Ace-Garageguy

A few more scores yesterday on the way home from my hike... First up is a Campbell kit #401 Quincy Engine House, long out of production and hard to find. Complete and unmolested, which is kinda rare as they've often been cherry-picked for their best-in-HO corrugated siding, and bags of details. They're typically in the $100 range when they come up online, complete. The corrugated real aluminum siding is finer and more scale-correct for many applications than the typical metal siding found in vintage Suydam structure kits. This is a cardboard-and-sticks "craftsman kit" that gets skinned with the aforementioned corrugated aluminum, and includes a lot of finely cast and injection-molded detail parts. It's a great little building for a logging or mining shortline, especially when combined with supporting structures and code 70 or smaller hand-laid trackage. It includes an addition with a shed roof for an attached machine shop, and a board fence for enclosing a parts or materials or junk storage area. Next up is a vintage plastic AHM 5827 Sand House, a natural companion to the engine shed above. Though several of the castings have very obvious ejector pin marks on the visible sides, this is fairly easily corrected, of they can be used as templates to scratch-build parts from wood. These are fairly plentiful and not expensive, but they don't seem to move well, as apparently most current RR modelers prefer later era scenery and rolling stock. Average delivered price is around $25. EDIT: There was a good bit more really cool stuff, but something in the rest of the post triggered the dreaded PAGE NOT FOUND, refused to post, and I'll be dambed if I'll waste any more time here trying to figure out what it was. Have a nice day.

65 was a long time ago, but I'm planning to double that (which I'll have to do to get to everything I have planned and/or already started).

Contributions to a retirement fund can be tough to make if you're just barely getting by, but it would be smart to go without that daily $7 latte to start building something to get you through geezerhood.

Pretty baby.

I was taught, in standard 6th grade science (NOT SHOP CLASS) in the public school system in Ocean County, NJ, the general operation of IC engines (4 stroke, 2-stroke, and diesel), steam engines, ram and turbo jets, shaft turbines in turboprops, rockets, electric motors, electric generation both AC and DC, the basics of electrical distribution over the grid, and a host of other things about how-the-world-works that was considered "common knowledge" at the time. I would be surprised if there were more than a few college grads today, unless they're mechanical engineers, that have the same basic knowledge. The dumbing-down of this country, the failure of the education system to impart basic "common knowledge" and any kind of critical thinking to go with it, is the real culprit here. Problems in the car industry (and everywhere else incompetence is widespread) are only a symptom. Poor education is the disease...as is just not giving a damb because actual knowledge seems to have little value when the standard today is "just Google it".

Paste may taste like pudding instead of pudding tasting like paste, so how can you be sure either way?

Those cars would be nothing but stains on the dirt back here in the Swampeast.

Pretty cool. I've never seen a Lark hardtop with the side windows all down before.

Prefer all you want, but if you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.

Inside my mind, you'll find a fair selection of unresolved issues, but I chip away at 'em a little every day.

Critics of my work who've never demonstrated that they can do at least as well don't rate my attention, but criticism from genuinely accomplished practitioners of whatever-it-is is always welcome.

The store-brand deli meats I favor for my sack lunches have gone up 50% in the past two weeks, from $6 something to $9 something per pound. Considerably more than they went up during the bat flu interlude, when everybody and his dog was blaming "supply chain disruptions" for gouging consumers. So...ummm...what's the justification now? I know beef is up, but it's not just deli beef, but ham, turkey, and chicken as well. Diesel isn't way up, so it can't be "distribution and transport costs", and as far as I know, the bird flu thing is over, and pigs are doing just dandy too. I guess they're getting us so sick of their endless greed, we'll be eating ze bugs out of economic necessity.

Break my bones may sticks and stones, but words will never hurt me.

Simply because, in a world that wasn't eaten up with more scumbucket dirtbag scammers every day, you didn't need to remember to pay a debit card off every month to avoid interest.

Criticizing can be helpful or destructive, depending largely on the intent of the one doing it, and the way it's packaged.

"Old" sometimes doesn't seem so bad, especially when I look around at a lot of "young" today.

Yeah, it was always easier to push the guys to hammer the real race cars after they were "blooded", so to speak. I'm going to have to remember that about the evil spirits too. Could be why my beaters all seem to be pretty much indestructible, but every time I make something pretty, it becomes a prima donna.

^^^ Welcome to the trials and tribulations of building real cars, but in miniature...which is exactly what we do when we step beyond building what's in the box.

That's a real shame. Why hire a geezer who knows something when you can hire a rainbow-haired kid who can't do anything but look at his phone all day?

Years ago, I quit buying car mags when the ad content began to vastly outweigh the editorial content, and what tech articles there were were thinly disguised ads themselves, dumbed down to the "see Spot run" level, a far cry from the multi-page hardcore tech articles in the 1950s and '60s that actually had (OMG OMG!!!) real math sometimes.

Hiking back to the Blazer earlier, the trail I took runs near an access road. I heard an engine that didn't sound at all familiar, but was definitely a 4-cylinder diesel (the rattling, exhaust note, and the smell don't lie). I looked over to see what it was, and it was something I'd never seen in the States before...a (Romanian built?) ARO 24, like this but in darkish metallic green. Cool little truck, and how it got here is anybody's guess.

But wait!! There's more!!!!!!

Education as to the names and general locations of many automotive parts began with building car models when I was a kid, exactly as Tim says above, and once that had started to sink in, I began to understand the technical articles in the real-car magazines.

^^^ 1775 was a very good year for rational thought.