Ace-Garageguy

I woodna thotta thatun.

And they're letting 16 YEAR OLDS vote on the referendum !!! Their feedback so far has been that if you give younger people access to the political system, they become informed and engaged. Interesting notion.

"Ekranoplan" is a Russian term for "ground-effect vehicle". We call 'em WIG (Wing-In-Ground-effect). They don't actually fly, but stay in ground-effect. The big ones were intended to be high-speed missile carrying surface-attack alternatives to subs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRT-R9BidoM

Yeah, really. And the bones are bio-degradable anyway. Same goes for banana peels.

Yup, that's the worst. And for me, it happens all TOO often...

X2

OMG !!! OMG !!! Cortinas were built by aliens !!!

How about the Lippisch "Aerodyne" ?

More lifting-body pix...

And something really fat and weird...

And some more from those wild and crazy Russian ekranoplan guys...

See first line, post 14.

I've got the next few days off, the forecast is for cooler and sunny, and I should be able to get some of my own vehicle projects moved along nicely...if I don't spend all day on the internet.

Bad assumption. A lot of people have WORKED their way through college and grad school, sometimes doing manual labor, if the desire to learn and get ahead was strong enough. Not fair at all to assume just because someone is well educated and successful that they didn't EARN every bit of it. You have to have something on the ball to be an engineer. Just being able to afford school isn't enough, and IF you want it bad enough, you can get there too...without "wealth and privilege".

So far, I've been able to kill all of my crazing issues (even a really bad mess I made, stripping lacquer from late-model, soft Revell styrene with REAL paint stripper...which attacked the plastic much like having poured liquid cement on it) by repeatedly and gingerly priming, allowing to flash COMPLETELY so as not to trap solvents, sanding flat, and primer-sand-primer-sand, repeat as necessary. I'm sure you regulars are sick of seeing this car over and over and over, but the truth is that this is the decklid I thought I'd ruined (using WAY TOO HOT self-etching primer) and stripped with the real stripper, then saved with the above technique. Looks just like this, still, two+ years later, and nothing has ghosted through.

Chrysler built something fairly recently that required removing a wheel to get the battery out. I was not impressed.

Beautiful work.

The old Sunbeam Tiger was the same way...you pretty much had to cut a hole in the inner fender to get the last plug. And at least they gave you an access hole for one of them in the footwell. BUT, the old Tiger was never intended to have a V8 in it. Being an off-line hot-rod conversion, with a big engine shoehorned into a tiny engine bay, I was inclined to let that one slide. Fun car, wonderful sound and worth the minor inconvenience. It's when a mommy-van is more grief to service than a Ferrari that I start seeing red.

Kinda sad how they wouldn't let the ugly little development mule sit up front with the pretty cars.

Pretty cool, Pete. He ought to know. He builds model cars too?

"Glamorous Glennis", the Bell X-1 Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound "barrier" with in 1947. Named for his wife. Amazing how recently that was a huge deal.

One of the Howmet turbine cars, obviously, and a Lola Mk6 GT, the immediate forerunner to the Ford GT40. But I think your orange Merc C-111 up there is one of the most beautiful prototypes ever built. Powerful, purposeful and clean, the lines are just as strong today as they were in 1969.

Great quote, and I think it's absolutely pertinent to the conversation. Honda, whose products are consistently among the best in the world for moderate cost, requires its executives to learn the business from the production floor up. I think this philosophy has a lot to do with the quality of the product. I also find it appalling, very often, that it's entirely obvious when servicing SOME cars (and other machines of comparatively recent vintage) that the designers never actually held tools in their hands, or had to WORK on anything. Some access to fasteners is just plain moronic, almost impossible to get to in the field; sometimes the order of assembly of components is just as stupid, and parts interfere with each other. And there's really no excuse for this today, especially when a car can be "built" in a virtual environment, and any access or dis-assembly problems can be easily identified during the design phase. Requiring car designers to be reasonably qualified as mechanics FIRST would make a whole lot of sense. Then they'd know what to look out for.

Love it.

Yes, seeing the old airplanes cut up always makes me sad too. I worked at a small airport in Arizona for a while that had been a de-commissioning center for B-17s and B-24s after the war. This is what it looked like in 1946. Almost all of these aircraft were dismantled and melted down on-site for scrap, and in a few cases, were sold for the value of the fuel in the tanks. You can still walk the un-paved parts of the field and pick up parts of machine-gun ring-mounts, hydraulic fittings and even an occasional data plate. Ghosts everywhere. And at war's end, many of these airplanes were flown directly from the factories to the boneyard, still brand-new.