Ace-Garageguy

You would probably get a chuckle from the plethora of rattlecan flat-black late models that seem to be a local fad around here. Totally dorkotronic.

"Should've" ('cept it came out "shuda") "bin 'ere yestidye, myte" said the Australian fella when I asked him if he still had the advertised boxing kangaroo.

Looks like babies with loaded diapers to me.

Just saw a Modelhaus '57 Mercury went for north of $500 on feepay.

English is full of all kinds of inconsistencies, but what drives me nuts is native English speakers who write "there" for everything that sounds like it, i.e. they're and their.

"Misnomer Night's Dream" is not a play by Will S., but a misnomer itself.

You can buy a real back-up camera for $18, and just not hook it up to anything. https://www.amazon.com/RAAYOO-Universal-Installation-Guildlines-non-mirror/dp/B074P45P7G

Walrusmart still sells 'em, and I've seen fake GPS and OnStar-ish antennas too. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Pilot-Automotive-AB-123E-Black-Fake-Antenna/484143110

That was the ultimate yuppie poseur accessory in the part of town I lived in then. Funny how they never caught on that if there wasn't coax running to a matching part inside the glass, it was an obvious fake to anybody with half a brain.

TLDR (Just kidding) Nothing wrong with a long post to communicate what you want to communicate. Scalemates has lots of what you're looking for, including the timelines of many many kits, and the various boxings and re-releases. https://www.scalemates.com/search.php?q=*&fkSECTION[]=Kits&fkCATNAME[]="Cars" EDIT: And if you're careful on eBay, and don't buy the first BUY IT NOW!!! you see, or get caught up in idiot bidding wars, you can usually find vintage kits WAY under the silly-high asking prices. I do it all the time.

I actually like some of the newer solid colors. I just don't usually them on what they're on. Metallics and pearls have been done to death IMHO, and they're mostly a royal pain to match for an undetectable repair. The dark gray "shiny primer" some folks seem to hate is very similar to a color Porsche used on the 356 and early 911, and good ol' Steve Mcqueen's personal car, shown at the beginning of Le Mans motoring through France, looks great to me. It's a very subtle color, and shows off the curves and volumes of the clean, early 911 without screaming "LOOK AT ME!!!!" There are a couple of interesting grayish blues I like too, colors I'm considering using on my own 911. But taste is a wholly individual matter. You like what you like, I'll like what I like, and I don't care what anybody else thinks. At all.

I don't know if it's that so much as it is mostly non-car-people doing vehicle design. Folks with shiny little degrees in industrial design who'd be just as happy doing toasters or refrigerators or toilets or phones are going to be more prone to the monkey-see, monkey-do school of design than people who live and breathe cars, and know vehicle design history in depth.

Yup. Of course, one way to deal with that, classic business-think, would be to raise the prices until demand slowed to what somebody was willing to produce. You make the same money, you work less.

"Truth" once had a pretty absolute meaning, like 2+2=4, but these days it's apparently malleable by your life-experience, socio-economic status, or any number of equally irrelevant things that give an individual a unique "perspective"; in other words, humbug.

Agreed, and exactly why I have zero interest in attending...but it sure is beautiful riding country the rest of the year, at least when it's not snowy.

I missed it...but it would take a very special combination of financial resources, a hands-on work-ethic, a high degree of mechanical aptitude (or the specialized skill-set necessary to make molds and castings), and a non-crybaby attitude towards working around smelly and potentially "dangerous" chemicals. One wouldn't expect to find a LOT of people with those qualifications, but in a country of 350,000,000, I'd have thought there'd be at least one. Like I said earlier...maybe in a different reality. EDIT: Had all this happened 20 or 30 years back, and had I still been involved in hobby modeling at the time, I would have seriously considered being that one guy. But when it all went down I had already committed to the course the end of my life would take, and re-launching somebody else's business was at the very bottom of my bucket list.

I don't recall seeing anything like that (but I might have missed it), just that they were closing so get your last orders in quick kiddies, and I believe they kindly postponed shutting down in order to cope with the last-minute rush. Anybody have any more detailed info on this??

Looks good. I loved those kits when I was a kid, though the fact the builder had to do some improvising to make all the disparate parts work together was beyond my ability and knowledge back then. But the need for improvisation and modification, rather than dampening my enthusiasm, spurred me with inspiration to acquire the knowledge and skills to make things play nice together that weren't designed to...and to design and make my own. I can very honestly say that was the beginning of laying the foundation for my life's work, and the development of a can-do attitude towards overcoming difficulty in general.

That's what I mean. And I wonder what the licensing situation is, with many of their existing masters and tooling that represent old cars made by major manufacturers who now want to squeeze every last nickel out of their long-obsolete designs.

I'm talking about old-school mods. Cutting plastic. A little bondo.

Probably one of the easiest sets of mods you can make to any kit. What's stopping y'all from doing one yourselves? Jump in there, fellas. Broaden your skill set.

Is it indeed?

"Zone of Genius" is a catch-phrase that means nothing more than "what you're particularly good at", and in most cases "genius" has nothing to do with it.

Yes, resilient silicone molds deteriorate with use. But hard masters last virtually forever (unless they're acetate originals, in which case permanent copies should have been made), so the tooling "library" remains intact. If you know what you're doing and are set up to do it, it's less than one full day's work to pull an entire set of new molds from existing masters for one typically simple early annual, Modelhaus-style kit. A mold is good for anywhere from 20 to 300 casting cycles before it's too degraded to use, depending on a variety of factors like the materials used, the quality of the mold, the complexity of the part, and the care and skill of the person doing the work. The Modelhaus catalog contained many models scaled directly from factory blueprints, as promos, and as such were very accurate...more accurate than a lot of the shiny new stuff we see today that's been deformed by either the math-challenged, or "creative interpretation" of reality...and some of the printable files available just aren't that great. I wish I'd invested heavily in Modelhaus kits when the company was still in business, but I procrastinated and lost the opportunity to build my own tooling library at moderate cost. Scanning, CAD, and 3D printing are wonderful tools to have in the box, but they're not the be-all-end-all answer for everything, any more than a computer is a replacement for a pencil and paper.