Ace-Garageguy

It's not a matter of "can't". It's a matter of caring enough about long term quality to DO it...even if it takes a little extra effort and shaves a few bucks off the profit margin.

I'm in for the ride. Got a deal on a boogered one of these a while back, thinking I'd do a Jota.

Yup...I've got the Hawk kit for just exactly that. The S6B was, of course, a direct predecessor to the Spitfire, and the dimensions are roughly similar. The Spit's a little bigger. The general plan is to splash molds from the Spit, fill them with a slurry of epoxy and styrene balls I developed decades ago for rapid-prototyping of real-car parts, and carve a 1/24 S6 from the Spit form, plus some bondo shaping and surface detail as required. Probably won't bother with trying to get any interior detail or engine, at least in the beginning...but the Merlin is visually similar enough to the R to use it as a starting point. Basically, I just want a big S6B to sit with my similar-scale GeeBee, and a baby-blue Spitfire prototype. If I live long enough, I'd like to do Dago Red and Rare Bear 1n 1/24 too. And this...

A pair of mild-steel 20-degree 2.25"-primary slip-joint merge collectors with a straight 3" exit, for the '66 SS 572 Chevelle project. The headers that were built by the last guy were a mess...wouldn't clear the steering, oil filter, starter, or engine mounts. When I started building new ones, it became apparent I'd have to slip-joint the collectors to get them in the car. Estimated the time it'd take and figured I'd come out ahead to buy collectors fabbed to my specs, and just build the primaries myself. Nice thing about these is that they'll serve as jigs to fit the primaries to, too.

One of these... ...and all of these... ... to hack into a reasonable facsimile of this, in 1/24 scale:

Nice!!!

Dollars or pounds...or euros?

Much approval for your careful, clean, layout and construction techniques. Your reference to a "poor man's milling machine" is a great reminder that it's not necessary to have a complete miniature machine shop to produce outstanding work. Some fine stuff going on here. EDIT: Just like building a real car from the ground up...only smaller.

They go well with the JC Whitney headlights...

It depends on the issue of each kit and exactly what tire compound they used at the time, and storage conditions. I've seen just as bad tire-melt with AMT, MPC, and JoHan as Revellogram...and there really seems to be no easily identifiable common denominator...short of a full-blown chemical analysis. I've also seen model tires that shrink, or get a dry powdery surface, or become sticky where the black gets all over everything, or crumble to powder.

If you followed the directions for each experiment carefully, there were a lot of practical illustrations of common chemical reactions. It all has to do with developing a better understanding of the world around us. I remember experiments to make water more electrically conductive, "wetter", and more corrosive. One particularly fun one was making amorphous sulpher, a kind of simple elastic/plastic (video below). (Of course, in the context of my response to Danno, the ability, as you noted, to make horrible smells, stains, and low-grade explosions would have been the desired outcome; making hydrogen sulfide is especially rewarding. )

After a fair bit of experimentation a while back, I'd suggest a very finely woven synthetic like nylon or acetate tricot, or polyester. You might also be able to use silk, or a very-high thread-count cotton (expensive sheets. etc.), but in my experience, "natural" plant fibers seem to be too "fuzzy" to look really good. (Silk's not from plants, and I haven't tried it yet) The synthetics can be ironed into sharp folds, and though they tend to be shiny, a spray shot of fabric paint will make them look quite realistic.

Ahh yes...the dreaded Countank. Guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere.

Genius. Shoulda followed up with a chemistry set.

Consider the big picture. It's unfortunate, but in the real-world, most manufactured items aren't made with any kind of "archival" quality in mind. REAL car tires hardly last for decades, even in dry storage off the car. They dry-rot, crack, treads separate, etc. Dash panels and car interiors in general dry out, shrink, and crack. Plastic knobs get brittle, plastic lenses cloud up, and anything plastic under-hood deteriorates with time. Many household items, commercial products and even tools disintegrate while in storage as well, particularly plastic stuff from "offshore" manufacturers. We live in a society that considers just about everything to be disposable...even personal relationships...and where short-term-gain is king. Is it really hard to grasp why manufacturers of "toys" rarely go the extra mile to make their products last indefinitely? Unless a specific manufacturer is actively pursuing quality at (possibly) the expense of a little profit, you get what you get.

There are quite a few vintage COE cabs in resin available through eBay and other sources, not hard to find with a little effort. Mount the cab on a later-model COE chassis, and you get the best of both worlds: classic truck looks with more pulling power and reliability. 1:1 guys do it frequently.

There's a fair selection of resin aftermarket manifolds for single and dual 4-barrel carbs, blower manifolds, and a few Hilborn injection setups, but nothing for Webers...as far as I'm aware. But if you have the patience to search eBay, it's very often possible to find the exact parts you may need...though unfortunately sometimes as expensive as buying a whole kit. EDIT: 3dscaleparts has printed Weber downdraft "Inglese" manifolds in several scales. Their "Hilborn" manifolds are also easily converted to down-draft Weber use. https://www.3dscaleparts.com/search-results?q=manifold&type=products Here's the "Inglese" setup: https://www.ebay.com/itm/133544031254?hash=item1f17d83416:g:uFoAAOSwSihdlifE

Yes, but it's a very specific cross-ram manifold for side-draft Webers on a 1/24 scale smallblock Chevy engine. The specific engine and the type of carbs the OP wishes to use must be addressed. For instance: down-draft Webers on a Ford FE engine

An Eisco Labs 6-decade resistance box, useful for electronic circuit design and analysis. Appears to be very well made...in India.

One has actually been completely rebuilt to operating condition, and has been touring the country.

It makes sense primarily because we can no longer cast huge steel locomotive frames. Cast steel...not cast iron. And a steel weldment is a very different animal from a steel casting. Not a problem if the engineering is right, but with today's heavy reliance on CAE, it's a valid question as to whether a CAE program can cope with designing a welded structure that performs in every way equally to a massive casting. Known, empirically-derived data is the basis of every answer you get in CAE, and I wonder how much accurate analytical data regarding massive (and long "obsolete") steel castings is available in the typical CAE environment. But I'm pretty sure the guys building this thing have thought of that. EDIT: If you've ever done any welding, imagine the difficulty of getting full penetration on a section around, let's say, 2" thick. Maybe that'll help to visualize part of the conceptual difference in a large weldment vs. a casting. Interesting reading regarding welding heavy steel: https://www.aisc.org/globalassets/modern-steel/archives/2010/04/2010v04_welding_heavy_steel_full.pdf

A black coupe makes an appearance early in the original production of The Italian Job.

Lotsa alignment shops around here can help you with that.