is not entirely easy though, which is why I've been working on the masking / spraying technique.

Sacre bleu . Je ai oublié que "frog rods" pourraient ne pas être politiquement correct .

A lot of you may already know this guy's work. If you don't, you should. Click here...http://www.garycampesi.com/concept-drawings-2/

"Superleggera" refers to the construction of the coachwork using thin-gauge alloy panels over a framework of small diameter steel tubing for support. "Lightweight" in this case refers to a particular variant of the DB4...with a lighter chassis intended for competition and bodied primarily by Zagato with, I believe, a chassis number suffix of "L" .