Ace-Garageguy

Yeah, I was going to suggest doing one in 1/24. The Airfix kits aren't too expensive, and I'm pretty sure somebody made a 1/24 resin Griffon. EDIT: Nope. https://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?/topic/33844-is-there-a-good-r-r-griffon-engine-in-132-or-124/ EDIT 2: The 1/32 scale Matchbox Mk 22/24 Spitfire has a Griffon with contra-rotating props. Either use that as a reference to scratchbash wotcher need in 1/24, or get the right Mk. P-51 in 1/32 and have at it.

I live in what used to be an extremely clean semi-rural county on the outskirts of Atlanta. The exact same thing is happening here. Any low-traffic area that's not fenced is becoming a dump site...including the woods between my house and the railroad tracks. I've hauled away at least one longbed pickup full of other people's garbage over the last 6 years. And one of the shops I work with has a very large rolloff dumpster (20 yard, 20 feet long) for scrap metal. Last week some enterprising souls filled it with wooden pallets, furniture, and household waste.

Always tough losing a pet, especially one you get close to. It's always amazed me how animals express emotion. It's real, not wishful anthropomorphizing. I even get kinda choked up when one of the wild feral cats gets squashed by someone too careless or too much in a hurry.

"Time and tide wait for no man", nor do hurricanes and tornadoes.

Shop prices for replacing engine timing belts at the required interval often exceed the value of older vehicles, which is why lowballers drive perfectly good vehicles to engine destruction, and they end up as scrap (at which point the lowballer has to pay way more for another car to destroy than it would have cost to keep the first one running indefinitely); PT Cruisers and Neons are among the kinda cool cars disappearing due to this.

Engine design is being increasingly done by people who shouldn't be designing cardboard bird houses, and "wet timing belts" that run in a bath of hot, solvent engine oil that tends to dissolve them, and then clog oil pickups with rubber particles (leading to catastrophic engine failure) are all the proof anyone needs of monkey-see-monkey-do incompetence on a global scale.

"Greed is good", the mantra from the movie Wall Street, is often mistaken to be the idea behind Atlas Shrugged as well...and it ain't.

Have either a miserable head cold, or I've developed an allergy to some fall pollen that didn't used to affect me. Head feels like it's full of cotton, scratchy throat and eyes, slight chills, runny nose. Yuck.

Very nice. If you're a modeler or maker or tinkerer, once you have a lathe and explore its capabilities, it's hard to imagine life without one. Besides my little Unimat lathe/mill, I finally sprung for a used Sherline lathe and mill setup with tons of tooling last year. One of he shops I work with has an Emco unit a little larger than yours. There's hardly a week goes by that at least one of them doesn't get used...(or when I wish my big gap-bed lathe that'll swing a 16" OD part, and my Chinese Bridgeport milling-machine clone weren't in storage).

Squirrel may be on the menu this year for Thanksgiving, what with food prices being what they are.

The collaboration between Italy's Ghia and Chrysler in the 1950s produced some stunning blends of European aesthetics and US V8 muscle. These got my attention when I was very young, one of them actually having been either on the cover of or featured in a children's picture book on cars. Though never produced in series and largely unknown today, I'd really love to see one kitted. But it's another pipedream that will never happen.

Album-collecting was fun in my teens, and building up my stereo system from Heathkit components taught me a lot about electronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit#:~:text=As of 2022%2C the company,and replacement parts for sale.

"Us against them" sums up a large part of human existence, generally for no rational reason.

Nice job so far on an unloved kit. Love that blue too. As I'm sure you know, it's pretty much a clone of the very similar AMT kit. And yes, the Revellogram '40s are much nicer, but this one builds up very nicely with a little extra effort.

Snagged two complete unstarted first-release vintage Revell kits for about $20 each at one of the "antique" malls. Each factory priced at $2, so accounting for inflation, not a bad deal. These are two of my all time favorite kits that I built as a teen, and the nostalgia fix is well worth a few bucks to me. And though both of 'em have a reputation as being "fiddly", I think they're two of the best offerings to ever come from a US manufacturer. Later releases of the '31 Ford came as either Tudor or Woody, without all the extra parts in the box to build the alternative version. Little tire melt from one of the Anglia's slicks on one door, but everything else is A-OK.

Coast through life looking for the easy way, tricking people out of their money, time, effort, and love, never giving anything in return, but constantly announcing to the world your superior morality and victimhood.

Movie night with tacos or pizza or spaghetti is a nice time-to-turn-off-the-world-outside occasional treat.

Truth. Period. Solvent glues dissolve the underlying plastic, and fuse with it permanently. Solvent glues do NOT come off.

Player pianos are probably not real familiar to the last couple generations.

High school memories fall into two categories, the best of times and the worst of times; "It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”.

Puked up a hairball did my kitty.

Picked up a few HO OO scale Hornby English style freight cars in a bunch of other unloved and cheap HO stuff... EDIT: I've been reliably informed these are in fact OO scale, which is slightly larger at 1/76 than HO at 1/87. The wheels are gauged to run on HO track, they're not appreciably wider than most HO scale equipment, so I'll probably fudge running them as background pieces on an HO scale layout, considering the majority of American model railroaders probably won't be all that familiar with old British equipment. EDIT 2: Two-axle freight cars were not uncommon on American narrow-gauge short lines, and though the British cars shown above don't match any American prototypes I've found so far, they're similar in concept...and it's my railroad and I can do what I want. Examples of American 2-axle narrow-gauge cars, below: I also dragged home an unpowered plastic HO (OO?) scale English Rosebud Kitmaster Diesel-Electric "shunter" (a switcher to us), to pull 'em with. It can be powered by one of the small drives I already have. It's a model of a real British locomotive class, quite well detailed for its age. Apparently some of these are still in operation...remarkably long service for locomotives built in the early 1950s through the early '60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preserved_British_Rail_Class_08_locomotives All I need now is a plausible backstory as to how British equipment ended up on an American mining/logging short line in the late 1950s.

Detail parts from the aftermarket slathered all over a sloppy model with poor paint and fit won't make it into a first-rate piece.

"Care", as in the verb meaning "to give a da--", can't be taught, and some folks are born without the ability.

Like painted with a dirty pinecone? (AI agrees:) AI Overview Learn more…Opens in new tab You can use a pine cone dipped in paint as a paint brush to add a unique detail to your painting project. To do this, you can: Find a sturdy, unblemished pine cone. Wash the pine cone to remove any dirt or debris