Ace-Garageguy

Teenagers who think they know everything have no use for old geezers who might actually know a few things.

By "real hot-rodding", I mean the way it used to was. Not building cars by throwing money at catalogs and shops, but dirty-hands guys making existing stuff better by engineering and making their own parts...and even engines. American backyard ingenuity is far from dead, and at a pretty high level of sophistication to boot. These are a few of today's men like Stu Hilborn, Ted Halibrand, Ed Iskenderian, Mickey Thompson, et al. For the haters...remember that these things are works-in-progress, experimental, still in the prototype/development stage...kinda like the rough cars that ran on the dry lakes and early drag strips, and went faster than all the armchair experts said was possible. EDIT: ...just like the YT comment section is full of people who've never built anything not getting it, finding fault, and telling him he's doing it wrong.

Enjoying seeing this one come together.

There's a lotta stuff out there now for doing different metal finishes (somebody who's much more familiar with them than I am...your input is needed here), but to the best of my knowledge NOTHING that works like the "buffing" metalizers did. And they were wonderful once you understood how to use them.

IIRC, this Ford kit was similar, but not quite that bad. circa 1949 Pretty much just a block of wood, profile-cut with a bandsaw, some wire for axles, maybe a molded part or 5, and minimal instructions. This is a WW II 6X6 CCKW. Model railroad kits were often similar too, with the clerestory part of passenger cars, for example, requiring carving, shaping, sanding, and sealing prior to painting. Most of 'em came out pretty awful. I've been collecting wooden RR "craftsman" kits from the '50s through the '70s. They're essentially just a box of sticks and blocks of wood, usually cut to length but not always accurately, sometimes with a few cast metal or plastic detail parts, and it really takes some effort to make a nice model...but it IS possible, and it's very satisfying if you have patience and enjoy a challenge. Below is a 70 foot Missouri Pacific refrigerator car. Modelers today really do have it pretty good.

That would be telling.

That's the way it really was when I was a kid, back in the days we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways...

You must really like '61 Invictas to put out that much effort to find one.

No matter how stunningly perfect your builds were, some orange-peeled, glue-smeared, poor fitting, rocking-on-three-wheels model that had every conceivable PE and 3D part stuck to it crookedly would win every contest.

Great grandmothers wink at me these days, instead of running screaming like the young women do.

Then why polish it?

PM'd

Hey...it's not the speed that kills ya. It's the sudden stop if you hit a squirrel.

Fixin' to go to the doc to see if I have a broken rib, or just a bad owie. Oops. Old man trip on cat on steps, fall down, go boom. Cat OK.

For he's a jolly good tuna.

Lovers can be much more trouble than they're worth.

I posted in the "what non-car model didja get?" thread I'd recently acquired a "1/88 scale" model of a Beech 18, based on what the seller and MULTIPLE interdwerb sites quoted as the scale being...which I checked PRIOR to buying the thing. A friend who's very knowledgeable about aircraft models contacted me, to let me know THERE IS NO 1/88 SCALE BEECH 18. And he's correct. I dry-assembled the model and measured the wingspan at roughly 10". The REAL Beech 18 wingspan is 47' 8", or 572". Elementary-school arithmetic shows the actual scale to be approximately 1/57. So what I get for believing info that's apparently mindlessly rebleated widely on the interdwerbs is an expensive model I have no use for. I DID check multiple sources, as the interdwerbs also repeat endlessly that the old Pyro / Lindberg Gee Bee is 1/32, when in fact it's about 1/26, by measuring the wingspan...though the little pilot figure is indeed about 1/32. Endlessly repeated WRONG information is still WRONG. Simple math and measuring have been too hard for the general populace for decades it seems, and it's just getting worse daily. Thanks fer letting me know, old friend. Now that I've assembled it and put it next to an HO locomotive, it's very obviously huge. Looks like I won't need to fab landing gear after all. It'll get built as a desk model, on its pylon, as it was intended.

I posted above I'd recently acquired a "1/88 scale" model of a Beech 18, based on what the seller and MULTIPLE interdwerb sites quoted as the scale being...which I checked PRIOR to buying the thing. A friend who's very knowledgeable about aircraft models contacted me, to let me know THERE IS NO 1/88 SCALE BEECH 18. And he's correct. I dry-assembled the model and measured the wingspan at roughly 10". The REAL Beech 18 wingspan is 47' 8", or 572". Elementary-school arithmetic shows the actual scale to be approximately 1/57. So what I get for believing and repeating info that's apparently mindlessly rebleated widely on the interdwerbs is an expensive model I have no use for. I DID check multiple sources, as the interdwerbs also repeat endlessly that the old Pyro / Lindberg Gee Bee is 1/32, when in fact it's about 1/26, by measuring the wingspan...though the little pilot figure is indeed about 1/32. Endlessly repeated WRONG information is still WRONG. Simple math and measuring have been too hard for the general populace for decades it seems, and it's just getting worse daily. Thanks fer letting me know, old friend. Now that I've assembled it and put it next to an HO locomotive, it's very obviously huge. Looks like I won't need to fab landing gear after all. It'll get built as a desk model, on its pylon, as it was intended.

Appearance probably shouldn't be the only criteria one uses to choose a girlfriend.

Whatever squirrel happens to run through the yard...

Looks pretty good...

That's just standard light "orange peel" from the spraying process, probably just a tad on the dry side. It's actually not that bad a paint job, and your technique will improve with practice over time. NOBODY shoots glossy, prefect paint in the beginning. You learn it by doing it over and over and over until you get it right. And it will color-sand-and-polish out using standard techniques discussed ad infinitum on this very forum. EDIT: And all over YouTube...

One of the Tamiya silvers was recommended to me when I was in need of a very fine-flake silver to do a vintage Mercedes race car. It looked good, but I can't recall the number fo' sho. TS-30 maybe? TS-76 perhaps? EDIT: Note that TS-83 is intended to replicate bare aluminum, for aircraft fuselages etc., doesn't like clear or being masked over, and requires a black base "for best results".

Or all kits are Palmer Corvettes. Of course, the minor proportion and line errors wouldn't bother some folks.

No rain in the forecast fer today, but it's been raining since 4 PM here. Love to see accuracy like that. Impressive.