Ace-Garageguy

Years ago, I was younger than I am now...but certainly not wiser.

Bunch of bananas getting overripe is a good excuse to make banana bread, and some women still like men who can cook.

Just means wadded up shorts, as far as I'm aware.

Nice proportions and realistic guts, as with everything you build. You have to love the concept of 600+ horsepower with no front brakes and tinynarrow tires.

Comics today often tread lightly for fear of offending the perpetually knicker-knotted.

It's an era-specific thing. "A 1974 article characterized cereal prizes of the 1950s as "Captain Midnight secret-decoder rings and.. baking soda-powered frogmen", whose arrival by mail, children waited for "impatiently".[11] In 1959, columnist Tom Harris of the West Virginia Gazette-Mail lamented the passing of the send-in box-top prize in place of the in-box prize" Source: Wikipee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereal_box_prize

Box tops from the right cereals could sometimes be mailed away to get secret decoder rings and other equally fascinating toys...back in the dim recesses of time, of course.

"Teacher" is one of the most important professions on the planet, probably one of the most underappreciated, and lately somewhat widely problematic.

Well...OK. This is the kind of thing that inevitably slows down my builds, and gets them shelved until I get to another stopping place on something else. Rinse, repeat, with the result being I never finish anything. So I thought I'd try to punch through this one. I wanted to use the period Indy tires and wheels from the ancient Monogram Kurtis kit on the rear because they have such nice molded sidewall detail, and the wheels themselves look like early plain-center mags taken from a championship car. But I wasn't happy with the wheels being molded as one piece with the tires. I want to do the wheels in old Testors buffing metalizer, and that's not a viable option if everything is molded together. I had the little lathe out to make some small real-car parts, so I figgered I'd see what I could do with some model-car plastic. First thing was to experiment on the backside of one half, to find out how fine a cut I could get. It was obvious I'd have to sacrifice both a wheel and a tire to get to where I wanted to be. Starting with the back half of one assembly, I used an X-Axto as the cutting tool to remove the center from the tire. I had to get the speed way down (to avoid melting) to the lowest possible with the normal drive belt options, and it's still a little too fast. In the test, I kinda buggered both the tire and the wheel, but I found out what I needed to know. Using pretty much the same setup, I was able to get one good wheel and one good tire half. The back of the wheel needed to be undercut slightly, to fit tight against the tire and not look like a toy. There wasn't any way to grip the wheel internally to turn it with the jaws that are currently on the lathe (and a previous owner had already buggered the wheel center, so it wasn't true), so I used the sliding live-center support and a drill chuck to make a fixture to glue a temporary spindle, dead-square, to the wheel rear face, then let it dry two days. When it hardened, I was able to use the temporary spindle to hold the wheel, and turn a slight undercut bevel on the wheel rim. After shaving the inside of the tire just a tad, I got what I wanted...a separate wheel and tire, close fitting. The wheel will run a knockoff, as this little car is supposed to have been built from Indy-car castoffs, among other things, so the center won't show. So that's it for now. I have to mold and cast both tires and wheels before I can finish this up, so end-of-year isn't too realistic at this point.

Nothing to see here. I decided to respray the body with Duplicolor "Universal Black", 'cause I couldn't get the hardware store can of black lacquer to spray, and the Duplicolor lacquer is darker and cleaner anyway. So after scuffing the body and prepping the hood, rad shell, and deckid again, I shot everything. It looked great, flowed out real nice...and then the paint on the body started cracking. I did NOT expect that, putting lacquer over old lacquer, but it happened and I'll have to fix it. Maybe I can still get her done by the end of the year, but for this weekend's show, fuggedaboudit.

"Teacher, teacher...Bill's not paying attention!!!" was the frequent cry of a little girl in 4th grade, not surprisingly named Karen.

Ditto.

Looking really good.

I could probably get to actually like the enraged golf-cart sound, if I was driving something regularly that goes like this thing does.

Here's some input from a guy who's about the best I've seen in this regard...

Synchronicity was used by Carl Jung as a partial conceptual basis in arguing for the existence of the paranormal.

Real life presents us with many interesting coincidences.

Experience is a far better teacher than is the opinion of the guy who became an expert by repeating what he heard from his dog's groomer's sister's husband's buddy's lawyer's ex's hairdresser's mechanic.

Kinda like making pretend vroom-vroom sounds while pushing a toy car around, isn't it?

Just broke down and bought a pair of DVC woofers for my Fuselier speakers. I typically blow one every few years, and one is completely gone (took it out of the circuit), the other one I did a Q&D cone fix on a couple years back is starting to buzz again, so it was time. They're not top-line, but being DVC units (dual voice coil), I can run them in a car with an older lower-power amp when I upgrade the Fuseliers again after moving...and with the recent addition of the powered sub that's been taking up the slack, I may not have to upgrade anyway. It'll be nice to hear everything again, on both channels, with no buzzfluffle.

Cutters, whether for PE or sprue or soft wire, shouldn't be used for cutting things they weren't designed for, 'cause you can easily damage the edges so they're useless.

Let us know what you find, please. I moved all of those West with the first load, and can't verify. EDIT: Even if the springs are not identical, and I have no reason to doubt Mark, if the arches are close enough, it may be possible to gently reshape them to match.

Intentions have never paid the rent, for me anyway, but sweat always has.