Ace-Garageguy

You're right...I've noticed the same thing. I've read just about everything published that I could find on the history of the car, and I still don't have dates to go with a lot of the pictures floating around. Scoops and openings in the body appear and disappear, and the color seems to have changed from a very light blue to the sky blue usually shown on the first iteration. I'm sure there was a lot of R&D done during the run up to the record attempts.

Thank you all again for the interest and encouragement. I had forgotten my cardinal rule for working on things...FIRST: Pretend you're smarter than what you're working on. So, I had to hack into the nose to shorten and re-shape it, and there wasn't anything to support putty. Hence, some styrene stock got added in... UNPAID PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT : I had run out of my usual glazing-putty favorite USC Icing, I had a motorcycle tank to finish up here, and the guy at NAPA suggested trying a small container of Bondo brand "Professional" two-part glazing putty ($14). I'm in the midst of moving, so I won't be doing any 1:1 bodywork for a while, and I didn't want a regular, expensive tube of Icing sitting around going bad. I used it on the tank, and liked it so much I used it to finish roughing the Challenger model. This stuff is great. It's the finest-grained putty I've ever seen, it mixes easily, spreads like butter, and fills even the most minor scratches beautifully. It even sticks to properly prepared (sanded 180 grit) styrene better than anything I've used so far (darn near all of them). The nose continues to progress, and I found a nice, period reference shot of the car in bare metal to supplement the other pix I've got.

Duplicolor is usually lacquer, yes. If you want to shoot metallics, try their pearl colors. The flakes are smaller, so you avoid the bass-boat, kustom-kar look (like on my Chevelle)...unless that's the look you're after. Duplicolor's high-build sandable primers, in several colors, work great for finishing minor bodywork, and their sandable primers work very well on plastic that doesn't need much in the way of scratch filling. And yes, you should really wait a couple of days, minimum, before painting over primer. The solvents evaporate out of primer over time, so it shrinks somewhat. Painting over it too soon tends to trap the solvents, delay thorough drying, and over time, tends to encourage gloss failure as the materials continue to shrink. If you're airbrushing enamels, the paint guru Donn Yost recommends thinning it with cheap lacquer thinner. His results prove he knows whereof he speaks.

Thanks Ray. I wonder sometimes if it looks like I'm screaming "look at me", but I'm really only trying to encourage some of the folks getting frustrated with rattle-can results, to show what's possible after a little practice...I hope this is understood by everyone. It's far from perfect, but I think it looks pretty good for spraybombs.

Oh yes...a man after my own heart. Looking great, love the color.

Good link, Kerry...and this one of mine comes up there. The chassis in the foreground is stock '32 Ford (Revell) and the one in the background is Revell '32 with a suicide front mount. It's basically a tubular front crossmember with an up-and-forward bracket fabricated to carry the center of the spring. It accomplishes the same thing as what you already have, but takes less space. It's also the way they do it on the real ones. You can make it just about any height you want, to get the stance you want.

I like the stretched wheelbase. You may already know...there's an easier way to do it, like it's done on 1:1 cars, called a "suicide front end". It gives more room for a grille, radiator, etc. than the up-and-over crossmember you've made. What you've got looks good.

Man, looking really good. It's tough to get all those pieces-parts to meld together so slickly. Nice going. Good clean radii on your wheel openings too. A+ Are you using a 2-component primer?

One potential problem is that mattes and flats sometimes pick up marks from being handled...which of course you cant polish out, or you ruin the whole effect. I've tried painting the semi-gloss first, and had unhappy tape-lines show up when I removed the masking. Because the flats like to be painted last, it's also a good idea to use a flat or matte that covers very well, like in one coat. If you have to apply multiple coats to get full hiding of the under-color, you risk getting a very visible masking edge from thick paint buildup. I think experimentation with the materials you're going to use is the hot setup on this one.

Yup, and that's why anyone knowledgeable, when swapping higher-output engines into early chassis (an A-V8 for instance) will use an X-member from some other donor chassis (if building a really traditional, period-style car). The '34 Ford X-member was one of the recommended pieces to do an A-V8, back in the day. Just about any engine swap will get beefed-up, re-worked crossmembers, if it's done by anyone with a functioning brain, for just the reason Art mentions...ladder frames TWIST, but boxing is way better than nothing.

Pretty fine.

You also mention Krylon Fusion, which CAN be too hot for some of the more recent kit-styrenes. It's called "Fusion" because it has hot solvents that 'bite' into the plastic, and on SOME plastics, it will produce a 'crazed' effect that you just can't get rid of. And painting on spoons is okay for checking colors, but (1) they're typically made of a harder, more solvent-resistant plastic than recent models are and (2) you just can't learn control of the spray pattern, and how fast and how close to make your passes, and how much to overlap passes, by painting spoons. You need to get a scrap body and practice on that. The Testors lacquers Mike suggests can give excellent results. This model was painted with all rattlecan Testors lacquers, and HAS NOT been sanded and polished in this shot...just to give you some encouragement about what's possible with rattlecans. And yes, practice, practice, practice.

More real information from the real world, about 3D scan-to-design-to-production. This is an engineering white paper webinar about current tech and capabilities. They ask for some info from you, like company affiliation, etc. Anyone serious about learning more would do well to look at it. http://www.engineeringwhitepapers.com/rapid-prototyping/3d-scan-3d-print-design-innovations-faro-3d-systems-webinar/ And here's another readable white paper about how laser scanning actually works. Again, anyone with serious interest in this tech should read it. http://www.engineeringwhitepapers.com/white-papers/laser-line-scanning/

I'm going nuts, slightly (more so than normally, anyway). As I try to bring this one home (while moving the house and shop, and in time for the Nov. 9 ACME NNL-style Southern Nationals) I'm finding more and more subtle differences between the early and late versions of the car, and it's a lesson in measuring, analyzing carefully and planning FIRST (if you want to do an accurate model of an actual vehicle) to avoid surprises down the road. I've been tearing my little remaining hair out trying to identify what was eluding me about getting the 'look' of the early car just right, even though I'd made templates of the profiles of the fender tops from a good profile shot of the car. My eye kept coming back to the relationship of the height of the front fender relative to the height of the lower side panel... I'd assumed the lower side panels were re-used in original form on the later version of the car, and were therefor the same height on both versions. Wrong. After carefully scaling good, crisp profile shots of both versions of it, using the wheel / tire diameters as references, it has worked out that the later side panels (as presented in the Revell kit) are indeed slightly taller than the originals, and after allowing for measuring errors and averaging a few repeated measurements (in order to allow for slight inaccuracies in interpreting the edges of the panels in the photographs due to fuzziness of the images), the difference accounts for what my eyeball was telling me all along...simply put, the discrepancy in the profile 'feel' of my model is right there. The numbers don't lie, and I'm working on a solution that doesn't involve disassembling what I've already got. And...I'd been being careful to preserve the engraving of the fuel-fill access panels on the nose of the car, BUT, a very good shot of it in original condition on the cover of the December 1959 Hot Rod magazine shows them farther rearward than as presented on the Revell model. The box-art photo of the Revell bare chassis shows the filler-caps on the Moon tanks positioned to the front of the car, and they roughly line up with the molded access panels on the nose. Several shots of the real car, sans-skins, appear to show the fillers on the Moon tanks positioned to the rear, which would account for the difference in location of the access panels. Fine...but here's the weird part...the INSTRUCTIONS show the filler caps to the rear, while the box-art shows them forward. Interesting. Anyway, all this also effects the nose profile, as I was taking my interpretation of said profile in reference to the location of the fuel-fill access panels, and they're different on the early car, I THINK, will have to be changed, and the profile altered accordingly. Oh man...tearing out more hair. The best model I've seen so far of the early car is this one done in 1/43 by Ugo Fadini. It captures the look of the first-gen car quite well. His model of the later 406.6 mph version of the car really makes the differences obvious... and a top-shot shows up more changes...

Oh boy, you've got it too. If I live to be 100, I'll never get them all built. And you've definitely found the right place. Welcome welcome.

You may also want to have a look at Byron's Gasser Madness. This was one of the go-to sites for research and photos for a good while, but it went away after Byron's death. Some friends of his have recently succeeded in resurrecting it... http://www.gassermadness.us/ Click on "A Brief History of the Gasser Classes" in the table of contents (to the left side of the homepage) for just that...

It appears to be a line-drawing taken from a Bo Zolland design... The old Monogram Predicta kits can sometimes be had pretty cheap. As the car is based on an early T-bird, I've used the chassis under several AMT molded-detail cars.

Yup. The Thom guy is probably Thom Taylor.

http://randyayersmodeling.com/modelingforum/index.php The Randy Ayers site is more late model. Early cars from 1948 are in the Darkside Racers topics. You might want to look at the Legends of Nascar site as well...this is the Curtis Turner page... http://www.fireballroberts.com/curtis_turner1.htm

Most certainly NOT clearcoated in the '50s, and most certainly painted with synthetic enamel...nice gloss without sanding / polishing, but nowhere near as glossy as the over-restored stuff that you see in a lot of museum pieces today. Lettering and numbers would have been hand-painted on, so the effect of a decal on the surface of the paint on a model looks about right.

How'd I miss this ?? Beautiful !!

Очень интересно. Без пластиковых в магазине?

I usedta buy Revell Orange Crates and Challenger LSRs before they were re-issued.

Great looking car...glad it runs as good as it looks now. It's hard to tell a shop's motives and capabilities without working there, but I was in the business for many years, and I've seen it all...including well-known guys who SHOULD have known what they were doing but didn't...and just plain crooks, even in aviation. Unless you're a knowledgeable gearhead, you're kinda at the mercy of the trust monster. ------------------------------------------------------------- I had a fleet client once bring me a Chevy van that was overheating and blowing clouds of white smoke, missing on a least one cylinder, and the auto trans was slipping badly, and wouldn't throttle-downshift. He'd been told he had a cracked head, a blown head gasket, a cracked block, and needed a trans overhaul. Compression test showed less than 10% variation from hole to hole, but a couple of the plugs looked very strange...oil fouling but lean. I found a vacuum leak inside the trans vacuum modulator that had been letting trans fluid pass into the intake manifold (hence the miss, the white smoke and lack of partial-throttle-kickdown).The trans fluid was low...naturally (the cause of the trans slipping). I took the thermostat out and tested it...stuck solid. Did a combustion-gas in-the- coolant test and came up fine. Put in a new thermostat, filled the trans, cleaned and gapped the plugs and tidied up the timing, etc. Ran just like it was supposed to, all problems solved. He was ecstatic.

I like where you're going, but I'd consider pulling the fenders rearward a tad. I think you may be running the risk of getting a little Jimmy Durante-esque, if you know what I mean.