Ace-Garageguy

Today's post brought me an old Monogram 1/24 Ford GTP car from 1985 in the 7-Eleven livery; rough box, fine inside. I had a decent kit in Ford Mororsports colors, and a couple of not too bad built-ups to restore, but seeing a thread elsewhere on here made me want to get a clean unbuilt one like this. Part of my collection focuses on race cars that I think are particularly significant technically, and this one fits in there. Ford Aerospace was heavily involved in the design, development, and construction of the Nomex-honeycomb/carbon/Kevlar composite chassis and bodywork, and this was one of the first race-cars to significantly employ computer-driven Finite Element Analysis in its engineering. FEA is also the forerunner of today's Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD, widely used for airflow management, combustion chamber design, etc., and is much of the basis of the CAD programs that are trickling down to us in the form of 3D printing on a desktop. Composite structures can take a huge amount of numerical crunch to get right, as the materials aren't homogenous and relatively easy to design with like steel and aluminum. Ford proved at the time that a US manufacturer was easily the equal of the Europeans who built the rest of the world's composite tubs, and the engineers had fun with it, one of them remarking that they enjoyed seeing it race, as most of what they did flew away and was gone, one way or another. The cars were very fast when they ran, but suffered from reliably problems...NOT ever any issues with the composite bits though.

Very impressive. Just a few years back people were saying how great it would be when this tech became widely available for "reasonable" money, and here you are proving that the future is here for those who want to go for it. As with Messrs. Elgin and Cunningham in my neck of the woods, your proven old-school skills and meticulous craftsmanship, combined with what's now possible, should inspire anyone who sees this.

Excellent choice...though I might be less in agreement if you favored Burl Ives.

Came home to pick up a tool, happened to be looking out as the new USPS driver dropped a package on the ground next to the mailbox and drove away. Last week I found one at the street end of the driveway. Of course anyone driving or walking by (and there's a lot of walkers now who look homeless) could just pick up a box that's at the street. (For the most part, the USPS drivers have walked up and left packages on the front porch, under cover, since I moved here in 2013.) Last week a friend not-smartly (with no tracking-number) sent me something of value that just disappeared. I'm stopping by the PO on the way back in to file a formal complaint.

Just one word...WOW.

Period perfect. Very nice.

Nice !!

I found a benefit for topcoating models with mayonnaise. The cat likes to lick them, and cleans the dust off in the process.

Anybody noticed the prices for mayonnaise, or eggs, or meat, or everything else recently? Can you say "ram-pant in-fla-tion" boys and girls?

Used to be great. It got reformulated and is now garbage...if you can even find it.

Looks great. Definitely worthwhile underhood upgrade if somebody has printing capability. Not many kit distributors respond well to drilling, and many aftermarket ones are huge and/or klugey.

Huge improvement on the headlights/grille/bumper assembly. That's been my SOP on chrome-headlight and one-piece parts like that.

Another non-question. Word meanings are hard. Must be as hard as understanding a 46% increase isn't "double". Only thing I'll miss is the buffing metalizers, but their demise is ancient news anyway. And...ummm...what was the question?

Yes...but it cures much harder than the surrounding material, so something like a Dremel has to be used to rough-shape it. Here's an application similar to what the OP is asking about. The blue hood surround section was bonded in with epoxy/flock, shaped, then the grille section was put in, and more epoxy/flock used to form the fender cheeks below the headlight sugar-scoops.

^^^ Damm. That is absolutely wonderfully beautiful.

I would have to disagree. "Wild" or "outrageous" show cars can be built while still demonstrating good design and taste. There are lots of them. The Golden Sahara exhibits neither. It's an apparently random collection of disjointed, unrelated elements and gaudy ornamentation...kinda like what we see from some mainstream OEMs lately. EDIT: All that negativity aside, I still like the thing for its unabashedly horrible over-the-top-ness. I agree the first iteration is cleaner, and hangs together much better as an all-of-a-part piece of work.

I'd never heard this thought expressed so succinctly prior to today: "you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into"

https://alsacorp.com/product/easy-chrome

Nothing too exciting today...just an oddball version of the AMT BlackForce kit, cheap 'cause it's an oddball, primarily for the wheels and tires... ...but I needed another shell to put together the Carson-top version shown below. I like 'em both.

Yup...and it was detail like that that got me hooked on those "awful" "fiddly" Revell kits from the period.

Geez. Seems like only yesterday it was 2022. They must be right about time flying when you're having fun.

Looks like nice clean work, and the subtle flames look great. I've always likes this kit as a donor for other projects too, the frame in particular.

I typically use a slow curing epoxy (30 minutes minimum, though what I use takes 24 hours to full room-temp cure) plus cotton-flock to adhere dissimilar materials. Lotsa people think my approach is overkill, but my stuff never cracks and falls off...or cracks during sanding, polishing, etc.