Ace-Garageguy

If you have the kit, a photo of the V8 engine tree would be most helpful...

Another REALLY easy way to find your thread (I use it, and some of mine have been dormant for YEARS) is just google "art anderson opel admiral". First several hits are your threads here. Looking forward to seeing this beautifully done (as usual for Art) build progress. Kinda nice to be able to see the whole build in one thread without having to hunt, though.

Bill's right about the spoons being great for testing colors and helping get your technique established, especially in figuring out how far away from the subject you need to have your spray head for each type of paint. The only shortcoming with the spoons is that, in many cases, orange peel develops as successive coats are being overlapped when painting a body and a "wet edge" isn't maintained. Part of the technique you'll need to master is holding the body and rotating it (my method) or otherwise moving the spray-fan relative to the body, and getting smooth, even overlaps with each pass that melt into each other and level the adjacent pass. Painting an actual model car body is the best way to practice this, BUT...plastic soda bottles work very well as stand-ins for car bodies, for practice.

Aha !! I hadn't seen this thread when I asked about Dora in the background of your military transports thread. Very nice. Man. Nice.

While in theory Rick has a good suggestion as far as it goes, there are a couple of caveats. 1) Many steel rules just aren't stiff enough to hold a warped plastic chassis flat. You need something considerably stiffer than the chassis to do you any good. A piece of 1/8 inch steel plate ought to do it. And most chassis moldings aren't exactly flat either...they have dips and parts going up and down. You may have to make some spacers to actually hold the chassis "flat". 2) If you use clamps or elastics, be SURE they're not going to introduce more weird warpage. If they're clamped or wrapped around a part of chassis that isn't supported, you just might end up with a worse mess. THINK. The WORST possible thing is exactly what will usually happen if you don't try to foresee all the possible disasters.

That's the tricky bit. Get a canning thermometer so you KNOW how hot your water is. T The average Tg (glass transition temperature, where it will bend permanently) of polystyrene is about 100degC (212F). PRACTICE FIRST WITH SPRUE to see how long it takes to soften enough to hold the new shape.

What he said. Are those drive chains on the rear axles of the Dragon separate, or did you just do an outstanding job of detail painting? If they're separate, are they included in the kit? I've never imagined such fine chains existed. The cables on the winch spools are about the most realistic I've seen, too. The German railway-gun in the background looks like Dora without her barrel. What's the story on that spectacular model?

Years ago, I snagged some of my girlfriend's makeup brushes. Some have long bristles and are REALLY soft. No damage to anything so far. A can of dry air, as mentioned, and a soft makeup brush to dislodge the dust, and you're set.

You'll have to narrow the frame and pinch it in front at the cowl even more. You can see it on the frame in the pic Bernard posted. If I were you, I wouldn't do a front zee, but do a suicide perch, again like Bernard's pic. You'll definitely want a rear zee to get a nice ride-height, but the '32 frame isn't the easiest to zee. I've just about settled on doing my own 1:1 next rod on '32 rails, using a '26-'27 glass body, and I've been doing the measuring for cut / paste in full scale. Narrow the frame first to fit the body shell you're using, and to keep everything square. Then zee the rear end to get the ride height in back. Finally, do the pinch of the rails under the cowl (which amounts to a lateral zee), and fab a new front crossmember to carry the suicide perch.

Are they necessary on ANY street-driven car? No. Anybody reasonably sane isn't going to be going fast enough to actually need downforce on the public roads, and for the most part, they make more drag than a clean tail anyway. I once had a Countach in the shop that was 5 or 6 mph faster without the silly rear wing.

i think it makes tornadoes.

The thing that always intrigued me most about the Crosley was the early oven-brazed sheet-metal engine. Fascinating little powerplant.

And...you will most likely have to bend it back FARTHER than you want it. Plastic has a "memory" and if you only bend it straight, it may slowly creep back to the bent state as it cools. Get a pan of water big enough to hold the chassis flat, and use tongs to put it in and take it out of the water. Use some thick work gloves to hold it whole you're bending, and GO CAREFULLY. Better to have to heat it gently several times than to get it real hot and go too far.

Thank you Greg. Absolutely fascinating exhaust system. I'm going to see if there's an old SAE paper on that thing. There may not be if it was an in-house "secret weapon" design, but then again, if it worked or not, there may very well be a paper about its development. It sure is different.

In my experience, more than anything that depends on how much orange peel you get with each coat. If you can slick your primer out nice when spraying, you most likely don't need to sand until you have 3 coats laid down. If it's grainy and dry-sprayed, or orange-peeled at all, you need to sand after each coat. Remember also to avoid heavy primer buildup, as it will obliterate fine details. On my own work, if there's no bodywork to have to surface with primer, (other than removing mold parting lines and light sink-mark filling), I've found that after a thorough scrubbing with hot water, a toothbrush and Comet or a similar mild abrasive, 2 coats of Duplicolor SANDABLE (NOT HIGH-BUILD) primer should be sufficient to get a good surface for paint, but it will most likely need to be sanded with 800 grit (or finer) wet before color coats. Be CAREFUL around details, and high spots or creases on the body. If you shoot a perfect coat of primer that slicks out nicely, you can get away with a water-toothbrush-Comet scrub instead of sanding. This works well for getting into all the creases and crevices on a body without softening fine details like sanding will. If you're using Duplicolor topcoats (color), you DO have to be careful of going through your primer when sanding. If you expose the bare plastic, I recommend more primer in that area. Make a mask so you don't get a lot of un-necessary primer on surrounding areas. The reason for local spot-priming if you sand through your primer is that Duplicolor is "hot" enough to craze some of the recent, cheapened styrene formulations that many kits are made of these days. In some cases, the Duplicolor primer will craze or "pull up" the surface of the plastic too, especially in areas where mold-lines have been removed and the plastic surface has been significantly disturbed. Allowing the primer to dry thoroughly, wet-sanding with 600 and re-primering as necessary will kill the imperfections eventually.

Liking this a lot. I've built a lot of models to work out rough fitments before building the 1:1 cars over the years. Excellent idea, and much as I love the old smallblock Ford, it's hard to argue with the output /$ of a junkyard LS.

It's not really so bad. I've almost done it to myself on occasion. The day after is what hurts.

They could call it a "SuperNova" and have it designed to explode bigtime on impact. No, wait...that's a Ford trademark, isn't it??

Indeed...

Absolutely stunning. I doubt I'll ever have the time or patience to even approach your level of detail, but man oh man, it sure is inspirational work you're doing.

Yes sir, very clean, excellent peel-free gloss, decal and detail work, chrome refinishing...all just right. Nice pix too.

Greg, what I'm getting at is that there are two pretty much universally accepted "correct" header/collector designs for a group of 4 cylinders. 4 into 1, or 2 into 2 into 1 (sometimes called "tri-Y") 4 into 1... 2 into 2 into 1 ... ("tri-Y") There an infinite number of variations on the two themes, but neither bears the slightest resemblance to the primary pipe / collector arrangement on the setup in post #7. Do you know if they were a dyno-developed odd resonance-in-the-collector system, or just a way to get more ground clearance ? I've read extensively on header design, and the post #7 units look more like '30s through '50s ideas of acceptable gas flow than any later designs I'm familiar with. The idea behind "equal-length" primary pipes, and making them enter the collector at the same point, has to do with exhaust pulses in one pipe partially scavenging the adjacent pipe...which wouldn't happen in the accepted sense with the way the primaries are spaced out along the collectors in post #7. That's why I'm wondering if these were a one-shot dyno-developed system that flies in the face of conventional wisdom; you know, if it works, it works, and screw the theory (which was, by the way, entirely developed using dynomometers and empirical observation).

What kind of trucks are you after, and where are you looking? I just did a random image search on Bing for "1950 Ford pickup" and got a lot of hits of restored-stock or close to stock.

Short answer: yes.

OMG !!! OMG !!! Giant car-eating millipedes are invading the country!!! OMG!!! OMG !! We're DOOMED!!!!!! Put it on fazepuke and twit IMMEDIATELY !!!! OMG !!!!!!!!!!!!