Ace-Garageguy

Problem is...so many of those are now 3-stage jobs with multiple toners that they actually amount to hundreds if not thousands of colors when you have to repair them. And most colors have multiple "variants" too, depending on where the car was built. Even solid colors including "white" (there are at least dozens of whites) and black are almost all basecoat-clearcoat from the automotive OEMs, with many of the whites being 3-stage as well, and lotsa blacks being metallics or pearls. Point being, there are so many chemicals, toners, and materials necessary to run a body shop today, any disruption in the availability of any of them can shut you down indefinitely...and people not in the industry have no clue as to what it takes to get a really good paint match for an undetectable repair.

Or this one...

How about some sounds guaranteed to freak your noisy neighbors out? Send your self-driving EV out to make a loop of the neighborhood while blasting this at 03:00 every other day.

Yessir. Not too many people even know that term anymore, either.

I used to make 'em out of watch or clock gears. I've seen the Rivet-R and one made by Trumpeter too. Got to get on some aircraft forums and get up to speed.

Nice work, every one. The baby Bird could just about pass for real in every shot but the engine bay. Only reason the other two instantly look like models is the backgrounds.

JOE (the OP): Sorry to hijack your thread again, but this build is so unusual, I hope you don't mind additional info for people who might want to do one too. I wouldn't swear to ALL of the IMC 1/20 buggy kits having V-dub engines, but this one definitely does. https://www.ebay.com/itm/224784653033?hash=item3456359ae9:g:TEIAAOSwjoxh3Pgr The 1/20 Imai kit is VW powered too:

Seein' as how I'm coming up on the end of working on other people's stuff, I'm getting the itch to have models of some of the more interesting things I've had go through the shop over the last 50 or so years. I bought an old Gunze Maserati Merak to do a simple curbside build. I always preferred the Merak styling to the heavier looking Bora...though I'm after a Bora as well. At first glance, the Gunze Merak body looks to be well-proportioned, though the tires will have to go. And I really liked a lot of the European showcars back in the '70s. I found a cheap Airfix Maserati Boomerang kit...but boy oh boy is it a mess. The lines and proportions are about as wrong as you can get. The box-art looks nothing like the model. Guess they didn't have access to measure the real one, so they picked a random 8-year-old off the street to design the tooling from photos. Good job I have extensive reference material on that one. Lots more work than I really want to get into, but it's such a cool car, I probably will. Somebody on the web has already started a credible job of correcting this collection of fubar, so we already have an idea of which way to jump:

I saw a 1/20 scale version on eBay a few hours back when I snagged a 1/24 version. Far as engines go, the only Corvair mills I'm certain were kitted are in 1/25 and 1/8. Shouldn't be too hard to do a reasonable scratch-job though, as much of the engine detail is hidden by cooling tin. There a few 1/18 Corvair diecasts, and as poorly scaled as a lot of that stuff is, you just might find an engine that could pass in 1/20.

I don't know yet. The card model has both. I'm kinda looking forward to doing all the rivets kinda like we used to do them in ancient times on model RR stuff...and dreading it at the same time.

Funny how folks in the 21st century seem to have forgotten which way bologna-cut stacks HAVE to face to work right.

Yeah, but if my recent experience is anything to go by, they won't be able to get a lot of the parts to fix the wrecks until summer anyway.

Yup. There was a guy I used to know locally built one from a wadded-up wreck, using not much more than the VIN plate and block from the real car. But he got every detail right, down to the yellow grease pencil scribbles behind the seatback on every car assembled on the Shelby line. Knew another semi-local guy who built '65 Corvette Grand Sport clones, again capturing generally unknown details like the visible woodgrain on the inner rear fenders...relics of GM's original short-run wood tooling. Pretty sure he got busted for fraud when he tried to pass one off as legit for lotsa $$.

Yeah, but that car had considerably more clearance at rest, at least two, maybe three times as much as the car on the opening shot:

Interesting. Looks like it used production stamped steel front control arms (from who knows what) in the rear. Also note the forged steering arm coming from the spindle. Makes me think hubs / uprights may have been sourced from 4WD front pieces.

Looking good. I need to find one of those...

All agreed. Cool car. But another thing that just jumps out at me is the lack of clearance between the rear tire and the wheel arch. Unless the suspension is pretty much solid, that's not going to work when the nose comes up and the tail squats at launch.

Very nice. Some of my favorite things are trucks that have to actually work for a living.

1/24 scale paper model of Howard Hughes' H1 race plane from the mid 1930s. This will be the basis of one scratchbuilt in styrene.

There's a thread on workbench lighting that may give you some ideas too. This is what I use for the bench, as well as the glamour shots. 100 watt equivalent LEDs in cheap salvage-store lamps. Backgrounds are just poster board, as suggested above by randx0. Works pretty good, huh?

You can answer their PM and it goes into their box, that they can open next time they log in. The site also sends an email notification to their registered email address letting them know they have a PM here, and from whom, but doesn't display the full text.

Good stuff. The mockup phase is always the most fun for me. Actually building the things is a lot like work.

If I run chains I run 'em on all 4. I learned to drive in icy conditions over 5 decades ago up North, so I don't have any problems. But usually if it gets icy here I just stay home. The roads are so choked with abandoned vehicles and fools speeding, it's not worth trying to get anywhere. It never lasts more than a few days anyway, and if the power goes, I have backups. Last time we had a significant frozen precip "event" (as the talking heads like to say these days) a few years back, it started snowing big fat wet flakes during morning rush hour. It had been slightly below freezing overnight, so the snow built up pretty quick, even on the roads. But rush-hour traffic turned the snow on the pavement to slush, and the temperature dropped fast after it stopped falling. All the roads turned to sheets of ice, and folks spinning their wheels just polished it. By noon, when the numbnutz all decided they better get home, nobody could go anywhere, and every hill and interstate was an inline parking lot, with the intersections and ditches littered with wrecks. I waited until late in the day to try the homeward commute, thinking folks would have been off the roads by then, but had to park my 2WD pickup in a dealer's lot and walk home 4 miles, as every road out of town was completely blocked. I'd really like to see you get up a long hill that's slick ice with a lube layer of water on it from the sun shining, on just "dedicated winter tires" with no chains or studs...and then stop on the downside.

Not much good on ice.

I get 404 error on both of those links...no photos.