Ace-Garageguy

I seriously doubt they have anything whatsoever to do with Musk. Scammer spammers will use anything to try to get their fingers in your pockets. Musk isn't needing to do email marketing of bogus idiot-trap green baloney.

OK...story please.

Along came a spider and sat down beside her, and Miss Muffet ran screaming into the night.

I "inherited" the '66 SS396 Chevelle project I'm currently finishing up after the poor thing was bodged beyond belief by some very well-paid "car builders". The custom stainless fuel tank was just one of a multitude of things that I've had to correct. Yes, the welds are nice and it's shiny, but the good part stops there. It's poorly designed in general and stupid small, with misplaced baffles and no sump for an EFI pump pickup (anything with 750 honest dynoed HP needs proper tank baffles and/or a sumped tank). There are more problems with the tank I won't bother to go into, but the major one has been developing a fuel pickup system that compensates for the lousy tank design. The car is in the "pro touring" style, with fabbed IFS, massive brakes, and wide sticky tires capable of developing impressive lateral-acceleration and stopping numbers, so again, a proper fuel pickup system is imperative. Part of the solution is a Holley HydraMat, but getting it to work with the existing tank outlet has been quite the endeavor. In the end, my solution is relatively simple, is based on aircraft and road-race practice and some rather obscure plumbing hardware pieces from quite a variety of sources...but it took a lot of head-scratching to get there. Problem solved, 90% engineering done (I'll complete it when I have all the bits in hand to make certain everything fits and plays nice together), fixing to order all the parts right now.

Thanks muchly. I'll file those.

The firebomber operator probably has civil options too, like recovering cost of repairs (obviously), but also a large chunk of change for lost revenue while the plane was grounded. If it was MY airplane, I'd go after the moron with both barrels to make an example to the rest of the drone-flying twerples out there. Imagine if the drone strike had been on a prop or the windshield. We could be looking at a whole helluva lot more...maybe the loss of the entire aircraft and dead pilots.

Dealership hijinks like generally dishonest practices, upselling customers into worthless new-car add-ons, unnecessary repairs post-warranty, and incompetent service writers got me pretty fed up with the car biz early in my career.

And everything has to work correctly and safely at very high speeds when you're done. Just a tiny bit more challenging...

2004 was the 5th year after Y2K ended the world.

Shine on, shine on harvest moon, for me and my gal.

"Necessity is a mother...", or something like that.

Kid gloves actually work well for TIG welding.

"Bank yer fires and prepare to drop anchor" shouted the XO, but because the stoker crew of genetically modified dogs hadn't had their Neuralink language chips updated to understand old-fashioned seafaring jargon, they just stood there looking sheepish...which isn't easy for creatures that look like nothing so much as upright-walking wolves.

Man...that sure looks like a real car. Nice work...

That's what she said as she ran away laughing gleefully, having just cleaned out our joint account.

This is the kind of YT content aimed at entry-level modelers I personally think has the most value. Nobody has to agree.

Handy-dandy internet-connected fridges that smell your milk to see if it's gone sour are such life-altering things, I just don't understand how anyone could have survived back before they existed.

I started using PP around 2001 when I was getting back into car modeling and selling off some of my full-scale car stuff I figured I'd never use (sold the Lambo Espada crankshaft to a fella in Spain...but anybody need a head or a flywheel?). Anyway, that's a long time. There have been a few hiccups, very few, but to date I've never lost a dime. But I'm sure some well-meaning ------- will "fix" it shortly.

Everyone who worked there, including me, took every appropriate precaution and used state-of-the-art PPE. The building was closed...not sealed, just closed during production, so airborne particulates didn't escape. They're too sticky to get through seams, small gaps, etc. There is some floaty fiber that comes off the glass feed to the gun, but it's not much. The stink emitted by styrene monomer during chopper-gun or other kinds of spray-based fabrication is really really bad though, and you could smell the shop for at least a block during sprayup operations. I'd used appropriate PPE for decades doing other things, from simple dust masks to respirator masks and full suits. But I'd never had the need to use an air-supplied full-face mask and a hood, as well as the suit, previously. A regular paint respirator is quickly overwhelmed by the styrene monomer stink from a single chopper-gun operation, even inside a 3000 sq. ft. building. As an aside, when we were making short-run small fiberglass parts, doing hand-layups, we worked with the rollup doors open and a powerful exhaust fan to suck stink out of the dead-air and of the building...always with personnel using particulate filters over respirator masks, gloves, and paper suits. But the release of the styrene monomer stink was so minor, and so fully dispersed, you could barely smell it even if you stuck your face in the fan outflow. Inside the building it was about the same as the bondo smell coming from a bodyshop...easily handled by organic vapor "paint" respirators with dust prefilters. There are many potential hazards working with any kind of composite materials, but as with most "dangerous" things, health problems and injuries can be completely avoided if correct precautions are in place. That said, I still see welders using nothing but sunglasses. I'll never understand why someone would risk almost certain permanent eye damage. Just to look cool, I guess.

"Anyway" can be used effectively to start a sentence when a conversation has gone off the rails, as in "anyway, back to the topic".

Many years ago, a composite parts fabricator I was working with went from hand-layups of relatively small polyester bits to "chopper gun" layup of large fiberglass sailplane-trailer top shells. The smell from the styrene monomer was massively increased, and as the shop had no air handling/filtration capability, and was in a light industrial area close to a neighborhood, I thought we'd better do something preemptively. We called the local EPA office for guidance, and explained the situation in depth. The response was "has anyone complained?" "No" we said, which was true. "Then don't worry about it" was EPA's answer, and we never heard another peep.

I never said "can't". I said there's a lack of "WANTING to". Where there is sufficient desire to do something...wanting to...cost constraints can be overcome. Several injection molding companies make things profitably in the USA, proving that cost by itself is not a deal killer. That means there is insufficient desire to make other injection-molded stuff here when it's easier to get somebody somewhere else to do the work as cheaply as possible, and just rake off the profits.

Hard to believe? There was a time when food prices in America were such a small part of my expenses, I didn't bother trying to save a little bit here and there. Now, frankly, I'm wondering how some people are able to get by at all.

You might enjoy this 2-parter on assembling an Offy midget engine. There are some shots of the nekkid chassis in the background as well.

My earliest one is red, and it's definitely, positively acetate...but not badly warped...yet. I don't know if there were earlier yellow ones or not.