Ace-Garageguy

I'm really beginning to get interested in this kind of racing, especially after seeing your great looking models. Very believable cars.

Good to see one of these built. You've done a great job and answered some of my questions about it. Nice stance on the kit-supplied street-rod suspension.

Nice shop.

Thanks for posting the link, Charlie. I'm trying to evaluate this tech as I have time, but I'd be really surprised if wirelessly-powered vehicles become mainstream within the life of the patent (and by the way...something doesn't actually have to WORK to receive a patent. Interesting, huh?). The hurdles to overcome here are much more difficult than getting cheap 3D printers on everyone's desks, and we all know the story there. Wirelessly powering a CAR around town is a huge leap from powering a laptop or charging a cell-phone over a distance of a few meters in a room, and a lot of infrastructure changes would have to be made to get there from where we currently are.. We've already, as a culture, completely and stupidly overlooked other alternative-power-for-vehicle technologies that are much more efficient and easier to implement, and where the infrastructure is already widely in place, like compressed natural gas (CNG). It's plentiful, cheap, and works in cars as we know them. Proponents of electric vehicles cite energy efficiency and reduced carbon-emissions as the selling points, but usually they only look at the tip of the iceberg. This quote from "Do the Math: MPG for Electric Cars?" points out some of the grave fallacies in the popular perception of EVs (electric vehicles) as the great savior of the Western world. (full text here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/mpg-for-electric-cars/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The present analysis leaves out two important bits. First, the energy consumption (and electricity costs) I calculated for the Volt, Leaf, and Tesla simply use the battery capacity—not the electricity delivered for charging. Charging efficiency may be anywhere from 70% to 90%. But that’s a small caveat compared to the second issue (and similar to the 25% energy overhead for refining gasoline from oil—which itself has an energy overhead of only about 5% in the extraction/delivery process). In order to deliver 30 kWh to your house to fully charge the Leaf’s 24 kWh battery bank, for example—incorporating the charge efficiency this time, the source of electricity becomes a highly relevant factor. Two-thirds of our electricity comes from fossil fuel plants, typically converting 35% of the fossil fuel thermal energy into electricity. Only 90% of this makes it through the transmission system, on average. If your electricity comes from a fossil fuel plant, the 30 kWh delivered to your house took about 95 kWh of fossil fuel energy. The 73 miles the Leaf travels on a full charge now puts it at an energy efficiency of 130 kWh/100-mi. The MPG equivalent number is 28 MPG. From a carbon-dioxide standpoint, you’d be better off burning the fossil fuel directly in your car." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please notice that 28MPG is shown as the equivalent fuel usage for the EVs cited. You can get better than 40MPG from burning compressed natural gas(CNG) directly in a conventional vehicle of the same size. That's MUCH more energy-efficient than pure-electric, and dumps less carbon into the atmosphere (assuming YOUR electric power comes from a fossil-fuel burning plant...do you know where YOUR power comes from??). America's energy crisis...and make NO mistake...It IS a crisis...has been politicized and spun out of all rationality. There's nobody driving the policy-bus who seems able to grasp the overall picture that how everything we do as a society, as a culture, and as individuals is interlinked. Knee-jerk patches aren't going to cut it in the long run. Wireless power-transmission to on-road vehicles may be a lot closer than I think, it may be cooler than sliced bread, but it does nothing to address where the power COMES from unless micro-bursts of energy otherwise wasted from a long-down-the-road generation of self-charging vehicles (either direct solar PV charged, or EV-hybrids using hydrogen produced from solar PV) is beamed back into the grid. Possible? Probably, but don't hold your breath.

This one?

You won't have to worry about that happening any time soon. There simply isn't enough "energy density" in sunlight to power a useful vehicle in real-time...from the size of photovoltaic array that can be installed on a car. As vehicle weight comes down (which is made difficult by all the crash-standards requiring MUCH more weight than solar-powered experimental vehicles carry), and solar cell efficiency increases (which is happening slowly), you'll see an increase in vehicle range as a byproduct of it being able to PARTIALLY recharge itself from solar cells as it sits parked, but a fully-solar vehicle, especially one that generates EXCESS power, is a long way away...if it's even possible. The solar powered "sun-racers" are fly-weight, carbon-fiber exotics with no practical application whatsoever. There's a lot of pie-in-the-sky hype, but much of it seems to overlook basic physics and the immutable laws of energy conversion. There really is no free energy lunch. The most intelligent use of solar to power a vehicle will be residential rooftop-mounted PV arrays that use electricity made from sunlight to crack household waste-water into free hydrogen, and oxygen. Hydrogen generated this way can be burned in IC engines or fuel-cell vehicles. Pilot programs have proven the viability of the numbers. It works, and overcomes the storage problem that PV-generated electricity faces. Rooftop PV arrays CAN feed excess power generated back into the grid during daylight hours. Charging electric vehicles overnight from the grid will help even out the power-demand cycles experienced by electricity-generating utilities, but will ultimately demand MORE electrical-generating capacity. PV arrays mounted on posts or parking deck and office roofs have the potential to recharge vehicles between trips, but it's a lot of infrastructure to come up with. Frankly, I don't see hybrid or all-electric vehicles being able to generate enough EXCESS power to feed it back into the grid. Vehicles need all the energy stored onboard to make them go, and there's nothing left over to sell back (although one POSSIBLE scenario would take power generated by an onboard solar array, AFTER THE VEHICLE'S onboard BATTERIES WERE TOPPED UP, and feed the continuing energy stream back into the grid...while parked, between trips).

I envy you Harry. My part of the country is cold, wet, and miserable overcast. Snow would at least give me a reason to go out and shovel or hike. The weather here is just useless for much of anything.

Very nice. I really like seeing working trucks being modeled. The paint scheme reminds me of railroad maintenance-of-way vehicles I've seen somewhere. Burlington RR maybe?

Superb fit and finish on this. The reversed rear fenders are an interesting touch too. Very nice.

Very nice. Looks like a support unit for the ever-popular zombie-wars combat vehicles. Please...more info on the 3D printed wheels and welder. It looks like your resolution is very good. What design software and printer, or service?

Oh man...does that really work? I live in a wooded area and the rodent problem with stored cars is serious. Please tell me this really really works...

Or care, unfortunately. I care, as do some of us who either are old enough to remember the last real war, or are students of history and who think it's important to get it right. But "getting it right" is becoming less and less of a priority every day. Incorrect information is constantly presented in the news and elsewhere, and is endlessly re-posted on the internet and accepted as fact by lazy minds. Glaring technical and historical errors abound in movies and most of popular culture. Critical thinking isn't taught as a valuable real-world skill, and questioning wrong information just takes too much effort for far too many people. The media presenters of wrong information get their salaries anyway, so where's the incentive to "get it right" about which airplanes should be shown to illustrate an event that happened 72 years ago? The majority of people you'd ask in the mall probably couldn't tell you which COUNTRIES fought on which sides in WWII, much less what kinds of airplanes they used. I agree entirely with Greg's thought that "the blatant use of government archival film footage to make a point on the local and national news showing the wrong aircraft (is a) glaring error (and) should be corrected as it has gone on for too long." Sadly, accuracy just isn't much of a priority to most of the world we live in.

Nicely built model. Here's a link to a HAMB thread about the shop that built the real one. http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?s=441f587cd1a3e0fc8660458659a3c540&t=49643

I don't know about the torpedoes, but the Japanese Zero fighter aircraft WAS a Mitsubishi product. I remember seeing Mitsubishi pickups being used by the U.S Navy back in the '80s at a base I was visiting. Gave me a chuckle moment.

No, just that after the war ended, there were very few surviving Japanese aircraft. American types that were visually similar to their Japanese counterparts were routinely used to represent the latter. North American Aircraft AT-6 Texan / SNJ trainers for instance, used to represent Japanese Zeros. The old American airplanes were, for some time, cheap and plentiful on the surplus market. Back in 2007, there were fewer than 5 original Zeros airworthy (some using vintage American radial engines), though some full-scale flying replicas have been built at considerable cost. But you already knew this, right?

That's officer Frisky fixin' to 'frisk' the subject.

So, what exactly is the difference between stealing electricity and stealing music? Lots and lots and lots of folks seem to think it's just fine to rip music and avoid paying anything to the artists, producers, etc. What gives?

Lots to like on this one...especially all the realistic chassis mods, and the right gasser stance for a refreshing change. So many guys build gassers with the noses pointing towards the clouds, it's really good to see one set up like a real car. Nice work.

http://moviewriternyu.wordpress.com/2013/12/07/rudolph-stuns-north-pole-by-signing-10yr-240m-deal-with-seattle-mariners/

Ummm...Pearl Harbor...ummm...wasn't that, like, the place Vietnam attacked in, like, 1975?

Try these answers already posted. https://www.google.com/search?q=+site%3Amodelcarsmag.com+++decant+paint&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

There was a "Connoisseur Classics" version from MPC as well, and if I recall correctly, it was identical to the AMT version...same tooling. I THINK the green-car box-art was street-roddded, and couldn't be built stock. Fenderwells for the spares filled in, no stock engine or rear end, etc. At least that's what it looks like from the partial kits and gluebombs I have. Art Anderson would know.

Gerald Wingrove's "The Complete Car Modeller" volumes one and two, from 1978 and 1991 respectively. Perfect, as-new condition books. Incredible craftsmanship, great scratchbuilding resource.

I have never sen the one in post 66 with "Twin Mill" on the side, but I sure like it.

Yup. Roth's "Mysterion".