Ace-Garageguy

Inside my mind, you'll find a fair selection of unresolved issues, but I chip away at 'em a little every day.

Critics of my work who've never demonstrated that they can do at least as well don't rate my attention, but criticism from genuinely accomplished practitioners of whatever-it-is is always welcome.

The store-brand deli meats I favor for my sack lunches have gone up 50% in the past two weeks, from $6 something to $9 something per pound. Considerably more than they went up during the bat flu interlude, when everybody and his dog was blaming "supply chain disruptions" for gouging consumers. So...ummm...what's the justification now? I know beef is up, but it's not just deli beef, but ham, turkey, and chicken as well. Diesel isn't way up, so it can't be "distribution and transport costs", and as far as I know, the bird flu thing is over, and pigs are doing just dandy too. I guess they're getting us so sick of their endless greed, we'll be eating ze bugs out of economic necessity.

Break my bones may sticks and stones, but words will never hurt me.

Simply because, in a world that wasn't eaten up with more scumbucket dirtbag scammers every day, you didn't need to remember to pay a debit card off every month to avoid interest.

Criticizing can be helpful or destructive, depending largely on the intent of the one doing it, and the way it's packaged.

"Old" sometimes doesn't seem so bad, especially when I look around at a lot of "young" today.

Yeah, it was always easier to push the guys to hammer the real race cars after they were "blooded", so to speak. I'm going to have to remember that about the evil spirits too. Could be why my beaters all seem to be pretty much indestructible, but every time I make something pretty, it becomes a prima donna.

^^^ Welcome to the trials and tribulations of building real cars, but in miniature...which is exactly what we do when we step beyond building what's in the box.

That's a real shame. Why hire a geezer who knows something when you can hire a rainbow-haired kid who can't do anything but look at his phone all day?

Years ago, I quit buying car mags when the ad content began to vastly outweigh the editorial content, and what tech articles there were were thinly disguised ads themselves, dumbed down to the "see Spot run" level, a far cry from the multi-page hardcore tech articles in the 1950s and '60s that actually had (OMG OMG!!!) real math sometimes.

Hiking back to the Blazer earlier, the trail I took runs near an access road. I heard an engine that didn't sound at all familiar, but was definitely a 4-cylinder diesel (the rattling, exhaust note, and the smell don't lie). I looked over to see what it was, and it was something I'd never seen in the States before...a (Romanian built?) ARO 24, like this but in darkish metallic green. Cool little truck, and how it got here is anybody's guess.

But wait!! There's more!!!!!!

Education as to the names and general locations of many automotive parts began with building car models when I was a kid, exactly as Tim says above, and once that had started to sink in, I began to understand the technical articles in the real-car magazines.

^^^ 1775 was a very good year for rational thought.

I've been "retired" for years, but I still work almost full time building, modifying, and restoring real cars, and the gross incompetence I have to deal with on a daily basis is making me dislike something I used to love, and poured a lifetime of skill-building effort into to excel at.

No sir. I just expect parts countermen to know as much about the operation of IC-powered vehicles as I did at the end of the sixth grade. I really don't think that's asking a lot.

Anyone who can make anything out of a Palmer or Premier kit without putting it through a wood-chipper, considering their grossly inaccurate lines and proportions, has my deepest and most profound respect...at least from an emotional aspect.

Nice work. Instructive and inspirational too.

Today reminds me of mornings in my youth when I was really really anxious to get to work on a model...but alas, some "adult responsibility" always seems to take priority now.

1964 was back in the days when people still knew what sentences were.

Kindof amazing that there was once a civilization on Earth that could actually make stuff out of iron with not much more than an open forge, an anvil, and some hammers.

Haven't bought one yet, but I realized I have exactly zero Fox-body Mustangs. Kinda odd I suppose, because it's such a wildly popular real-world car...but maybe that's the reason. I like unusual. Only problem is I have no idea what to build it into. A mildly flared canyon-carver might be nice, 'cause the high-winding SBF really lends itself to that kind of thing...

It's a great tool, especially if you get the full set of blades. Not cheap, but worth it. There's a learning curve, but it does a vastly superior job than the old number 11 blade (turned backwards or whatever), because it takes a nice curl of material out of the depth of the scribe, without making it any wider.