Ace-Garageguy

More of this man's beautiful work...

This may be a start...

Besides being a top-notch comedian, he took cinematic risks (not always well accepted) to show a very introspective and human side, exploring life, relationships, the hereafter, and even the rapidly blurring line between artificial-intelligence-endowed robots and humanity. Carpe diem, Robin. Nanu nanu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veYR3ZC9wMQ.

I've always kinda lusted after the Hubley '60 ford, but I've stayed away after hearing there's an odd scale issue...like it's bigger even that 1/24. Any truth to that?

All I drove in HS was the parents' cars when I could wheedle one out of them for a couple of days, or a date. First car I actually owned was a '62 Beetle (for $200, in my summer before college...and I had to work for the money) that some schmo had put a leaky 36hp engine in (shoulda been a 40, but I knew no better). And I mean LEAKY. Oil would POUR out on the ground at idle, and leave a blood trail everywhere I went. My first heavy mechanical experience was pulling the engine and re-sealing it. Man, I got so filthy I looked like a coal miner. Everything black but my eyes. Then in my ignorance, I decided that all that heavy tin all over the engine (the poor little thing's cooling system) was just dead weight, slowing it down. After all, with only 36HP you need every bit of weight-reduction you can get. And after all...air-cooled motorcycles didn't have all that ugly sheetmetal all over the pretty finned cylinders, so why did I need it? So I took it all off. It worked OK for a couple of days, but progressively started smoking and slowing down. When it finally dropped a valve, I learned it was far far better to actually KNOW SOMETHING about a particular engine and WHY the engineers had done things like they did, than to just barge in stupidly and start modifying...cluelessly. My second heavy mechanical experience was putting a junkyard 40-horse in the hole the little 36 had died in.

Welcome aboard. There's a bunch of good people here willing to share a wealth of knowledge, or just appreciate the work of a fellow modeler.

One of the cars I drove in high school (first car I ever drove, too) was a 1963 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 convertible, 330HP 394 cu.in. ("Skyrocket" optional engine, not the top-line Starfire). Not my car, but my mother's actually. Why they ordered the hot engine, I'll never know. (I think my mother probably just liked its looks sitting there in the showroom...sand beige, black top, dark red interior). Lots of "working on mysteries without any clues", as Seger says, went on in that car. When my mother died, the car got away. I tracked it down many years later, in Texas, and brought it back up here...very rough, now waiting to get restored. By me. If I get to it before the Reaper gets to me.

Very well said.

Yeah, kinda like trying to do a top-chop in 1:1 with a chainsaw. I had a modified soldering iron with a cobbled up X-acto tip, and it made a horrible mess the first (and last) time I tried to use it for precision work. Sure SEEMED like a good idea, though.

Looks like beautiful work to me. Great color for that body style, and the wheels / tires really take the look up a notch.

No question, I'd buy multiples of each. A wagon tooled off of the Lindberg '52 Ford would be nice, and a '49 Ford from the old AMT kit, plus an AMT '50 Chevy... Whatever comes out, I'll buy some. Slightly different tack...I wonder what Revell's reasoning was, building their original '57 Ford wagon. Although I made a horrible mess of it, it was the first model car I ever did, and I have fond memories of the build-process...paint all over my hands, glue all over everything, etc. I imagine there are more than a few old geezers (like me) who'd like to see that ancient tooling restored and reissued.

The car from the show was a fiberglass replica, not a real Ferrari. (EDIT: Art's right about it being on a Corvette chassis, a C-3. The interiors of the Vice kit-cars were modified to look like Daytonas as well.)) The real Ferrari Daytona had primarily steel body panels, but the hood, doors and decklid were aluminum. Here's an article on one of the cars used in the show: http://www.superchevy.com/features/vemp-0611-miami-vice-ferrari/

I've had some leaky beaters that were so bad, I seriously considered lashing a gallon can of oil to an inner fender, with a drip-feed into the engine. A quality solution being, of course, job one.

My senior year in high school, the fastest kid drove a metallic blue '62 Nova with a sweetly built 283. One morning he wound it up running by the classroom windows down to the stadium, and just as he went to shift into second, the engine let go. It scattered parts and hot oil all over the drive, and the principal wasn't at all impressed. The kid maintained a low profile for a few days, and then showed up one morning with a shiny-new '69 Z-28, metallic blue with white stripes, and the o-so-rare crossram manifold. I was a recent Yankee transplant, didn't run with the cool kids, and I never knew how he got hooked up with such fine cars.

Oh man, that's pretty.

Now THAT looks like a ton of fun. Lotsa power, front-mid-engined, big sticky tires...who could ask for more?

If you're careful with the Plasticoat or Duplicolor primers, and let the first coat flash off very well before adding additional coats (and don't ever pile it on, especially if you've broken through to bare plastic), you should be able to work without the barrier material. To get a feel of how these primers will work, I strongly recommend you spray the backsides of parts (that won't show) on each model you're working on. Some plastics, even from the same manufacturers, are more sensitive than others. Experimentation and practice on what YOU'RE building is the only sure-fire way to get good results.

Somehow I missed this one. Great scale engineering, fascinating project.

This 1960 DragMaster "kit" is pretty typical of the period. You see the slicks are fairly wide piecrusts. The gearbox, next to the block to the right, appears to be a simple in / out or 2-speed unit, probably an aluminum housing. The old cast-iron '39 Ford 3-speed top-shift boxes were still being run as well, and beefier LaSalle and Packard boxes, but some cars ran no gearbox at all. The driveline appears to be a shortened closed-style Ford shaft, with only a front universal, chrome plated. The adapter to mount the gearbox to the engine is also aluminum, to the left of the headers in the foreground, but to the right of the headers is a fabricated steel scattershield, which could be chromed or painted. This design gets sandwiched between the adapter and the trans, and also serves as the rear engine mounts. Some clutch scattershields also had a front plate that bolted to the block as well. (Note: There were some aluminum bellhousings approved by NHRA as scattershields, but they tended to be very thick in order to offer protection similar to the steel ones. I've also seen cast-steel, but if you go with the fabricated-steel look as in the photo, you can't go wrong.) You'll see there's also a chromed, fabricated-steel scattershield for the quickchange rear end, which uses narrowed '32 -'48 Ford axle bells (chromed in this shot). Narrowed production-car and light truck rear ends were common too. Early fabricated scattershields could look crude, but if the welding was good and the design intelligent, they afforded decent protection from exploding clutches and flywheels. Around the mid-'60s, Lakewood (and later Ansen, who had been making cast housings, and others) introduced the one-piece (sometimes referred to as "hydroformed") scattershield design, made out of 1/4 inch steel plate. The "hydroforming" process that made these deeply-drawn shapes possible, IIRC, was an offshoot of aerospace technology. The technique makes it possible to form metal in ways either extremely difficult or impossible with other pressing methods.

Definitely.

I don't know if this is real or P-shop, but I like it.

Here's a scale model buildup...http://public.fotki.com/mackinac359/peterbilt-model-gallery/m106/39-260-glass-on.html#media

You "hear" that, do ya' ?