Ace-Garageguy

I can't much stand most of 'em, can stand a few in very small doses. The ones I like best are Sarah-n-Tuned's builds of her own cars. She's an ex-military aircraft mechanic, knows how to do most stuff right, sweats the details as obsessively as I do...though she sweats different stuff...and is really funny in an offbeat way. She also is kinda cute, and has quite a following of simps.

Evidence might be plentiful, verifiable, and unimpeachable, yet may still be casually denied by those with extra-special brain function.

"Patrón" is a way to refer to a male leader, boss, or employer in Spanish.

"Around heah" said the greasy-haired toothless potbellied bartender in the stinking sweat-stained shirt "we don' like your kind".

"Together, we can do this" usually means (in my experience) "you do all the work and I'll take all the credit".

Hands are pretty amazing tools.

Yup, absolutely positively the Monogram 1/8 scale "Big Deuce". I have several. Here's a build thread on one of 'em.

Beautiful. Really.

Last week another NIB/NOS HO-scale steam locomotive, this time a Bachmann 2-8-0 in Reading livery that I think dates back several decades. These are quite nice-running, and the valve gear action looks very good too. Like a lot of this older semi- "toy train" rolling stock, with some careful detailing and weathering and a little "tuning", they can look and run as good as modern models costing many times more, and adding DCC isn't particularly difficult I went back to the flea market and snagged another big box of unloved, damaged, parts-missing interesting freight cars really cheap. Filling a freight yard these days can run into some serious money, with modern ready-to-run cars and kits costing anywhere from $25 to almost $100 each. But what I buy at the flea markets, usually only needing a truck or a wheelset or a coupler or other minor repairs (plus weathering) costs me on average $4 each. The shot above from 1962 is dead in the era I'll be modeling, and shows a mix of freight cars built over several decades: mostly boxcars and covered hoppers, but also open hoppers, gondolas, tank cars, etc. The mix of cars in a yard is determined by the local industries a railroad serves, as well as what kind of commodities move through it from one part of the country to the other. Anyway, to fill a freight yard to realistically represent the kind of activity shown above, the expense would be staggering using only current issue cars and kits. But at what I've been paying, though still not exactly cheap, it's doable. And the older broken stuff is generally within the time frame I want to model, too. Plus, just as with my car modeling, I seem to prefer bringing something back from almost-trash instead of buying shiny-new.

Interiors of ponies like lungs and intestines aren't anything I'd want in my car, because they draw flies.

Seligman through Oatman, Az. is a great stretch of Rt. 66.

Diseases of the soul can be cured...sometimes.

"Show me the mommies" said the fella who found younger mature women particularly attractive.

Obviously, packing built models for moving is entirely different from packing for shipping. Shipping built-ups without damage is almost impossible because of the way boxes are thrown around and generally abused during the process. But if you're going to do the box-handling into and out of your POD, you can make sure they're not slammed around and remain upright. I pack built-ups in individual small sturdy boxes as Rob recommends, with the model itself in a large ziplock as Barry recommends (to contain any parts that may come loose primarily), then either surrounded by plastic peanuts or bubble wrap depending on the individual model's fragility. I then pack individual boxes within a larger box to maximize loading and space efficiency, and provide good anti-crush protection. PAY ATTENTION to how high you stack boxes too, how sturdy they are (to resist crushing from compaction from road-vibration on the trip), and how much weight is on the lowest box in any given stack. NOTE: Don't let any resin bodies or parts you may have be subjected to any weight or pressure. The only damage to anything last time I moved a large load of models 2000 miles in extreme heat (well over 100F in the truck most of the way) was one resin body I'd packed "too tight" in its box. Expensive and rare body, totally ruined, non-repairable.

This popped up just now... NEVER MIND. Copy / paste function failed to display a bold-face message obviously intended for an administrator, would only display that lonely 1. that I can't delete. Second time this has happened. A clue? Template forums/front/index/forumRow is throwing an error. This theme may be out of date. Run the support tool in the AdminCP to restore the default theme.]]

Nice completion.

Okay folks, remember the "no politics" rule in spite of the temptation.

Bedtime for Bonzo, a film from 1951, starred a future US President.

To be or not to be, doobie doobie doobie.

Page awareness is indeed recommended for playing this game.

Yard-art can take many forms, like steel agave that also work well for impaling unwary trespassers.

Minutes pass like weeks when you have a sharp stick in your eye.

"Someday my prints will come" was what people used to say about having photos developed.

"Offered up" is past tense of "offer up", which is a phrase typically found only in British service manuals meaning "place something near something else for assembly".

Absolutely. Tons of really useful historical data has just gone away over the last two decades. And with Google's continuing policy to either steer you to something to BUY so they get their little referral cut, or to put their spin on any results (rather than just displaying RELEVANT but NEUTRAL results to any query) the usefulness of it and any search engine based on it (which is most of 'em) deteriorates daily.