Ace-Garageguy

You want ugly Miata? I'll give you ugly Miata. This Bizarro-world custom has to be the winner.

I think it looks OK in the photos, probably looks a lot better in person, but still seems to be a combination of styling elements lifted intact from other cars and not all that well integrated. If it's lighter than the recent ones, and as much fun to drive as the original, it'll do. I agree with Mr. Just. The Lotus Elan, which was THE major influence for the original Miata, was a light, taught, agile car that would run away and hide from most nose-heavy sloppily sprung American iron as soon as the roads got a little twisty. The original Miata was a Japanese version of the Lotus (which was fiberglass) in steel; it was also simple to work on and as reliable as a stone ax. It was a REAL sports-car, but usable as a daily driver. A friend of mine has a largish vehicle fleet (new stuff and old stuff) and his original Miata, with close to 200k on the clock, is his favorite car. The heavy, over-wrought Miatas of late are poseurs, wanna-be, nothing at all like the originals in spirit. Sports-car look-likes, not sports cars. I hope this one returns to its real-car roots.

I used to stay up late to watch her. Interesting girl, for sure. I wasn't convinced of the accuracy of the facial likeness until I saw your work with her makeup. Remarkable how much it actually looks like her once the hair goes on. What is the nominal scale?

Cool idea. I'm assuming from the flat cab rear panel that you're going to do a "roadster pickup" interpretation. Correct? One of the re-issued AMT engine parts-packs has a Corvair flat-6, an engine that was and still is a popular high-performance swap into VW-based vehicles.

I like the concept.

Post #6 made me think "that thing sure would look good with Deborah Harry IN it..."

TEST on a SPARE body and develop your procedures BEFORE you paint the model you care about. Once you learn how to shoot paint, you should be able to lay down a very smooth coat with almost no orange peel whatsoever. It takes practice. Also READ and UNDERSTAND the directions. If it IS a basecoat / clearcoat product, you will NOT get any decent gloss until it's cleared. There are metallic paints that are BASECOATS that HAVE TO BE CLEARED, and there are metallic paints that ARE NOT BASECOATS, and they MAY be cleared. If it IS a basecoat / clearcoat product with metallic sparklies in it, you DO NOT want to sand the basecoat AT ALL. That's why you need to learn how to shoot a smooth basecoat. If you get a grainy, orange-peeled metallic basecoat, you CAN sand it smooth with something fine like 1500 grit and then shoot another coat over it all. SOME solid color (non-metallic) basecoats will look fine if you sand them before clearing. SOME WILL LOOK LIKE CRAPP. TEST FIRST. You can SOMETIMES get away with sanding metallics that ARE NOT BASECOATS (ones that are only single-stage), but NOT ALWAYS. TEST FIRST.

Saw a White '73 Mustang on the way down to Buckhead. I see the car several times a month, at the same time of day, so it's obviously a daily driver. Clean car, shiny paint, looks like it's only a year or two old. Also saw a red Ferrari Mondial cabriolet on a trailer (behind a Dodge diesel dually) as I was getting back close to home.

You've definitely got the knack of getting the right look with your hot-rod builds. Proportions and stance are just right, and entirely believable. Another great looking model.

Definitely one of the best hot-rods I've seen on the web, period. The proportions, stance, parts choices, color and overall "look" are just exactly right. Great job.

One of my favorite ways to work in this hobby is rebuilding near-hopeless gluebombs and badly damaged old models. I always start the threads with photos of what I started with, and the WIP threads I've done on bomb-saves have been enthusiastically received. Here are links to two: http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/?showtopic=59708 http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=58538

Love to see gluebomb saves. Great colors on this one. That slotcar track looks pretty cool too.

Incredible model. Man, that's nice.

I agree with your dad...one of my all-time favorite birds too. Beautiful model. Glad you got to finish it for him.

Ah, Mr. most...I'm sure you've noticed on this very site the large number of folks who'll ask "what kit is that?" or "what color is that?" or "what are the wheels from?", etc., when all the information they're asking about was available in the first post of the thread. It's everywhere. I don't know if it's a massive failure of the educational system to teach reading-comprehension, or just widespread laziness.

I have to agree with dieseldawg142 (Dan Smith). The work on that truck is about as good as it gets. Anybody who wants to know how stuff that's done right looks...well, you need to read through the link he's posted.

Oh yeah, and the front overhang is way too long. Almost forgot. (Just my personal opinion. Yours may vary. No offense intended, so let's not all go spiraling out of control).

Carl, I have to agree that the Eleanor II looks pretty good. The basic lines of the little cars are nice, but what has always bothered me is the tall fender sheetmetal above the wheel openings. For some reason, I could accept it on the Pinto as just part of the design. When it morphed into a "Mustang" though, to me, the fenders always seemed too tall for the relatively short wheelbase.

For what it's worth, there's a really great looking, exceptionally well-detailed model posted recently on this site that uses a Vertex-style mag. It has the hair-part style of plug wiring, with all the wires on the left grouped together at the cap, etc. Does it spoil the model? Of course not...but it's instantly obvious to anyone who's ever worked with this type of mag in the real world. Correcting the error would not have required having the firing order right...just moving a couple of wires around to look like the real deal at first glance.

Fine model of an important historic car.

For anyone interested in the true history of hot-rodding and the way it really was back in the post-war years, this short silent film in a must-see. Several of the famoso cars of the day appear, as well as a host of unknowns. No fat-cat poseurs, no rat-rod poseurs, no air-conditioned semi-trucks full of support equipment. Just talented, motivated, skilled guys building fast cars from junk, learning as they went, and working up a sweat in the process. Pure non-commercial racing, with heart and soul.

GREAT JOB !!! Correcting the length of the too-short Monogram snapper body shell with the right-length nose makes a world of difference. This model has the right proportions for a '34, whereas most snapper-based models, however nicely built, do not.

I guess it's as much a McLaren as a one-off custom body on a Ferrari chassis, say by Scaglietti or Pininfarina, would still be a Ferrari. Or this supposedly Abarth-bodied '53 Ferrari 166 MM...

Really? That looks like 8 places to me...there are 8 individual holes the plug wires come out of. There are also different styles of caps for this basic design of mag... And there are several different designs of mag that have been used on cars at one time or another...like this one... Understanding leads to more accurate model building...if you WANT to build accurate, realistic models that represent full-scale reality. PS. There's a difference in "hair splitting" and "technical accuracy". People who build things that have to run well understand this.

A friend of mine has used the image of a Lambo 350GT that appears in a video game as the basis of his STL file that he's used to have Shapeways print him a 3D body shell in 1/24 scale. It's light on detail and a little rough, but certainly much less time consuming than starting from scratch to carve the same thing. It's symmetrical, too (which is challenging to achieve using traditional methods).