Ace-Garageguy

I agree with just about all of this. When I was young, I learned actual ENGINEERING and MATH from articles in the best of the hot-rod mags. Things like the physics of weight transfer, and coefficients of drag and friction, and how a collapsing magnetic field creates a hot spark in an ignition system. I learned more advanced electronics from tech articles in the model RR mags about control and signal circuits. Early adopters of then-new transistors were regularly featured. Tech articles would often run several pages of TEXT, and would EXPLAIN PRINCIPLES OF OPERATION AND THEORY. Try to do that now, even in an online format, all you'll get is TLDR. Many people's attention spans are about on a par with goldfish. https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/ There's little understanding of or interest in the physical world. The populace is being dumbed-down, with less and less useful knowledge imparted to each successive generation by the "education" system, so the mags are thinner, what's there is mostly advertising and pictures, the writing isn't as good, the understanding of the subject matter is often poor, and as noted above, "tech articles" are infomercials for products being hawked elsewhere in the mags. Yeah, it's a different world. And it's not all for the better.

Domino's Pizza.

It took over nine weeks to get a small packet from Japan, the same size that normally arrives in about 10 days. And like yours, wasn't trackable once it reached the States. It had also been sitting in limbo at the Japanese accepting PO for several weeks prior, and I had started to think it had slipped in a crack somewhere and was lost forever. So don't give up hope.

Who knows? He might discover the secret to table-top cold fusion.

Pillars look good. Nice fab work.

Not much to look at, but I got the suspension re-sorted. Mostly, she just wanted to say hi, 'cause she was feeling left out when the others on the bench got updates posted.

Got a little closer on this baby too. The bodywork fairy came by and finished up roughing in the LF wheel arch mod... So I made a transfer template so the other side would match... Moving along nicely. That's when I realized the '62 doesn't have chrome around the front wheel openings, but does have a molded-in bead that's pretty obvious. A little .030" half-round should get it. Nobody ever would have noticed, especially 'cause this is supposed to be a clone body anyway, but hey...I'm a glutton for punishment.

OK...those wheel backs and the way the brake drums fit them was really bugging me. I found some mystery chrome backs and made a test rim from one. Assembled, they just didn't do it for me. They're about a scale inch smaller than the old 16" rims, and though you can't see both sides of the tire at the same time, the finned drum didn't look right with no clearance around it either. That's the '50 Olds generator getting its bracket finished up on the right. What to do? I remembered I had a gluebomb AMT '40 with the old 16-inchers. Trashed, not restorable, but 2 of the rims looked salvageable. Red too-small test rim on the left, a black 16" rim salvaged from an AMT 16" wheel, and another wheel...plus the wheel and tire that'll be on the front of the car. These things were a double-barrelled bugger to work with, as they had the tire-melt blues, and one insisted on crumbling a couple of times. Got two done and primered, finally. Had to turn down a dowel to make a tapered sanding stick to do the insides without breaking the damm things. Assembled with the right amount of clearance around the fins... Yup. This'll work. Painting the things has been a nightmare too. OLD can of Testors dark red enamel, almost no gas left in it, and it wants to bubble more than anything else. I can't believe I'll be sanding and polishing inner wheel rims. Oh well. Then they'll be done. (I shot the wheels years ago with the same can, 'cause it glossed so nicely with no additional work; that's procrastination for you.) Made a shim for the back of the hood and dialed in the fit at the cowl and radiator shell to my satisfaction too.

Something completely unnecessary but kinda fun, a couple sets of 3D-printed jack stands. The adjustment hardware is a little overscale, but I think they look great...and they actually work just like the real ones.

Now for the really cool part (I think so, anyway). She'd crazed down in the panel lines, and it also looked like by the time I had everything blocked, some of tthe lines would be getting pretty shallow. So I bought a set of the Tamiya panel-line engraving tools. Expensive, and they took over 60 days to get here due to the Covid mess...but boy damm howdy, are they great. Made a transfer template of the new wheel opening to insure the other side will match, with some reference marks. Getting the wheel arches round is simply a matter of finding something with the right diameter and sticking some sandpaper to it... Body with wheel arches done, puttied, and all the crazing sanded out, panel lines deepened...Even though the surface is level and smooth at this point, the effects of the crazing are still evident here. But I didn't want to get too aggressive and start losing body contours. In the event, the green was a good guide-coat for showing some mold lines and other imperfections. That apparent crack on the decklid was why I got a pretty good deal on this thing, too. Now fixed, permanently. There's a learning curve with the scribing tools, and you can see where my hand slipped a couple of times, but nothing terminal, and easily corrected. Two coats of Tamiya fine white surfacing primer. Another first for me...and damm is that stuff great too. If you want good work without having everything go wrong, spend a few bucks for top-line materials. There are a few tiny flaws to address, another coat of primer, and she's ready for paint. I'm really happy I was able to save this one relatively easily...especially since I knew better but buggered her in the beginning anyway.

It's been a while on this one, but I've been doing some testing, learning how to deal with some problems, etc. I tried a couple of different methods of shooting the body with HOT self-etching primer, in part because I'd wanted to leave her in chromate green through the build process. And she crazed like crazy no matter what I did. Even though this particular kit misses the accuracy mark in a few places, overall I just prefer this rendition of the 250 GTO to even the real one...except that odd rear wheel arch. Adding material in the form of .030" strips... While that was setting up, I started addressing the wheels I want to use. They're 1/25, and fall through the 1/24 tires I want. Solution: a strip of .020 styrene around the rim. And it's OK. Some of the earlier Americans had really thick looking rims. After painting, they'll look close enough to possible period-correct for this build. Raised lettering is being removed from the tire as well. Took some more experimenting to get that working 100%, too. Sculpting and rounding the first wheel arch...and the primer crazing is really apparent here. This is a fairly expensive kit, and giving up on it wasn't an option I liked. About done with the first phase of the wheel arch mod...

Just got in an Italeri 245 Dodge 4X4 with an anti-tank gun. Next target is the Italeri 226 ambulance. Not many out there, but sage advice here has led me to a Bilek repop.

That looks like fun. Great copy on the box blurbs.

That one's a real knockout. Beautiful model.

It's not that hard to build a straight axle and leaf springs from scratch. The process is fairly well illustrated in this thread. And feel free to ask questions if you need any clarification. Below is an in-progress shot.

Yes sir, your experience has been pretty much identical to mine. I found that after an extended build session, it seemed to be beneficial to swish the thing out with clean MEK, using the fill bottle to suck-n-squirt several times, and then blowing air through it to get any residual solvent out prior to storage. No problems since, but I keep a virgin in stock just in case. I did have one that no amount of soaking would clear. I scored the needle with a diamond file about 1/4 inch from the tip and snapped it off. Still working years later, just a little shorter.

I love the Touch-n-Flow for the precision, but it can be finicky and a little prone to clogging. https://www.flex-i-file.com/touch-n-flow-system.php I have a friend who's diabetic and gives me an endless supply of needles, and those work exceptionally well and are free.

Numbers are hard. Most of it's 1/25. A few parts are somewhat underscale, like the slicks...although...the slicks center diameter is OK, the sidewall height and outside diameter is much more appropriate for a production car than a supercharged dragster. Unfortunately, the stupid-small diameter of the slicks is echoed in the cutouts on the body. Easy enough to correct if you want to build something that looks like what it's supposed to be, but again, inexcusable that "professionals" in the model-design business get so much stuff like this...very obvious and easily researched...just flat dead wrong. A 6th grader should be able to handle the "math"...actually just basic arithmetic...involved in scaling a model car correctly.

OK...based on the drawings afx posted above, and a known nominal wheelbase of 75 inches, the current Slingster body measures out to be very close, plenty close enough for a dragster body, to 1/25 scale. The method of determining this: The wheelbase on my screen displays at 4.794". Dividing 75" by 4.794", we get 15.64. That means the drawing displays 1/15.64 scale on my screen. Measuring the firewall height at the beltline, the length of the body at the beltline from the firewall to the rear extremity, and the width of the cowl, multiplying all those respective numbers by 15.64, we get the full scale dimensions. Close enough, anyway. Then, taking those numbers and dividing by 25, we get the real dimensions of the body as rendered in 1/25 scale. Then we measure the kit body and compare. Very close, again, plenty close enough for what the kit body represents. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I haven't unearthed the earlier kit body yet, but I can tell with certainty from looking at the OP's opening shot that it's significantly over 1/24 scale.

Sumpin I ordered back in early March from Japan just got here Friday. It had been in tracking limbo for weeks, then started moving again early last week. Yippie. And it actually works as advertised. Yippie squared.

Yup...

I mentioned I'd bought a supposedly 1/24 or 1/25 diecast to measure so as to get an idea of the actual scales of both the Monogram body shells. The diecast was WAY wrong too. They probably made it ridiculously huge because, had it been correct, it would have been tiny and morons would have complained. I'll take some info from the shots above, do some basic arithmetic, measure my kits here, compare, and post the results.

Thanks. Another one started, pretty much figured out, and benched.

There are also three small turbines in the AMT Amtronic. One is sorta a scaled-down version of the Chrysler turbine-car design, with regenerators on the sides (if I remember correctly). There are two more little guys on a common drive housing (upper right in the photo below) that I reworked some time back for a turbine-electric hybrid dieselpunk thingy.

I started something like that a while back...