Ace-Garageguy

Love it. You always get the vibe, the "look", dead-on-the-money.

Let the flame-war begin. I'm sure all the alternative-energy experts will weigh in about how it's a fake, or only a prototype, or too over-the-top and gimmicky, or is ugly, or is so expensive only the hyper rich could afford it, or that there's not much hydrogen infrastructure... I'm sure I'm missing quite a few expert "reasons" why it couldn't possibly work. And they'd be completely missing the point that humans have the technology, developed and mature technology in most cases, to build something derived from this on an affordable basis today, getting the hydrogen from housetop solar PV arrays cracking household waste-water into hydrogen and oxygen. I have an approximately 1/24 scale functional hydrogen fuel cell model car. A small PV unit sitting in the window in the sun makes hydrogen from water, and the little car will run a short distance on it. Honda did a full-scale rooftop-solar-generated-hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle project years ago. It worked great. The home installation made enough hydrogen every day to power the car through an "average" daily commute cycle. Getting from there to where we need to be is only a matter of scale, and the desire to do it. And it makes one jell of a lot more sense in the long term than the idiot push to battery-power everything.

I always get a chuckle when people here tag me as an old-man-shouting-at-clouds, mired hopelessly in a petroleum-based past, and lecture me on how "the world has changed". How ridiculously off base. What I'm actually opposed to is stupidity masquerading as smart, lies hiding behind smoke-and-mirrors, and change for the sake of change. THIS, on the other hand, is demonstrative of a future I'd enthusiastically embrace. The Hyperion XP-1, below, is even cooler than Jaguar's spectacular (2010) C-X75 twin-turbine / electric hybrid project :

Imagine an alternate reality where that actually existed, was the norm, was built from advanced composites and weighed less than 2000 pounds, and was powered by a hydrogen fuel cell (hydrogen supplied by electrolysis from a house-top solar PV array cracking household wastewater into hydrogen and oxygen) delivering 500 horsepower via electric wheel-motors, with a 500 mile range. My question is, as we have the ability to create that today, why humanity is more intent on posturing and following bleating sheeple down idiot paths, rather than building really cool stuff.

Typing accurately can be challenging with a bagel in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

Adobo sauce.

Man...are those gonna thump!

Ears of the big variety are sometimes found on little pitchers.

Those Famous Fords were a series or reboxings of earlier IMC kits.

Very, very nice. I love these little cars in reality, and was so inspired by your build that I sought out one of these kits for myself. Always liked the big snake eating the little guy logo too.

I like to go "vroom vroom".

Perhaps she's decreed that as they're totally useless, the family can save money by using the pages for you-know-what paper?

Not that one, but I am getting a message saying "there was an error displaying this content" or maybe "loading" instead of displaying. Ignoring it works fine though.

I prefer 30-minute or longer setup epoxy for joining dissimilar materials. The 5-minute stuff just isn't strong enough in my opinion. Barring that, "toughened" Loctite gel is my second go-to.

About every other login, I'm still getting the warning. Then I get bumped to another login. No biggie, but how hard is it to get it to work consistently, anyway?

Cool cool cool. Love the Voodoo too. I'm assuming the Zero pilot has the sun directly at his back.

Symmetry is sometimes lacking on model-car aftermarket resin offerings...and aftermarket real-car fiberglass.

In the physical world, some of us frequently have to deal with "assumptions and minor incompatibilities" as well. For instance, the MS (Military Specification), AN (Army Navy, familiar to anyone who plumbs race cars), and later NAS (National Aerospace Standard) for aircraft/aviation hardware and materials was/is an attempt to insure compatibility and performance standards of fasteners and plumbing bits, metal in any form or composition, composite (fiber reinforced) materials, plastics, adhesives, sealants, etc. on things that would fly with human lives dependent on them. The intent was/is to insure that hardware or material from any manufacturer complying with a particular standard would be compatible with hardware or material from any other manufacturer complying with the same standard, and would perform as designed and specified. It's particularly critical on combat aircraft, as one never knows where the next box of a particular widget came from, but if it carries the appropriate label, compliance and compatibility is assumed by people in the field who might not have the time for due-diligence while getting shot at. It usually works, but due to occasional misreading of a spec, misinterpreting a spec, or willful failure to comply with a spec (a frequent problem with "offshore" suppliers), anyone involved with aircraft repair and modification will occasionally encounter "minor incompatibilities" (sometimes not so minor, like when a mission-critical bolt is made from the wrong material and causes a catastrophic failure, like a wing shearing off in flight) based on "assumptions" that compliance with specifications is guaranteed by a part number and a label. Aircraft repair or maintenance facilities generally comply with appropriate AS 9100 / AS 9110 standards (industry specific, based on ISO 9001 QMS - Quality Management Systems), MUST comply with 14 CFR 145, and it can be a significant financial and paperwork burden on small companies to do so. Any aircraft repair or modification has to comply with arcane procedures specified by the FAA, fully documented as to compliance (which is where the old joke that 'the repair isn't complete until the paperwork weighs as much as the airplane' comes from). Anything done "outside of the box" (like the composite fuselage structural repair procedures I was directly involved with developing) has to be documented extensively, with complete engineering data furnished to, reviewed by, and approved by an FAA DER (Designated Engineering Representative) under 14 CFR 183.29...BEFORE the repair is actually done or the aircraft is returned to service. "Assumptions and incompatibilities" occur here as well. One aircraft manufacturer was vehemently opposed to our new repair procedures for their own financial reasons, implying that our work would be "unsafe", as we didn't comply with their outdated, unnecessarily heavy, but "certified" repair procedures...which were very limited in scope anyway. Their motive was that typically, one of their aircraft suffering significant wing or fuselage damage had previously been deemed "non repairable", forcing insurance companies to REPLACE the aircraft (as in buy a new one from them) rather than repair them. When replacement cost for their particular aircraft can be over a million bucks, it's pretty obvious why they didn't want us to fix them for substantially less (insurance only purchasing such parts as were available from the manufacturer, through us, rather than an entire airplane). We ultimately were issued FAA approval, and we were very fortunate that our DER had been, before his retirement, the lead structural engineer on one of the first high-performance all-composite series-produced general aviation aircraft in the world, and was well versed in dealing with "assumptions and incompatibilities" concerning compliance with the relevant FAA rules and specs. Based on the length of this one post, I could probably write a book on instances of "assumptions and incompatibilities" in the physical engineering world, and how they can sometimes even lead to tragic consequences, including lives lost unnecessarily.

"Breakfast of Champions" was the advertising tag line for a well known breakfast cereal, in spite of the well known fact (then and now) that protein, along with carbs, is a much better performance-enhancing breakfast than just sugar-drenched empty carb calories with a little milk, but in some circles of intellectual endeavor, the "breakfast of champions" was 5 cups of coffee and half a pack of cigarettes.

At this point, I'm beginning to understand that most of today's target market for kits don't give a holy darn about the dark and mysterious bits under the car that make it function, or for the majority, have no idea what any of them do anyway. And it's OK with me, as long as what we're getting have well-proportioned bodies that capture the visual essence of the real cars. "Serious" modelers have been dealing with blobular undercarriages for decades. Yeah, it'd be nice to have all the mechanical goodies represented, but it is what it is.

Impulses should not always be acted upon.

Over the past few weeks, I've snatched a few minutes here and there to get the somewhat corrected 1/24 engine for my Pontiac GTO powered Ferrari 250 GTO ready for paint. Lengthened the block and oil pan to correct the proportions, added material to get the block casting details closer to a real one, replaced the blobular timing cover with one modified from the old Revell parts pack Poncho mill, removed the mechanical fuel pump (after sourcing a period-correct electric unit to mount at the tank), lengthened and modified the heads to represent factory freeze-plugs on the ends, removed the cast-in spark plugs and "spot-faced" the wells they live in (after drilling the heads for plug wires), reworked a parts box 3X2 intake manifold to fit the heads correctly, added the manifold-to-timing cover coolant bleed casting, fabbed up a reasonable looking valley cover, located and drilled the modded block for the new Rep&Min distributor, and determined that I'll need to fab headers, as nothing I have is remotely close EXCEPT for the "cast iron" OEM headers from the AMT "Polyglass Gasser". The cast iron headers would be on the heavy side for this particular swap, so I'll only be using their flanges as patterns for new ones, with corrected port spacing to better match the heads I have. I also got the pretty-good-close-enough 3X2 carbs from a GTO snapper kit to play nice with the intake manifold. All this was necessary so I can fit the engine in the chassis, hopefully getting the air cleaners to just fit under the Ferrari hood blister, while maintaining some sort of reasonable ground clearance at the deep end of the sump, and make some passable engine mounts...so I can rework the firewall / footwells as necessary, and get on with the rest of it. This started out as a -cough-simple quickie build for a break from more "serious" projects. Pix will be on the build thread after I load what's in the camera with them (real-car work) into the main computer.

Nope, though something in the general area was discussed at one time. I'd strongly advise getting multiple medical opinions, 'cause if they mess up an "electrical connection", there's no going back, and some functions can suffer even if everything is done absolutely right.

I just wish I'd had the presence of mind and understanding of the ephemeral nature of the resin business to have bought everything I was interested in when it was available. I've learned my lesson, and snap up everything I really want now...but as the man once said "shoulda been here yesterday".