Ace-Garageguy

Thanks for the clarification. Your knowledge is much appreciated. A seller on eBay has one with a Modelhaus interior for about 4 times what I paid for mine with no interior...which isn't an issue 'cause it won't get built stock anyway.

That's interesting. Thanks. I have a 4 liter Rover engine that needs freshening, was seriously thinking about building a Locost 7 around it...but I bet I could find a blown-engine Chevette for a few bucks out West. Sure would make a fun little sleeper.

Yup, I was "collecting" them too, back when the popular wisdom said we'd never see them again...right up until just before the repops were intro'd from the same tooling.

It's an AccuCast ABS (not resin) repop of a Johan promo, as far as I can tell. https://www.scalemates.com/kits/accucast-models-1959-dodge-custom-royal-2-dr-hardtop--1223217

AND...both cylinder heads need to be lengthened slightly, to properly line up with the intake manifold, and the manifold itself is lacking the thermostat housing / water neck detail of the real engine.

The specific issue is that the engine I elected to use is, as I stated above, somewhat small for 1/24, and several details are toylike and blobular. The distributor is molded into the intake manifold, and after removing it and extending the rear of the block and re-contouring the rear face of same to more accurately represent the real engine, and to provide room for a nice distributor, I ended up with a hole on top of the rear of the block that would normally be closed with a valley cover. The kit engine doesn't have it, of course due to the shortcuts taken in modeling it, so the manifold needs to be shaved on the underside and an approximation of a valley cover fabbed up. It's barely visible on an assembled engine, so it doesn't need to be anything too complex. No biggie, but just another of the myriad things that crop up when you chase reasonable accuracy.

Check your specific application. There's not always a UJ on either side of the center support. My LWB Chevy pickup, for instance, has three UJs total: one at the trans yoke (2), one at center yoke (10) behind the support bearing (6), and one at the diff end of the rear shaft (11).

A spectacular deal on this, which pretty well closes out my Mopar list: ...and a not-bad deal on this: It wants to be something like this:

And I got the recipes from a Pakistani chef.

Delay can be costly, but so can jumping in too soon; life presents us with many opportunities to make the wrong decision.

In a word, YES. The Fujimi 356 Porsches...and 911s too...are among the best kits ever offered for anything.

"Coverage not available in all areas" said the internet cable company advertisement.

Pork vindaloo, dal makhani, basmati rice, naan bread, w/chutney and a cheap but decent California Merlot. Heaven.

You must be a Scot...

"Choice of toppings" is one of my favorite phrases.

"Attack helicopter" is one of the 12,576.885 recently discovered genders.

Tours of hydroelectric generating plants used to be widely offered, but have been largely discontinued since 9/11.

What's kinda sad today is that a lot of service providers don't really give a rat's rump about providing "service", but they're more than happy to keep raising the rates. I hate my home internet guys, but they're the only ones offering what I need at that address. If I'd bought the place, I'd damm sure be looking at something like Starlink, but since I'll be down the road in not too much longer, I'll just put up with the high cost and frequent outages (usually during my morning business sessions). Hard to believe T-Mobile isn't available where you are. I've traveled extensively with someone who uses them, and coverage has been really great everywhere, even podunk towns in the desert.

Sounds like you have a lot of skills, and with your solid references I'd think you can get hired again pretty easily...but I have no idea how the job market is where you are. 3D printing sounds like an interesting possible option too. From what I can tell, guys who are turning out top-quality product can't keep up with demand (though some of them are selling their work way too cheap).

I've never found myself in your position, thankfully, as most of my life I've been self employed. Between businesses, if I needed work, my wide ranging background and experience made me in demand for white collar and blue collar positions...so my input may be useless. What kind of marketable skills do you have, to make finding work possible in the event you take the payout? Any possibility of starting your own business doing something you enjoy, that won't take much startup expense? A six month semi-paid vacation seems pretty sweet if you can get back on the horse without too much difficulty at the end of it.

Negativity is hard to overcome if one pays full attention to the overall state of things both here and abroad.

Age is no excuse to let oneself go physically; granted it's harder to exercise than it might have been 50 years back, but the health, emotional, and cognitive benefits are worth a little occasional discomfort.

Worlds of wonder are all around us, including my wonder at an apparent inability to comprehend the "ONE" part of "One sentence game" while indulging in cut-and-paste from a dictionary or wiki entry.

Rivets of the correct type, length, and number are absolutely necessary when assembling pedantry (and actual load-bearing structures in the real world).