Ace-Garageguy

That's really cool. Beautiful work, and the artist is great. Love me some stone-age babeage too.

Recalls, failures, and just plain stupid on newer vehicles may be more common than you think. There are also known defects, like some GM trucks with wiring-harness ground faults that can kill the engine and electrically-assisted steering simultaneously (think that might be a safety issue?), but may not have become recalls...yet. Here's the tip of the iceberg: https://www.caranddriver.com/recalls/

Those of you who live away from cities and their light pollution can go outside all this month around midnight and watch the sky tracked with "shooting stars". It's the annual Perseid Meteor Shower that occurs as the Earth goes through part of a comet's tail. It lasts through the end of August. People in the northern US (Ohio etc.) have been seeing the Northern Lights recently too.

"Costs more!!! Smaller package with less in it!!!" should be today's marketing slogan for just about everything

Up until a few years ago, I read everything Ray Kurzweil wrote, and I believed the future of AI was in good hands if he was one of the people at the helm. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/29/ray-kurzweil-google-ai-the-singularity-is-nearer His mathematical modeling of neural networks based on mimicking the cascade of decision events that was at the time the explanation for human consciousness made a lot of sense...and something similar is alluded to in the video. IBM's Watson and a chatbot app that's apparently fallen by the wayside also gave me a lot of hope. Kurtzweil now works for Google, and I'm beginning to think he may have become lazy (or simply doesn't have the authority his title would imply), and the majority of the current generation of AI researchers have elected to take what looks to be an easier path, only getting halfway home with the hardware/firmware, and hoping "training" will let the machine get the rest of the way on its own...apparently an approach embraced by a "consensus" of people in the field, rather than opting to do the hard work. Possibly much to their peril. The appalling stupidity of some of the garbage Google's "AI Overview" vomits up is evidence aplenty that they've missed the mark by a mile. But a massive problem is that the majority of people who accept Google as the font of all knowledge can't tell the difference between idiotic drivel and correct interpretation of all available information...which Watson excelled at.

Ferocious attack kittens can be deadly.

I think the push to use big-box DIY paint is in the pursuit of "saving money", believing there's some magic perfect primer hiding in plain sight, that will cost a fraction of what made-for-hobby-use (Tamiya etc.) or real-cars (Duplicolor etc.) do, and spit out perfect no-effort results every time. Most of these clowns don't seem to be able to grasp that different products developed for different things work entirely differently. You wouldn't paint the interior walls of your house with an industrial urethane made for heavy equipment, or a toughened epoxy coating made for machinery in a highly-abrasive environment. You wouldn't paint a real car with latex or oil-based house paint and expect anything but a pathetic mess. Yet they'll insist that paint products made for full-scale DIY projects, that put the emphasis on adhesion to anything and fast coverage, is appropriate for small finely-detailed scale models. Common sense just isn't that common, unfortunately.

Game me once, shame on you; game me twice, shame on me.

Foil the dastardly plans of the Bond-villains intent on world domination.

Yup. However, from what I'm seeing elsewhere on the web, I'm beginning to wonder if the Chinese intrusion Dave mentioned earlier isn't affecting a lot of sites. There are intermittent and maddening performance issues recently on several of the sites I frequent, including a few other forums, suppliers, bill-pay portals, etc. Not EVERYWHERE, but enough to make one wonder... I have multiple computers, have checked things like the oft-blamed "cache", browser versions, firewall settings, etc., and am pretty sure none of the slowdowns are on my end.

Experimenting is fine. I do it all the time. But reinventing the wheel is just not necessary. If you want to "experiment", your time would be more wisely spent developing techniques to get the best possible results from proven products that accomplished modelers have been using successfully...like Duplicolor primers.

"Standard" colors from the "any car, any color: $29.95" places were pretty awful.

"Parts is parts" isn't really true, which you will know if you've ever used any of the "bargain" or "budget" lines from "offshore" manufacturers.

World Products makes a classic smallblock-Chevy cast-iron block that takes LS heads, for a best-of-both-worlds engine build.

Like several of you, I bought a bunch of unboxed or unassembled-box kits off of feePay...cheap. Some of them didn't include the PE, but later those frets came up cheap too. All the fit issues have been addressed by builders on this very board. What I'd also like to see is a new run of AM's McLaren Can Am cars.

"Older but no wiser" defines far too many humans.

Christmas is coming, and the year from one Christmas to the next seems to get shorter and shorter.

Poseable girlfriends sound like more fun than poseable steering, but we make do with what's available.

Man...that's pretty. Great colors and interior. I love Ghias too, and that would be a perfect daily driver.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

I all fairness, I have to say I've turned out a few nice paint jobs with the cheapest rattlecan paint that was out there. One in particular, an exceptionally bilious shade of medium green enamel, I put on a '53 Ford pickup that was supposed to look like a cheapo Earl Scheib job. Anybody who remembers Scheib and other any-car-any-color-$29.95 shops should recall that most of the "standard" colors they stocked were just flat awful. I did the prep and primer as usual, with Duplicolor sandable red, and did enough testing with the cheap rattlecan stuff to 1) be certain it wouldn't craze, and 2) that I could maintain sufficient control of the stuff to flow it out nice. The result, after very minor sanding and polishing to remove the inevitable dust nibs you get in slow-drying enamel, was exactly what I wanted. Smooth but not real glossy, and an ugly color. But use garbage like that regularly? No way in jello.

Sadly, that is largely SOP for many social media sites, and anywhere where comments are allowed. The truth isn't popular in a lot of circles.

Etiquette?" she asked, to which I answered "what's a quette?"