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Ace-Garageguy

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Everything posted by Ace-Garageguy

  1. Or maybe the builders all grew up in the everybody-gets-a-trophy environment... Praised Regardless of Outcome.
  2. And apparently it's accelerating so hard, the front wheels can't keep up with the rest of the car.
  3. I was hoping somebody would post pix. Very convincing, and exactly what I need to get a hung-fire build moving again. Thanks.
  4. Not listed as "pro built", but somebody paid almost 50 bucks for it.
  5. Wow. That is real art. Your ability to capture surface, texture, material, weathering, and aging effects is brilliant.
  6. Most of my builds are long-time-ago started threads. And most of my old photos are hosted on P-bucket. As I will be revisiting these old ones as time permits, it would be nice to be able to replace the sometimes unreliable (down as I write this) P-bucket hosted photos with fresh ones. Not too much point continuing to bother otherwise.
  7. THANKS for the additional info. I have a long standing fascination with CCKWs, M-34/35s, and M-135/211s, amassing piles of reference material and kits to get into once I finally get all the way retired. Almost bought a running M-135 back in '95 for $1500, but was put off at the potential cost of rebuilding the automatic gearbox when the time came. I had been told by "experts" it was a big Allison, and only years later did I find out it was actually an old-school GM iron-case Hydramatic. Had I known at the time, she'd be sitting outside today.
  8. Can't believe I just watched all 2 minutes and 54 seconds of that...
  9. The fact that they're all Monogram kits narrows the possibilities considerably. Top row, no. 2 appears to be the "Slingshot" Dragster. Next to it is the Hot Rod, Monogram's second plastic kit. Next one looks like the Forty Niner Dragster. Second row far right is Monogram's first plastic kit, first issued in acetate, the approximately 1/20 scale Midget Racer
  10. Here's a TE448 that has had the sides of its rear cage raised to comply with sanctioning body regs. Probably should have gone a little higher...
  11. The classic Dragmaster is more like this, kinda like the Chassis Research K88, but different... or with double hoops like the Mooneyes frames Both were available as Revell parts-packs. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The other Revell parts-pack frame was a Kent Fuller version of the TE448, identifiable by its small-diameter-tube X at the rear, with upper and lower forward rails forming a shallow triangle, the basis for the twin-nailhead powered Tommy Ivo car above in Snake's original post. The TE448 had double Us at the rear, and generally more parallel forward rails, as in Snake's first photo. And I don't know who built the first one, but I find the Fuller version to be the superior design.
  12. Check this out...non-mandrel bends, oxy-acetylene welding on a T.E. 448:
  13. Like you said, both Kent Fuller and Chassis Research built the style of frame you're asking about, but so did others. T.E. 448, below ("totally enclosed") was kinda the "kleenex" of the type, and is still a name commonly used to refer to this design. https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/retro-te-448-fed-dragster-build-tech.576068/ So you can call it a "Chassis Research T.E. 448-style" frame. Or not.
  14. Slingshot. Mickey Thompson is widely credited for originating and popularizing the design with the driver behind the rear axle, allowing maximum engine setback for the most possible weight transfer under acceleration. And one of its chief advantages was the severely narrowed rear axle, which helped limit the tendency of cars to self-steer if they had unequal traction on the rear tires. The term "rail job" was applied to the earliest stripped down cars that were nothing but frame rails, engines, and running gear. The term expanded to encompass anything similar, including "slingshot" cars. Thompson's own words: “It was late 1954 that I decided to build a radically new type of dragster. For years everyone in the sport had been making noises about traction, weight transfer and about getting as much of the weight of the vehicle as possible concentrated on its rear driving tires. As the whole sport learned to get more and more horsepower from its engines, the need for greater traction became even greater. Gradually the idea took shape. The big obstacle was keeping the driver between the engine and the rear axle. This required a drive shaft of a certain length, which pushed the engine forward by that amount. Now if you would place the driver behind the rear axle you could couple the engine-transmission assembly directly to it and you would really have the main weight of the vehicle focused on the driving wheels.” “There was another problem to traction and that was the amount of rubber on the ground. If you could double the area of rubber on the pavement, you could probably transmit almost double the horsepower to the road before the wheels would spin. That is when I went to dual rear wheels and everybody laughed at my "Truck", but I got the results I'd hoped for. Then I went to the A-1 Tire Company and talked them into building moulds for the first recap wide-tread slicks, which I seemed to have invented. This paid off some more. One of the biggest factors limiting dragster performance in those days was directional stability-the things were just desperately hard to keep going in a straight line. I felt that this could be helped by approaching as closely as possible to a three-wheel configuration with the front wheels very wide apart and the rear wheels just as close together as the width of the driver's body would allow. So I built a dragster that way. As it gradually took shape, the result of all these ideas made me the butt of jokes all over southern California. But funny thing was that it ran and one day a Santa Anna hot rodder Leroy Neumeyer said to me, ‘You know what that beast reminds me of, Mick? A slingshot. You know, the way the driver sits back there like a rock in a slingshot.’" That was the name that stuck and the configuration proved to be so successful, so unbeatable, that within a couple of years it became the standard of the sport.
  15. I'm in Ga. We were among the earliest of states to begin reopening 3 weeks ago, amid much derogatory and fear-mongering rhetoric in the media. Our new case count continues to decline as more and more businesses open and things begin to look somewhat normal. Make of that what you will. I've been working full time, business-as-usual (not from home) since I got back from Az in the middle of March, when this whole mess broke wide open. A National Park near me reopened parking lots and trails last week, and I was able to go for a 3 hour hike yesterday.
  16. WOW. And I'm green with envy.
  17. Unless it's a virgin in the box with everything intact, I say have at it. I have a very few models that qualify as "collectible" and that I have zero intention of building, but a whole lot of rare and unusual kits that will be heavily modded. Far as real cars go, I've wanted a '30-'31 Ford coupe hot-rod for decades. I came across a very nice older restoration-to-original for decent money a few months back. But as rare as these things are relatively unmolested, I just didn't have the heart to buy it to hack up. On the other hand, if it had had a nice body but was a generally crapp car otherwise, I would have jumped it in a heartbeat.
  18. Sounds like Gary's a Karen.
  19. You just gotta love a place that lists "SR-71 Blackbird parts" on its website.
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