Ace-Garageguy

You have another interested observer here. I have a few of these acquired really cheap as parts sources, and one saved intact to actually build.

A lot is going to depend on a particular builder's technique. I don't "use heavy coats", but I learned to shoot "full, wet coats" in order to let my materials flow out and thereby eliminate much sanding required to remove orange-peel. If I shoot full wet coats with Duplicolor primer, most kit plastics of fairly recent manufacture will craze. Up until the reformulation of the PlastiKote line a couple years back, I could usually shoot full wet coats in safety.

So this guy's saying he has the magic calibrated eyeball and spidey sense that he uses to "interpret" the actual dimensions and numerical relationships, totally subjectively, into what he thinks they should be to represent vehicles realistically in scale. I call bovine exhaust on his approach. If he wants to design cars, he ought to be working as a real-car designer, not stretching and reshaping something that already exists to present it the way he thinks (completely arbitrarily) HE wants it to look. I'm sure every misshapen mess on the market has some equally arbitrary set of "artistic reasons" that it looks more like a young child's toy than a scale model. I've had industrial model makers try to pull this crapp with MY designs. I spotted what they were doing immediately, and kicked their backsides out the door. I ended up building my own models directly from the prints in several cases, and guess what? The models looked exactly as they were designed to look with no "artistic interpretation" from some doofus third party required. But hey...most people building models just don't have the artistic talent, particularly in 3D, to spot the things that are wrong with many kits. We routinely see people say "I just don't see the problem", and others saying "I don't care anyway". So it's easy for these "artistic interpretation" designers to get away with this stuff, 'cause most modelers aren't going to catch it. And those of us who really do have accurately calibrated eyeballs have to take what's made, and accept it as wrong, or waste our time correcting it.

I'm sorry, but if you stop and think the least bit critically about this, it's ridiculous. If a given car's static ride height in reality is, say, 6 inches, the ride height of the model should be 6 scale inches. Maintain the same numerical relationships, and models will look correct every time. The often repeated notion that models have to be warped and dimensions juggled by some super-secret oogy-boogy factor that can only be seen and interpreted by magic kit designers to "look right" is sheer gibberish too. Yes, I know this from personal, highly critical real-world experience. For simple proof, consider this: a small photographic representation of a real full size car looks "right" without any magic manipulation of dimensions. Why? because all the spacial and numerical relationships are maintained exactly as they are in reality. The stupid too-tall and too-wide tire issue is something else that makes no sense. Measuring and dividing isn't hard. At all. Especially if that's what you get paid for, because you're supposed to know how.

A further note: the people involved in the project at the time were very well aware that the energy input required to distill fuel-grade alcohol would tend to make it non-competitive with petroleum based fuels available at the time. The primary focus of the project was, in reality, to develop simple and cost-effective SOLAR stills, to hold down distillation energy inputs normally required from other sources. My involvement was in helping to determine how crappy a still could be and still produce something a car would run on, so I'd test low-grade alcohols and gasoline mixes. So my statement about the cost of energy in as opposed to energy out is the result of direct real-world hands-on experience, and not mindless parroting of the petrothink alluded to above. One result was a still made of plywood sheet and corrugated roof tin, with some PVC pipe, that could turn out 140 proof ethanol on the first pass, using fermented grass clippings as feedstock.

...Oshifer...honesht...ish not me thash been drinking; ish my car...

The AMT Barris Surf Woody has a twin Paxton setup for a Ford smallblock too. The Surf Woody can be found for under $20 including shipping, and is a goldmine of other kool parts as well.

Man, those guys are good. Never heard 'em before. Drummer reminds me a little of Ginger Baker at his best. Sorry he's gone.

Exactly...but the concept of "unsprung weight" is largely unknown to hot-rodders, and there's a lot of "everybody runs a 9-inch so...baaa baaa...I will too" in play. Still, if you have your heart set on building a semi-bulletproof car out of junk, it's hard to beat a boneyard 9-inch.

Then perhaps you can explain why they say 1/25-1/24 right there on the selling page, and even in the web address for the page...?

Straight ethanol has an equivalent octane rating of 109. Therefore, the percentage of ethanol mixed with gasoline can have a significant effect on the resultant octane rating of the blend. But, because ethanol has less energy than an equivalent volume of gasoline, as added-ethanol-induced octane in a blend goes up, power and mileage generally come down. As Joe mentioned, tuning can compensate for some of this. Because of ethanol's higher effective octane rating, an engine running on it can tolerate both more compression and more ignition advance, both ways to increase power...to a point...and the reason why an engine optimized for running ethanol may tend to knock on fuels with a higher gasoline content. For what it's worth, I worked as a greasy-hands consultant with a well known university on a pilot ethanol project back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and ran my personal Triumph GT6 on a variety of "gasohol" blends and ethanol fuels of various proofs. EDIT: Because of the design of the little car's SU carbs, it was quite easy to rough-tune them for different fuels by simply raising or lowering the needles in the pistons. Exhaust gas analysis would tell us where we were, mixture wise, when we'd established a decent running tune through trial and error. Then we'd machine new needles to deliver a modified fuel delivery curve, based on the previously altered positions of the needles. SU carbs vary the amount of fuel delivered based on manifold vacuum, a function of engine load and speed. We'd install 'em, and test more. Changing ignition timing is a simple matter of twisting the distributor, and changing the advance curve only requires substitution of springs, weights, and vacuum canister valving. The cylinder head comes off the GT6 engine in no-time-flat too, and juggling compression ratios with annealed copper head gaskets of various thicknesses was a cinch. A couple of days of tinkering like this could establish a workably accurate...and repeatable...tune for any blend. Actual science. EDIT: Suitably tuned, little car would run happily on Bacardi 151, and the exhaust smelled great. The one overriding problem on that series of tests was the reluctance of the engine to start on close-to-pure ethanol in cold weather, because of alcohol's vaporization characteristics, and a point-type ignition system (replaced with an electronic "multi-strike" system later on). With today's fuel injection nozzles delivering a nicely atomized mist, and very high-energy ignition systems, it's no longer an issue.

Material thickness is often cited as the "reason" for all sorts of things in the modeling world, when in fact it is only an excuse. The real reason? Incompetence, pure and simple. If "material thickness" really had anything to do with it, or if the reason was anything other than sloppy laziness on the part of the designers, ALL models would sit like 4X4s, and we lowly modelers wouldn't be able to so easily correct wonky stance by simple expedients like re-positioning stub axles on spindles, or lightly shaving material from leaf springs, would we?

I don't know why people get so offended by the word "ignorant". The definition of ignorant isn't the same as "stupid" "Ignorant" simply means "lacking knowledge". The vast majority of "news" watchers are largely lacking knowledge about aviation. That makes them "ignorant" concerning aviation. Sadly, much of what's presented as "fact" by mainstream news, more about sensationalism driving ratings than actual journalism...journalism that strives to get things right...is complete and utter BS. It's a case of the blind leading the blind, in effect, and why much of the country is so confused today. PS: One of the absolute best sources of factual information concerning all things aviation is the Juan Browne YouTube channel posted by Kurt, above. The guy is a high-time airline pilot, ex-military with combat experience, and heavily involved in general aviation (small airplanes) as well. He never goes off half-cocked, treats aircraft accidents with the gravity they deserve, and makes damm sure to get his facts straight before he opens his mouth. He thoroughly understands the physics and engineering that makes planes fly, all the systems inside and outside aircraft, and the functioning of the FAA, ground control, etc. In short, he is a real "expert", not some guy who once went to an airport and now pontificates from his vast pool of nonexistent knowledge for some idiot "news" channel.

Here's a shot of the rear axle in the Revell Anglia and Thames. Same design as in the Miss Deal kit, but smaller, though still the appropriate style housing for your application. This one looks to me to be more scale-correct, but I don't have time to research the real full-scale dimensions right now.

Here's an image of the parts tree with the axle from the Revell Miss Deal kit. With a little research and a little simple arithmetic, you can easily compare the dimensions with known dimensions on the 392 Hemi block to check it for scale accuracy.

That would be the Eaton HO-52 then. Here are 8-bolt wheels with center hubs from BNL Resin too. http://www.b-n-lresins.com/shoppingopencart/Aftermarket-resin-cast-1-24-1-25-scale-hobby-model--wheels/resin-cast-1-24-1-25-scale-model-8-Lug-4X4-Wheels

Not available in truck kits, but there are period heavier truck axles in several vintage drag car kits. One source of a six-bolt (wheel) rear end looking a lot like the Eaton is the Revell Stone Woods Cook Willys gasser. The Revell Anglia and Thames have similar rear axle housings. There's a bigger one, possibly over-scale, in the Revell Miss Deal Studebaker funny car. You can make the brake drums up from styrene tube, and the wheels and hubs to match your photo should be available from one of the dirt-track aftermarket resin sources.

Hey man...it probably is "just as good" if you're the typical DIY consumer, putting a runny, dust-filled layer of color over your bleached out rattan lawn furniture.

Most likely, and if the lowest bidder is Chinese, and quality control on this side of the Pacific is anything like it is in the car-parts biz, don't expect to get the same product every time. Reality can be a real bidge.

Like this old Eaton HO-52?

You're not going to get the same mileage or power from E85 as you'll get from gasoline, no matter how you drive. Yeah, it'll cost less to fill the tank, but you won't go as far on E85. If it's cheap enough, it might cost less over time to burn more fuel to go a shorter distance. You'll need to keep your own records and do the math to know for sure.

That's why in the car biz, we use masking tapes specifically developed for industrial solvents. There seems to be this idea that there is such a thing as "standard" masking tape. There isn't. As with most things in life, it's a little complicated, and those who don't do their own due-diligence risk unpleasant results.

In many ways, the ethanol craze was a giant knee-jerk boondoggle, based largely on ignorance and feel-good environmental policies that were fueled by faulty logic. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 Btu. Put another way, about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 Btu.Mar 6, 2009 https://www.organicconsumers.org/scientific/70-percent-more-energy-required-make-ethanol-actually-ethanol-cornell

I believe you mean ethanol. They're both alcohols, but have some significant differences. Most alcohol-gasoline blends for public consumption use ethanol, not methanol. E-10, E-15, and E-85 refer to the percentage of ethanol in the blend. If the fuel system is correctly designed, the vehicle "knows" exactly what fuel is in the injector rail at any given time, and adjusts operating parameters to best advantage. Mixing any available gasoline-based fuel should cause no problem whatsoever...again, assuming correct design and function.