Ace-Garageguy

The best thing about Micro Krystal Klear, Elmer's, and other PVA glues (polyvinyl acetate) is that they're WATER SOLUBLE when wet, and they dry COMPLETELY CLEAR. They don't attack the plastic like normal plastic cement (either liquid or tube) does, so there's no possibility of leaving permanent fingerprints. They don't 'smoke' the plastic like some CA super-glues do. And being water-soluble, you can get excess off using a damp Q-tip. You don't have that option with epoxy if you get it on the clear part. The down side to using PVA glues is that they're not really intended to glue NON-porous materials like styrene. Using them for windows is really kind of a stretch, but they work VERY well if used correctly. They have NO wet strength though, so parts need to be clamped, jigged or taped in place until completely dry. They do a beautiful job of holding lenses and window glass in place with no visible fogging, and fingerprints will come off, like I said, with a damp Q-tip. It's also possible to remove parts glued with PVA relatively easily, because the bond is not as strong as epoxy, and doesn't attack the plastic like solvent glues do. This property of PVA glue also makes it much safer to use for attaching parts to PAINTED surfaces.

Very nice overall look. I've used that Saleen tonneau on several models over the past 6 or so years. Liked it so much, I made a mold to copy them without having to buy a whole kit every time. Good idea of yours to transplant the entire top edge of the cabin and w/s frame. Looks good.

Exceptional work. Just beautiful.

Yes sir, very nice traditional car, and nice combination of appropriate recently and vintage-tooled parts. It works. Yes sir, very nice traditional car, and nice combination of appropriate recently and vintage-tooled parts. It works.

Some of the best looking panel lines out there, in my humble opinion. http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=80880

Bing bing bing bing !!! I just noticed the new face. Middle name Lillis? Who woulda thunk it? I wonder how the new Fleetwood Mac will sound relative to the old one. Should be interesting. And I honestly prefer the version of FM Craig mentions too.

I'm surprised you could find parts for it. That in itself is pretty amazing, what with the tendency for many products these days to be designed as un-servicable and disposed of when they quit. Having replacement parts available just MIGHT mean the company that built it thinks it's a pretty good unit, worth repairing. i say go for it, and most positively good luck!!

Man, you must really like dog food. Just kidding... I've liked the Honda Fit looks since I first saw one. Neat little car. Maybe an anti-glare hood and big red rising-sun meatballs on the doors?

There was a time when much the same thing could have been said of the Japanese. Many of their products that weren't sufficiently Westernized looked odd to our eyes, but their design sense has matured and developed with a lot of co-operative cross-pollination among cultures, to everyone's benefit. The same thing will ultimately happen with the Chinese. But I don't recall the Japanese producing an almost line-for line-copy of any Western vehicle, even for exclusive sale in their home market, and passing it off as their own. Intellectual property laws exist to try to limit the essential immorality of stealing someone else's original work, whether the "someone else" is an individual artist, or a team of designers. The underlying issue is MORAL, and ETHICAL, and currently the Chinese seem to be on rather a different page than the West would like to believe it's on. The Chinese cultural and moral differences from Western ideals may also be seen in the unfortunate fact that a tiger corpse is worth about $100,000 street value there. Parts of endangered species are used in traditional and useless medicines with NO regard for the protection of soon-to-be-extinct genes. The idiotic but culturally ingrained idea that ingesting a part of some animal imparts some of it's character to the one who ingests it, like thinking that tea made from tiger bits makes you brave, or that powder made from rhino horn makes your masculinity harder, is responsible for the widespread worldwide poaching of irreplaceable animals...animals that don't BELONG to anyone, but are part of humanity's...ALL of humanity's...heritage. No surprise then that taking ideas, with no compensation, is common.

Irrelevant. Contrary to the popular perception, having a patent or trademark or copyright does not give blanket automatic protection from infringement or copying. There are NO patent police, NO trademark police, and only rarely does the US FBI make good on the threat at the lead in of motion pictures and prosecute criminal infringement of copyright. What a patent or trademark or copyright actually DOES is only to establish who has a LEGAL right under whatever law to use the described material, idea, process, design or device. The legal owner of intellectual property must pursue infringement through the courts at the owner's cost. The cost is not borne by the patent or trademark office, and the cost of prosecuting infringement is often so high that incursions are not actively fought. This is the case with many of the older car-design knockoffs. There are also limits on the length of time that the owner of intellectual property may keep it to himself. Currently, a utility patent in the US is only good for 20 years from the effective filing date. Design patents have a term of 14 years from the date of patent grant. After these times have elapsed, or if the recurring fees necessary to keep the patent in force are not paid and the patent becomes "abandoned", anybody or his dog may legally produce the subject described in the relevant document. Copyright is an entirely different issue, not like comparing apples and oranges, but more like oranges and orangutans. Copyrights may be renewed by the original owner and his estate after his death. I'm not current on US copyright law at the moment.

U.S. law specifically designates "utility patents" and "design patents". Having written, applied for and been granted several of each, I just MIGHT know what I'm talking about. As far as vehicle design knockoffs go, I don't know where you got your information, but Ferrari, among others, ACTIVELY prosecutes anyone building copies of their designs. Look up the fight between McBurnie and Ferrari for a little background.

One of the problems with doing business with the Chinese...for a long time...has been their failure to recognize Western patents. Most Western countries considered civilized have reciprocal patent agreements that tend to limit infringement, even if patents are not formally filed in other countries. But if you send anything to China to have it made, good luck protecting your intellectual property rights. There's no way. The only limiting factor is that it's going to be legally dicey trying to sell anything made under bogus Chinese design theft in any country that recognizes the legitimacy of real patents. But there are ways around that too, and this I know from firsthand experience. And to Matt...sorry mate, but you CAN patent a design. It's called, surprisingly enough, a "design patent". I've been all through this minefield years ago, and lost a bundle due to some tooling work on a hammer handle I designed being subbed out to the Chinee. This is one of the reasons I'm so adamantly opposed to the entire concept of "offshore production" and "outsourcing" of anything to save a buck or two these days.

Part of the problem with that particular kit MAY stem from the poor rep the thing has due to window fit, and inaccuracy in the side-window shape on early versions. A rebody with later sheetmetal would solve the problem entirely, and well utilize the rest of the existing tooling

Here's your photo, Craig. Way more nads than I'll ever have...

Yup, and a perfect illustration of why technical complication and "sophistication" is not always better...contrary to much of popular belief. KISS rules. And I don't mean the rock group.

Granted, model companies that want to be around in 20 years need to be taking the long view and developing entirely NEW markets NOW...but that's just not the typical business model, unfortunately. Cost cutting today and stock price next quarter seem to be about as far into the future as most boardrooms can imagine. Petroleum companies, had they had any REAL vision, should have been positioning themselves as broad-spectrum ENERGY companies, many many years ago. Instead, most of them try to squeeze the last few drops of crude from shale and tar sands. Let's not forget that the FIRST solar engines were in operation in the mid-1860s. That's around 150 years ago. My, how slowly humanity moves forward, even when shown the way. And forward-thinking scientists of the day were already warning that human expansion could not be sustained indefinitely by burning fossil fuels. The 3-dimensional scale model may well be a dinosaur that just refuses to believe that that shadow in the sky is a looming comet, soon to extinguish all of dinosaurdom. An approach consistent with normal human behavior is to continue with business-as-usual, minimizing immediate risk, but raising the likelihood of ultimate doom. And that is consistent with milking the last of the baby-boomers for their dwindling supply of pennies, until the vary last one gasps his last gasp..

One thing I always wondered about with those is HOW they tracked. I mean, it's pretty obvious that a pivoted swinging tone-arm needle simply follows the groove in the record. But dragging all that sliding mass SIDEWAYS on the unit you pictured seems like it would take some kind of motor-driven carriage. Otherwise the side loads on the groove would be horrendous for as tiny as they are, and rapid record wear would result...assuming it would even follow the little groove at all. So, the question is HOW is the sideways motion of the carriage synchronized with the inward spiral of the record groove? As you know, not all records are the same length, so there would be resulting differences in spacing between groves, making it necessary somehow for the machine to read that and compensate.

Yeah, but young people probably couldn't handle it.

A little more transparency would be nice indeed, but if you think about it, it's also a pretty safe bet that the nostalgic stuff like Revell's '32 series and the '50 Olds and '57 Ford, as well as the chopped Merc and '48 Ford, have done well enough to justify the extensive (though somewhat oddly done...in my opinion) retool of the Sizzler as Slingster. I've already bought several copies of each, and I know I'm not in a modeling minority on that issue. If these are selling, give us more subjects in a similar vein, and we'll buy them all. And as I've alluded to earlier, another safe bet is that Moebius must certainly have done well enough with the '53 Hudsons and big Chryslers (and they probably have a pretty good idea of Revell's numbers on the '50 Olds and '57 Ford too) to justify the upcoming '54 Hudson, '61 Pontiacs, '65 Plymouth and '65 Comet. I mean really...who in their right mind, if thinking of ONLY mass appeal, would have thought a '53 Hudson was a good bet? But it's a well received and apparently popular kit, and beautifully executed. And I get the feeling Moebius is leading the CAD / rapid prototyping / rapid tool development race at the moment. There must be a pretty good return being made manufacturing kits of cars that younger people "have never heard of, and don't care about".

Yes but... I agree with the reasoning following from "I can't do it. Do it for me." And there are a lot of YOUNG guys building chopped and / or channeled As in the real world. We're also beginning to see a resurgence of model-related articles in the 1:1 hot-rod mags. Revell already has excellent tooling for the model A chassis, left over from the woody, pickup, sedan and other kits. Revell already also has excellent tooling for a street-rod style '32 chassis, obviously. Why not tool a good 1/25 chopped A coupe body, and retool the '32 chassis enough to build a traditional car on it (a model-A built on '32 rails is the ultimate "traditional" combination) with an I-beam front axle and a rear Zee in the frame to accommodate a buggy-spring quick-change, and throw in chassis bits from the old A as well? Hire a REAL hot-rod builder and modeler who UNDERSTANDS the stuff (I'll volunteer) to work with the kit designers so that the thing can be built MULTIPLE ways on the A chassis, on the '32 chassis, channeled or not, etc. etc.) using an absolute minimum of new tooling. If it sells, give the whole concept even longer legs by offering different bodied kits...as Greg suggests, just like they did with the run of '32 kits. An easy-to-tool rectangular-tube chassis could be added down the line (a lot of cars are being built with these too in real-world-land), and some different wheel and engine choices to keep it flying as a parts donor, if nothing else. As I've already asked, and Greg reminds us, how have the chopped Merc and Ford performed as far as ROI goes? And the Rat Roaster? Using the Merc tooling to build the wagon seems to be working, but what are the real numbers?

Good luck, and i hope you find it's a common problem with a simple solution. In general, without having a unit on the bench and testing the circuits as it's powered up, diagnosis is pretty much hopeless. If it's run by a logic chip that's died, you're probably out of luck.

Faster, even with a stock Caddy mos' likely. And cheaper.

And you've made perfectly a large part of my position that what's hot in a 2D, pretend environment will not necessarily translate into what's hot in a 3D, real-object environment. Gaming provides a high level of constant external stimulation, and I believe that the "patience" required to play a video game for hours is not at all the same kind of "patience" required to sit at a workbench for hours, with only internal stimulation, not to mention no social interaction from off-site competitors. Constant external stimulation and constant social interaction seem to be what the youth culture is mostly about. It was when I was young too though. So here's the tricky bit. When I was young, the only way I could get the rush of driving fast was by DOING it. The only way I could get the feel of a hot-rod was by BUILDING one...or at least by building a model. Now that so much stimulation is available in a rapidly-evolving virtual environment, where's the motivation to build a "real" anything, especially a little model that doesn't even go vroom? The rapid-response eye-hand co-ordination acquired during gaming is not at all the same as the fine-motor, delicate control necessary to build models. Combine that with a society-bred short attention span of only long enough to get from commercial to commercial on the tube, and you don't have a very favorable market for selling models to. Remember too that I work in the performance / hot-rod industry, and occasionally in aviation, and we've all had an EXTREMELY difficult time getting young people interested in developing manual and thinking skills, even when the potential pay is much better than working at a Starbucks or a Mcd's. Please understand, I'm not being argumentative here, and I'm NOT trying to hammer my viewpoint down anyone's throat. I'm simply doing what any good member of a product development team should do, by bringing opposing views into the light and by examining them, trying to determine what the TRUTH of the target demographic REALLY is, rather than what we might WANT it to be. I retain the overall opinion that the fading baby-boomer market still has pretty strong legs, and the smart money in the short term will be to milk what's left of us for every nickel that we're willing to spend by getting products that appeal to US to market ASAP. Moebius has been doing it, and it's tough to argue convincingly with success. On the other hand, getting even a relatively small percentage of the video game numbers you mention as kit buyers looks like an interesting proposition. Again, I'd like the know some REAL numbers of old-fossil-appeal kits selling TODAY compared to kits that should, in theory, appeal to a much younger crowd.

Pretty. Drool drool. Bet it's a bugger to tune spot-on though.

Typically, after a while in the early days of organized, two-cars-at-a-time drag-racing, there was no cooling on some of these cars (to save weight) other than what was supplied by the water in the block. You light it off, pull up to the line, and do your run...then shut down pretty quick. Flatheads are BAD about cracking when overheated, so it's not the smartest possible setup. Some old drag cars that look like this also had small remote water tanks (and much larger tanks were common on lakes cars, but more to cut areo drag than to save weight on the lakes)...and the pumps circulated coolish water that was changed between runs. Some cars being built these days in this particular look have radiators hidden under the rear bodywork.