Ace-Garageguy

"Water has no effect on fake flowers"

"Be careful who you let on your ship, because some people will try to sink it because they can't be the captain."

Someone once said "you can't learn how to drive in a parked car".

Bear with me here: "smarter than the average bear", posted immediately above, is NOT a sentence.

I believe the most significant "bad" chemical missing from the non-toxic plastic glue is toluene. It was what made the old tube gloo popular with the sniffer crowd, and could cause permanent nervous system damage. Other solvents found in "toxic" glues for polystyrene include methylene chloride, methyl ethyl ketone, and xylene. If they're not on the TDS (technical data sheet) or SDS for the non-toxic stuff, they're not in it. These nasty solvents are what make regular plastic cement actually work, by dissolving the styrene to literally weld parts together. The non-toxic stuff doesn't even come close.

I used to call these, and especially the '60 models, "carrier deck Oldsmobiles" because the tails were so long and flat.

Forehead o' mine seems to be getting taller all the time, but as I become more and more "highbrow", why don't I seem to be getting smarter?

^^^ This is great. But what many don't realize is that people like this...engineer-it-to-the-best-of-our-ability, build it, test it, see what breaks, record and analyze the results, fix what broke, test it again, find the next weakness and fix that, etc., etc., etc...developed the numbers that CAD and CAE and CFD programs use to help engineers design things today. This points up the disturbing ongoing push in bean-counter-driven engineering towards "zero prototypes", where designs in the computer go straight to production with no physical-testing phase. Though CAD/CAE/CFD are absolutely wonderful tools, the data they run on is not complete for every possible situation, and even the best of the best of the best data-driven computer simulations should never be taken as the final proof that anything complex is fully developed. Reality can ALWAYS come up with something the simulations and the people running them never dreamed of.

Apparently at least $75 tariff on $3.50 worth of paint from this particular seller in Poland? Might want to check the math on that. And speaking of a topic that is already getting "political"... EDIT: And I'm sure any attempt on my part to explain the rationale for the tariffs would be branded as "political", so I won't bother.

Nice '59 land yacht. A little busy for my taste, but I could learn to love it.

This section is called "The Off-Topic Lounge". If I'm still capable of understanding what words in English mean, that means this section isn't about model cars. If endless posts about celebrities dying and friendly squirrels and what somebody had for dinner and what griped or pleased everyone don't interest you and all you want to be exposed to is model car talk, there's a pretty simple solution. Don't scroll down this far.

Though rhymes with "doh".

They're very good. You just have to pay attention and work carefully.

By way of illustrating a much less awkward sentence that expresses the same thought, allow me to respectfully present "By the Time I Get to Phoenix was a hit from days gone by, sung by Glenn Campbell in 1967".

By now one would think that the non-sentence above would have been made into the following sentence: "Meet the Beatles, 1964, had a song titled It Won't be Long, good music from days gone by".

It's political here though, as not all parties share the same opinion. And last time I looked, this site was based in America. If you don't see there's a contradiction there, then we'll just have to disagree. Nor can I understand how one can even think about 9/11 without questioning how such evil is possible in a "civilized" world, and remarking about it. Seems like a perfectly natural conversational segue or digression to me. But it's not my call.

I can tell you one thing right off. The line over the side glass is way wrong. Look at the real car shot; the line is straight, almost dead parallel with the line at the top of the doorskin. On the model, that line over the door glass starts sloping down almost immediately. The discrepancy is not a camera or lens artifact. It's just wrong. There are other issues, but that one jumps out and does indeed make the roof look too low...though it may actually be too low even at the front.

Yup, real pretty.

That, sir, is really really cool.

IIRC, the original Renwal version had an electric motor to turn it, whereas the repops have a hand crank. They also had what looks like an early Hydramatic automatic gearbox (non functional) which the repops lack. Either way, they're not really good kits for the inexperienced. Joining all the clear plastic parts together without making a nasty mess takes some skill and forethought, and the operating parts require patience to get assembled accurately and working right. I bodged one badly when I was a kid, only fairly recently bought an original Renwal glooey mess to get the trans and electric motor parts, and a repop for everything else.

A very large part of what I see as the cause of some of the questionable engineering emerging from the OEMS is that they're plagued with a "we know nothing about how it was done well before and we don't care, because we're so smart and educated that we can reinvent the wheel every time; after all, we're tech-savvy, not like those knuckle draggers who preceded us". Engineering should be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Any truly competent engineer takes historical precedent very seriously, analyzes what has worked well in the past as well as what broke, to understand why, in order to see how to implement lessons learned into future designs.

So tell me more. Will milk really put out the fire if you get hot pepper juice in your eye?

"Cigar Guy" stands behind his products forever. Lifetime warranties. If his stuff is failing, he won't be around for long. Small companies just can't screw ya like the big ones can. There's no shortage of late-model many-speed gearbox failures and vehicles sitting for months on dealers' lots due to zero parts or replacement gearboxes being available. And the owners are still making the payments while they sit. I know of several right here in my little ol' neck o' the woods. Today especially, there are people who are WAY better at what they do than OEM engineers and their bean-counter overlords. EDIT: There was, by the way, a little company called B&M that took pretty good GM auto boxes and made them into almost indestructible drag-racing boxes, and changed the face of drag racing forever. They worked similar magic on most of the well known US automatics, and are still in business (though, like many other iconic hot-rod businesses they've been absorbed by mega corps). Ring a bell?

Pretty much my exact thoughts.