Ace-Garageguy

There is a war being waged on rationality and objective truth.

Beautiful model, great upgrades. Overall impressive. I like heem.

Can't pay the rent? Part yourself out.

Show how original you can be.

Life is more about doing than talking about doing.

Lost Chord, In Search of the is a Bloody Moos album from 1968.

The 60+ year old AMT vinyl tires cleaned up to look like new with a Comet-toothbrush-hot-water scrub. They'll be bead-blasted to take the sheen back down to look like real rubber. Using the frame and fender unit as a fixture to reinstall part of the floor that had to be modified to clear the raised rear crossmember, necessary to lower the car. Considering kit-sourced firewall options too. The black one, from the original Ala Kart, was heavily glooed to the body. The gray one is the "stock" unit from the AMT '29 kit that accompanied the Ala Kart. I need to get more recess on the firewall to accommodate the flathead V8 better, and more closely resemble a real firewall. Firewall location and recess needs to be determined along with final engine placement, so the driveshaft length can be dialed in. Frame sitting up on its back feet, checking tread width, and making sure the radius arms clear the frame rails AND the edges of the slicks. Using an "open" driveline would allow "splitting the wishbones" in the rear, or replacing them entirely, but I want to keep more in the spirit of how early A-V8s were built. And splitting the wishbones on a closed driveline in reality can often lead to binding during suspension travel, broken front UJs, driveshafts, or transmissions. It looks like the measuring worked out, as the tread width is dead on where it needs to be for the slicks to have reasonable travel up into the fenders...just like the first mockup. With the chassis inverted, I can mark the locations of the brackets the ends of the split front wishbones need to attach to. The front axle and bones are modified from the ancient Revell '30 Ford woody and its derivatives. Engine pieces from the 8BA sourced from the Revellogram '50 Ford pickup.

If there had been sufficient hood clearance with the engine located as shown earlier, a bit too low, I would have gone ahead with it in the "it's only a model" frame of mind. But because I'm going to have to do a custom hood anyway, I decided to put the engine at a realistic height from the road surface, so if this thing was a real car it would be entirely drivable. I made up mounts that will pick up the block in about the right places, and hold it at the right height. From the side, we see we now have plenty of room for speed bumps, etc. We also have worsened the interference between the carbs and the hood, causing the huge gap at the rear. As the original kit was intended to be a curbside, the front frame is simplified and not very correct. Also, I want to do pose-able steering, and there will need to be provision added for some kind of upper suspension lateral links (control arms) to accomplish that. The ancient 1/25 Aurora 250 GTO kit has its share of problems, but the front frame is more representative of reality than the Gunze design. If it hadn't already been heavily glooed together, I could probably have adapted the crossmember and all the suspension. I liberated the Aurora front crossmember after removing the glooey suspension mess. The old gluebomb Aurora 1/25 kit is slated to be rebuilt as another "what if" M/SP drag car, with a straight front axle, so it graciously donated the IFS crossmember it won't be using. Next trick was to laminate a .020" styrene face to one side, for additional strength and thickness. The first rough position fit of the new crossmember. I've looked at photos of bare 250 GTO chassis, and there seems to be some variation from car to car. So this isn't going to be anything like a rivet-counting exercise, and the story if it misses the mark of perfection is that the car had been wrecked, acquired cheap with no engine, and the forward frame section and suspension were rebuilt by a competent fabricator, but not following the original blueprints. This is entirely feasible in reality. The lower control arms as supplied by Gunze will remain, but everything forward will be pretty much scratchbuilt. This also lets me make upper control arms that will hold spindles for pose-able steering. The edge of the laminated rear face is visible here. A curved crossmember between the engine mounts has also been added, to lessen the torsional loads on the frame tubes, and stresses at the mount locations on the block (thought out in advance, so the pan could be dropped with the engine in the chassis it it was real). . Everything forward of the control arms carefully removed, and additional .020" styrene laminated to the front face of the new crossmember, with appropriate "lightening holes" added.

The final text for a graduate degree in 16th Century Inuit Poetry, so candidates will at least leave school with a useful skill, and can actually get a paying job...

Those who can't cook. Oh, the humanity.

Home improvement can be much more expensive for the cack-handed and unskilled who attempt DIY and have to call in professionals anyway, to fix their screwups.

"Simpsons" might cease to exist in the context of "sons of simps", as simps are not generally known to be prolific breeders.

"Elephant in the room" is a descriptive slang phrase that's loosely but distantly related to "800 pound gorilla", though its meaning is entirely and completely different (while "800 pound gorilla in the room" has been used occasionally, the phrase tends to blur the differences in accepted correct usage of the original phrases), and has nothing whatsoever to do with "camel's nose in the tent"...but all these incursions of fauna should be treated with concern by lexicographers, pedants, and government and corporate officers equally; perhaps of purely scholastic interest, the phrase "piranha in the bathtub" (sometimes "piranha in the pool") has never really grown the legs to become part of the vernacular, but being a fish, that's not particularly surprising from a zoological standpoint.

The folks working towards fully autonomous vehicles have realized it's a lot harder than they thought it was going to be, and it's taking a lot longer to get it right. Even a stupid, dozy human has abilities that machines haven't mastered yet...which is not to say stupid, dozy humans use these abilities...but to be a superior driver, a machine HAS to.

The whole plug wire thing appears to be very much in the eye of the beholder, and I'm of the opinion that builders who spend a lot of time under the hoods of real cars are going to be the most critical, with regularly calibrated eyeballs. To my eye, pretty much scale-correct .011"-.012" looks best for older stock plug wires, and .015"-.016" looks best for late-model or high-performance wires. I think most average folks aren't going to notice a few thousandths of an inch, but it jumps out at me like a wart on the Mona Lisa's nose. The really fat wires some seem to be satisfied with look like garden hose to me. Sorry, but that's how I see it. Funny thing is that I was completely satisfied with sewing thread for plug wires when I was much younger, and I'm sure a lot of other geezers were as well. And it looked like puke.

"Flake" is what we used to call people who had no real solid understanding of objective reality, but now they seem to be the dominant influence in the ruling class.