Ace-Garageguy

You really don't need "hard" wire for the length of runs you'll use on a model. Softer wire, not even as stiff as paper clip wire, is entirely acceptable. It's stiff enough to support itself, but soft enough to be easily formed around anything of a suitable radius. What is important though, is to use the right diameter wire to accurately represent 3 or 4 AN (brake lines), 6AN and 8AN (fuel lines), 10AN (large fuel and most oil lines), and 12AN (larger oil lines).

Movie producers today often seem to want to hammer the audience with guilt-inducing "social justice" messaging, rather than just telling a good story...which is why the new Top Gun movie was so successful without all the baloney.

Claypool, Indiana had a population of 431 in 2010, according to that year's census.

Great resource. Thanks for posting the link.

Love the colors and the pinstriping and the rolling stock. Nice.

Fuel senders are almost always floats of some kind, either swinging in an arc, or linear, vertically. If the sender is positioned at the front of the tank, and you're parked with the nose uphill, there can still be sufficient fuel at the pickup to run, but the sender will be at the bottom of its travel and read "empty"...which in the case of your truck's internal logic, inhibits starter function (which is probably a good idea if your truck has that annoying stop/start function, as those starters are insanely expensive compared to their dinosaur ancestors, and prolonged cranking is hard on any of 'em). Anyway, most vehicles have the senders and pickups roughly at the center of the tank, so you've got a about a 50/50 chance of picking up fuel however the vehicle is oriented. But I gotta tell ya...and it's going to p--- you off...these days, don't assume there's any well thought-out "reason" for doing anything. Almost daily, we see things that defy logic from a functional engineering standpoint, and we have a great time poking fun at folks mousing around on their little CAD screens who have very obviously never seen how anything works in the physical world.

^^^ How helpful.

And it shows.

Ohhh baby!!!

A first-time noob buyer who doesn't frequent the model boards isn't going to know all of this, and if I was in that low-info market segment, I'd be turned off, frankly, if I ponied up $40, opened the box, and found a very basic snapper. Not everyone does due-diligence prior to purchase, so it might be nice to post more complete info on the kit box. I think that was the OP's point.

4-doors were generally follow-ons of dealer promos. There are still some very nice repops available, of the bodies anyway. There's also vintage resin, but they're getting pretty spendy now that Modelhaus is gone. The 2-doors and performance versions of just about everything were what most guys actually wanted, even if they had to buy 4dr strippers to haul the wife and kids...so the model manufacturers fed the fantasy. But some of the older kits are indeed being re-released, and "freshened", with manufacturers going so far as to 3D scan original kits to reproduce injection-molding tooling that's long lost. Far as your other questions go, it's expensive to design and make tooling, and kit manufacturers, like any other business, try to appeal to the largest market segment to achieve the best return on investment. It's a relatively small group who want 4-doors and wagons.

See pages 3 & 4.

Guess you missed the first thread. He's annoyed the kit he bought for a full-pop full-detail retail price was in fact a low parts-count snapper with plastic tires, and it wasn't apparently obvious on the box that that's what it was.

"Us and them" describes the antagonism between various groups, and in general, the stupider the group, the more antagonistic.

Yup. I quit building models as a hobby in about '69, didn't start in again until somebody gave me some that were on the way to the dumpster in '95, didn't actually do anything with them until 2005, and then ramped up very slowly. Perhaps interestingly, I found the skills, basic knowledge of cars, and pursuit of quality craftsmanship (the requisite self-critical feedback loop) I'd learned early in life were a big influence on my real-world work, and then decades later, the additional skills and knowledge I'd picked up "working" translated back to model building.

Fine, fine, fine. Love the trash, too. I've noticed over the years that paint on industrial and municipal equipment loses its factory-new gloss after a couple of years in service, and your finish and slight weathering is a perfect representation of a well-maintained truck that's not very old.

Much respect.

"Experienced" doesn't necessarily mean competent, or skilled, or knowledgeable...or even fully conscious.

Internet expert, advanced class.

Minds continue their headlong race to smallness.

This is the only thing I've ever seen from Bad Chad that's not immediately puke-inducing.