Ace-Garageguy

Glad someone over here was able to use my info as well.

Wheel paint is Testors 1204 Gloss Dark Red enamel. Body will be gloss black lacquer.

This is another one back in the rotation while things dry, or while I work out problems on the other builds. It started as an AMT '40 Tudor Sedan. A comparison of the kit body and the mod bod. This one's getting a Lincoln V-12 flathead, and an early auto gearbox (not the Ford gearbox pictured). Lots of cutting and fabbing to get it all to fit.

Another method to widen fenders, or to create custom flares, is to glue .010" strip styrene to the inner edges of the wheel openings, letting it extend outward as wide as you want your flares to be..... Then simply fill and sculpt to the final contours you want......

A couple of things to remember..... Roll cage tubing will almost always be 1.5" or 2" on a full-size car. That scales to .060" and .080" in 1/25. Those sizes can be bent cold, with your fingertips, SLOWLY and carefully. BUT, IF YOU GO TOO FAST, it will crack. After I make my bends, I run the part under HOT tap water, and hold it in position while it cools. That sets the shape pretty well. It WILL tend to spring back after a while, but if you glue it in place fairly quickly after bending, it's not a problem. The main hoop and the windshield post bars were done as I described on this model. Exhaust pipes will be from 1.5" on a stocker (or header primary tubes) to 2.5" (scales to .10" in 1/25) on something fast. You MIGHT see 3" tubing on a race car (.12" in 1/25). The larger sizes are a little too thick to bend cold, but the concentrated heat from an old blow-dryer is plenty. I made a small metal funnel from a cake decorating tip to go on the nozzle of the dryer. It works best to have the dryer in a vise so you can use both hands to make the bend, and the small opening in the funnel directs the heat EXACTLY where you want it. WARNING WARNING DANGER DANGER: The concentrated heat will burn your fingertips if you're not careful, but it won't "smoke" the plastic unless you hold it in the heat WAY too long. The funnel will also cause heat to back up into the dryer and sometimes cause it to shut-down automatically. The dryer is designed to do this if it overheats. As soon as it cools down, it will work again. BUT, you shouldn't have to run it long enough to overheat it anyway. It actually takes very little heat to bend styrene rod.

Yes, Williams has a pair in 1/32, both the R-1 and the Z. They also make some other important racing planes of the period. Nice kits.

The dropped front axle I'm using is from many Revell model-A kits. It's a nice piece, and comes with working steering, but it also has model A mechanical brake backing plates, which aren't appropriate for a hot rod that represents a car with hydraulics. MOST fast hot rods got built with '39 or later juice brakes. They were almost a bolt-on, and vastly improved deceleration. This is the chrome tree that goes with the axle, a set of juice front backing plates from the Monogram '30 Woody kit (which comes with later brakes) and the axle and wishbone from the A kit. Axle and backing plate drilled to take a .030" kingpin. Axle, split wishbone with the ends modified and drilled, and new stub-axles on the backing plates. And a much more realistic model with poseable steering and the hydraulic-brake backing-plates that any fast car would surely have had.

Because sanding pads are actually soft sanding "blocks", it is very possible to just knock off the dust nib without changing the shade of the surrounding paint. Yes, you DO have to be very careful. Candies are extremely difficult to spray and get exactly even coverage anyway. A lot of 1:1 cars have visible stripes in the candy where the build is heavier in some areas, owing to improper overlap of paint gun passes, and there's no way to fix that, but I have sucessfully sanded small dust nibs out of candies. ALL lacquer candies got sanded and buffed back in "the day", and urethane based candies do today. Whenever you touch a candy color with anything, sandpaper or polish, you risk getting blotches of uneven color. So VERY VERY careful is the rule. Color sanding of a candy color on a crowned panel, the top of a fender for instance, is a scary proposition even without dust in it. But unless you can lay the paint down perfectly slick, which is pretty doubtful in most cases, you're going to have to color-sand anyway to get show-quality paint. Again, because a sanding pad is a "block", it's possible to just kiss the surface and let the bolck shave off the dust nib without going into the surrounding color. Then, colorsand and polish as you would normally.

Oh please. This is something EVERYONE should be aware of, because the "chemicals" CAN accidentally be mixed while cleaning, with unfortunate results. Forewarned, as they say, is better than gassing your family or blowing up the toilet.

Looks like it's banana bread time. Seroiusly, this thing looks so cool, so real that I'm finally inspired to try doing a weathered bulid myself. That's what I love about this hobby most.....always something new to learn and to experiment with without blowing up the house.

About the only things around the house or in the car that are really dangerous to mix are chlorine and ammonia.

Yes, absolutely positively you can sand it out. Use the very fine sanding pads, and use them WET with plenty of water, and keep cleaning the accumulated gunk out of the pad grit. Also, every time you go to a finer grit, clean out your water container carefully and get fresh water. Grit particles from, let's say 2400 pads, that come loose during sanding and get suspended in the water will make SCRATCHES when you're sanding with much finer grits like 12,000. Also be careful when you start to sand out the trash. If it's a little hard thing, it will also make a SCRATCH when it breaks free and gets slid along the car body. Really pay attention to what you're feeling and hearing when you're doing this.

The compass cutting tip is by far and away the preferable option, in my opinion. You don't have to cut all the way through the plastic, just score it enough so you can snap the discs out and clean up the edges with 400 grit sandpaper. Nice thing about a good cutting compass rig is that you can then use it for any diameter circle you want. There are also hole punches, like for notebook paper, for several size small holes. I use them for small things like coil spring seats. Another cutting compass trick is to make whitewall tire masks out of frisket paper. Then you can spray your whitewalls with vinyl interior dye, and they look like factory printed jobs and don't end up with the lettering filled like acrylic paint will do.

It's really not that scary. Brake fluid lives under the hood of cars. Degreaser gets used there. Alcohol is in windshield washer fluid. If mixing these chemicals was particularly dangerous, they sure as he-- wouldn't be sold over the counter in auto parts stores. The lawyers wouldn't let it happen.

I restore and rebuild a lot of gluebombs. Almost anything can be brought back if you work hard enough at it. Glue can be sanded off with progressively finer and finer grits of sandpaper. I've had to go as course a 180 wet to get big stuff off, then 400wet, then 800, 1200, and on up through the polishing pads made for paint, all the way to 12,000. Then polish with a mildly abrasive compound, like toothpaste or something actually made to do the job, like 3M Finesse It. Waviness in molded plastic windows can be blocked out too, and finished the same way. It's impossible to make a compound curved windshield out of flat plastic sheet unless you hot-vacuum-form it over a mold. Interestingly, the polishing pads of very fine grits now commonly sold for model car paint were originally developed for removing scratches and polishing plastic windows on aircraft.

I tried the caustic Easy Off on a body that had only been painted a few hours with Testors One Coat Lacquer. Easy Off didn't touch it. I ended up using "acrylic top coat stripper", and had to really scramble to get it off the car before it trashed the plastic. Brake fluid did nothing to it either, by the way.

Beautiful model of one of my favorite race cars of all time.

Love it. I know nothing about Australian race cars, but this is beautiful.

The engine will represent a 324 Oldsmobile, with 3 two-barrel carbs and a top-shift LaSalle gearbox hung on an Offenhauser aluminum adaptor. The engine is made up of vintage Revell and AMT parts, as when I started this build, there was no GOOD stock representation of the early Olds OHV V8. When the Olds 303 came out in '49, it had 135 hp, as compared to the Ford flathead's 100, and was the beginning of the end of the flathead Ford's dominance. Engine in the chassis with a fabbed solid front mount. I'll probably rework the mount to the rubber-isolated style. The period-style headers are being modified from the Pontiac pieces in the old AMT '36 Ford kits.

Yes, it's a Gee Bee R-1, with the large 1000hp Pratt & Whitney Hornet engine and larger fuselage diameter. (The Gee Bee Z, as seen in the movie Rocketeer, had the smaller diameter PW Wasp Jr. engine of about 550hp, and a smaller diameter fuselage). It's a very old Pyro kit, re-released later by Lindberg. Many sources list both kits INCORRECTLY as 1/32. The wingspan scales out to 1/26. The only thing about the kit that's 1/32 is the tiny pilot figure. The kit is also inaccurate in many areas, most notably the wing ribs showing very prominently. The real Gee Bee had plywood-skinned wings that were as slick as the technology of the time (in 1932, it flew 296mph) could get them. All that said though, with some work it can make a stunning model. Though there were no Gee Bees left by the period this car represents, about 1957 (though a flying reproduction was built from original Granville brothers' plans by Delmar Benjamin in the late 1990s, which put an end to the reputation the airplane had as a pilot killer), I just like the way they look together. Here's a link to a video of the replica doing aerobatics in 1999.

Farm out, man. Like man, that paint is really convincing, man.

Very nice build, and I really appreciate you thinking of putting it with the Merc for scale. That track nose, the little V8-60 and the wheels / tires would be great for a period dry lakes car.

Pretty trick truck. I like it. Is that a distributor AND coil packs, or do I muisunderstand what I'm seeing?

The Duvall comes from the AMT '32 Ford Phantom Vickie kits, 30089 and 30246.

These are such good looking cars, i always kind of wonder why Chebbolay spent gazillion$ developing the "nostalgia look" semi-clone. They could have just pulled out the old tooling and sold a bunch of these, all over again. On a C6 chassis. Yeah, I'd buy that.