Ace-Garageguy

You have some great stuff happeming here. And you're giving me a lot of ideas. Nice work. Real nice work.

Thanks guys...especially Art. If anybody would know this one, it's a good bet it would be he.

I've never really understood the desire to intentionally cause another person pain, shock, anger, discomfort or embarrassment. Somebody want to explain what's "fun" about doing nasty things to other people?

I'm kinda curious how the driver of the poor little '55 ended up with his legs out the windshield. Is there some new safety system here I don't know about? Harness bolted down with un-graded hardware-store bolts, in sheetmetal? No harness at all? Maybe it's the old theory that being thrown from the car is safer? Man...guy coulda had his legs cut clean off when it rolled.

I've looked. I've found 1/25, 1/24, 1/16 and 1/8. Anybody ever come across one in 1/12? Or does anyone have a recommendation for a good one in diecast? I've seen some pretty poor ones and a few OK ones in 1/18, but I need something accurate. Roadster with a good body, grille and frame, fenderless is fine. 1/12 only. I'm still searching, but I thought I'd ask if anybody knows, like, right off hand, or has a diecast they're particularly impressed with. EDIT: I found a 1/12 3-window coupe diecast. That's all so far.

Do what you want. When you kill someone and say "sorry...I didn't think anybody would get hurt. We were only having a little harmless fun", that really won't cut it. I've seen it happen. Practical jokes around machinery are stupid, dangerous and irresponsible, no matter if the target is "the biggest prankster" and the instructors "were in on it" or not. Feel free to think I'm a past-it old fart with no sense of fun. Or try "responsible adult".

The temperature at which plastic warps and takes a permanent shape is called the "glass transition temperature", or Tg. For common "polystyrene" that kits are made from, this occurs at about 100 deg. C, or 212 deg. F. The exact temperature depends on the exact plastic formulation. If there's been any weight on the boxes, the contents may have also "cold-flowed", and could be warped even if the temperatures were lower than 100 C.

Hmmm. I've never heard the term "oxidisers" applied to supercharged engines before, and I've been in this stuff for over 40 years. Maybe I'm ignorant. If so, Ill gladly accept being corrected. Nitrous-oxide could be considered an "oxidizer", as could nitro-methane, because they both make available additional oxygen for combustion. Far as the classes go, most of the early NHRA drag classes grew out of the dry lakes classes...which came first. My considerable recent research through a library of old SCTA material and post-war car mags pretty well seems to back this up, timeline-wise. At various times in drag racing, both an "S" on the end (like A/GS for class-A, figured on displacement-to-weight, Gas, Supercharged) and double-letter (AA, BB, CC) prefixes were used to denote "supercharged" (like AA/G, indicating displacement-to-weight class A, Supercharged, Gas). Cars running nitro-methane (which came to be called "fuel") displayed-display the letter "F" to denote this, as well as the other class letter-designations. AA/FD= Class A, Supercharged, Fuel, Dragster The specific letter-class designations also changed pretty quickly as drag racing evolved, and varied among sanctioning bodies, so in order to get historically accurate class markings on a model, it's necessary to know pretty narrowly the time-period it represents, and where it was running. One of the most famous of all the LSR Loewy Studebakers, the Belmont Sanchez car, did in fact run in class B/CC in 1958 or '59 at Bonneville, and broke 200mph, the first "stock-bodied" car to do so. The car is pictured below with the "taped-on" upright-headlight-fenders, which knocked it down from "Competition Coupe" to just "Coupe" class.

I like the color and the application looks to be well done. But to me, the flake is kinda huge, more the bass-boat /dune-buggy size. I'd prefer it on some wild-and-crazy kustom-kar, something smaller and Roth-style. But it's also appropriate for a chopped Merc, if that's what you like.

Years ago, a moron I worked with thought it would be funny to throw a string of firecrackers under a car I was pouring gasoline into. The crackers went off, I dropped the gas can, fuel spewed everywhere, and the rest of the string of firecrackers set it on fire. It went up in a big "whoomp", burned my hair and eyebrows, set fire to my feet and the legs of my jeans, and set the car on fire---which burned to the ground. Real frigging funny. I beat half the crapp out of him, and then had him arrested for assault and felony property damage. Yeah, practical jokes around machinery and flammable chemicals are REAL funny. Oh, but we're careful, you say. So what's the worst that could happen? Well, I could have been severely burned over a large part of my body, or I could have been killed if the open fuel tank had exploded...and it could have if atomized gas had ignited in the filler tube. Yeah, real funny. Morons. Risk your OWN life, not someone else's. You NEVER know how somebody will react, and YOU COULD KILL OR PERMANENTLY INJURE SOMEONE. A loud unexpected noise in a shop environment could startle someone who is working on a running engine. Their hand could slip into a belt or fan, removing flesh or fingers. Yeah, real funny. The guy you used the airbag on could have jerked and plowed his car into a wall or an onlooker. Real funny. I'd fire or expel any fool who pulled some idiot shitt like that, and seriously try to have them arrested for criminal stupidity.

Yeah, and when the tool-road in question is in Ethiopia, you really have to wonder... "Honey...did you do any driving in Ethiopia last month? No? Hmmmm. Neither did I."

All the marketing department has to do is come up with an oh-so-hip-and-with-it-nickname like "Bimmer" and "Benz" and they're a shoe-in. Somehow, "Caddy" just doesn't cut it anymore at the country club. It wouldn't hurt their image at all if they'd go back to LeMans and win, too. Heck...if they could pull that off (and GM certainly made the world finally take the Corvette seriously that way), I'd buy one (I'll have plenty of time to save up while I wait for hell to freeze over).

Yes...at least I know for an absolute fact that for 1959 B/CC was B/Competition Coupe on the salt (although the B/CC Stude coupe I'm most familiar with had streamlined front fenders that put it in the "competition coupe" class). I assume A/SC and B/SC were "supercharged coupe" classes. These Studes also ran in FC (fuel coupe...nitro), and C (coupe) classes.

All I've got is the info quoted in post #3: " With advice from the NHRA, Montgomery lengthened the Willys frame to fit a '67 Mustang body. "

Yes, and since this is pretty well widespread knowledge, widespread enough for instructors to be using it to illustrate corporate-internal-communication-disconnect, why hasn't it been addressed as energetically as building mountains of worthless paper with ISO compliance?

And then there's this...

Wow. That's fer sure a term you just don't hear any more. 23 skidoo, dude.

Well guys, I for one actually learned a lot more about the Malco Mustang as a result of this thread than I'd ever suspected. I think it's fascinating that the car was built on the old Willlys chassis, for one, and that Ford was pressuring Montgomery to use the smallblock. The car really IS a gas-class icon, and the first of the "late-model" bodied gassers. It's good stuff to know.

Yup, and I designed mine in 1985, built the full-scale mockup in 1996....(The mockup was never completed. Pic is the 1/4 scale wind-tunnel model)

Holy erroneous pedantry, Batman. Since YOU brought it up, James, "infallible" means "incapable of making mistakes or being wrong.". You have used it incorrectly. You should have used "FALLIBLE", which means "capable of making mistakes or being erroneous." Substitute the correct word meaning in your first sentence to get the meaning you intended, but failed to convey: ​Just to show we are all capable of making mistakes , Bill it's Google not google and HP did post on the 16th after the melee began. bobthehobbyguy used "infallible" correctly, and there is no double-negative in his statement. If you're going to correct English, try to get it right. P.S. I see you also corrected your prior use of "may-lay" to "melee". Excellent.

I once scored a piece of 1/16 white styrene sheet, about 3'X4', in the dumpster out behind the local mini-mart. It was the wrapper for one of those round ice-things they fill with soft drinks in the summer, and put in the middle of aisles. Of course, one side was printed with Orange-Crush advertising, but hey, it was free. Several of the local real-estate companies here also print their signs on sheet styrene. I've gone into a couple of offices and asked if they had any they were discarding. Got the frames too, that were made from low-quality steel stock, good for tooling fixtures.

If they can bring it in for that price, I say fantastic, congratulations, and I hope they sell a million of them. One of the stumbling blocks I had finding financing for my own 3-wheeler (my avatar) (after exhausting my own funds) was that the cost-to-manufacture one would have been around $25,000. All hand-built of course, but the economies-of-scale couldn't be made to work on such a radical design at the time. Building enough Elios via mass-production to be able to hit the target price and still make any profit will of course require a pretty large up-front investment in tooling and plant. All of that investment will have to be amortized over time, and it will factor into the cost of each unit too. I hope they can pull it off. I'd really like to see some rationalized transportation solutions in the real world.