Ace-Garageguy

No irks today, but I'm sure as soon as I finish my first cup of coffee I can think of something to whine about.

Overrated, overheated, over blown, and over-and-out are all over, Rover.

Very nice models. Love the old ones. Wonderfully balanced, tossable little cars. The advertising phrase "nothing handles like an Alfa" was entirely true. They even managed to smell different from anything else. The newer one is attractive, and I'm sure it's competent, but with a different grille it could be anything from anywhere.

Sensibilities of the delicate kind can lead to screaming hysterically, running in circles with your hair on fire, and complaining to moderators on social media platforms several times every hour.

My understanding is that slammers don't have any interior, just blacked out windows But anybody...feel free to correct me.

Wow. That's...utilitarian.

Day can be the opposite of night, but it's not necessarily right to assume that's always the case, because everything is interpreted and therefore governed by lived experience and feelings and personal perspective and not repressive objective reality.

"About time!" barked the employer as his least favorite slacker schlepped in at noon.

Hobby-shop browsing was my favorite rainy Saturday passtime, starting when I was about 11.

Hot Rod magazine in the late postwar era and all through the '50s could have just as well been called "Hot Rod Engineering". I have a fair collection of mags from the era, with in-depth articles on the various types of ignition systems from battery/coil to magneto to early electronic setups, the theory and practical application of supercharging and its effect on volumetric efficiency, modifying and tuning Hilborn mechanical injection for the street, carburettor theory, design analysis of American units, and practical mods and tuning, theory and practice of header design...much of what anyone could need to know to become a competent and knowledgeable car builder...or just a good mechanic with a firm grounding in basic concepts...was covered at one time or another. In the last years, most of that stuff would have been nixed by the dumbed-down editorial policy, binned in the TLDR can. It's a shame, because much of my engineering interest was inspired by periodicals like Hot Rod, and the tech stuff lit a fire in me to learn as much as I could absorb into the workings of automobiles and machines in general...and by extension, the workings of the physical world we all inhabit. From what I've seen lately, I can't imagine much of what's out there now having the same effect on a young person. EDIT: One of the earlier magazine flags to fall was Sports Car Graphic, whose tech editor was Paul van Valkenburgh, author of the classic Race Car Engineering and Mechanics, a tech wizard if there ever was one. One standout article I vividly recall took a DeTomaso Mangusta from a relatively unreliable, overheating, typically finicky Italian exotic, corrected a multitude of smallish issues, and turned it into a useable daily driver you could actually go someplace in. How cool was that? SCG folded in 1971, and later my entire collection was lost along with the contents of a storage unit when I was occupied elsewhere.

"Specialist cars" is a term that encompasses primarily British low production and kit cars.

Beliefs are often not worth the neurons they're imprinted on.

DELETED. The answer is out there but it's too potentially dangerous for me to recommend.

Point-and-shoot cameras are the great bringers of sort-of-focused mediocrity to photography.

"Hooch" has another meaning from some Asian conflicts I'll forego mentioning at the moment, and "shoot the Hooch" is slang for rafting on the Chattahoochee River.

My paperwork/billing is taking a LONG time this cycle, with close to 300 progress photos to label and cross-reference with the work-diary text.

"For he's a jolly good fellow" is something I'd usually deny.

"Term" can mean a length of time or a description.

Beans and franks still appeal to my palate when I'm feeling five years old.

I have to disagree with that. If you're shooting lacquer primer, swelling and ghosting will most definitely show. This Revell '50 Olds hood swelled and ghosted badly after removing the peak and blocking out some divots (white areas). Re-primering, sanding, primering, sanding...until nothing came up produced this when I laid color on it:

1955: 1956:

THIS ^^^

Early flame jobs were pretty basic. Check out the 1948 Hot Rod Magazine cover car about halfway down this page... https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/traditional-50s-hot-rod-flames.1024947/

Yup, that's pretty much the classic explanation, though I've heard versions where it was an Indy car with a fuel leak, or a short-track dirt car. Whatever the truth is, the origin story is good enough for me.

I'm really stoked about this one...a NOS HO-scale powered Bowser Fairbanks Morse H-16-44 "Baby Trainmaster" kit, complete with a factory-modified Athearn F-7 8-wheel drive, all the nice wire handrails, couplers, etc. These ancient die-cast locomotives are heavy, and with 8-wheel drive, will just about pull stumps. The detail is far better on them than one would generally expect from a model this old (originally a Penn-Line kit from the 1950s IIRC), and with a little extra work, they can compare very favorably with today's stuff. There's sufficient room inside for current-generation DCC too.