Ace-Garageguy

Thanks for the heads-up, Mr. Bacon. Good news indeed.

Absolutely beautiful. And that brake-rotor trick is just jammin'. I don't know about you, but I find my bodywork and primer prep has to be just a little better when doing a flat finish. As there's no post-processing, like color-sanding and polishing, there's no way to correct very small sanding scratches or other minor flaws that might have gone unnoticed, or that shrink out in a few days.

Fascinating model. I'm sure your Dad loves it. Seeing you guys building these great looking hard-working trucks is inspiring me to try my hand at one or two. I find I like looking at big old trucks now just as much as I did when I was a little kid. Thanks to you and everyone else on this side of the board.

Spectacular. It's always a genuine pleasure to see anything you build. Absolutely some of the best model work on the planet.

Very fine.

Excellent metal effect. I look forward to seeing where this goes.

Haggis without the sheep? Say it isn't so. Oh, the humanity!

Sorry to see that happen to you, and very glad you didn't lose your decals on the body. That would have been a bad double bite. This is another reminder why it's always good practice to TEST combining different materials you haven't used together before...exactly...BEFORE you go on to shoot a model. It can be a pain to keep stripping a test body for re-use, but it beats having to strip a model you care about, or risk losing (sometimes) irreplaceable decals.

Since you're in the IT biz, why don't you explain to (probably) a lot of those here who don't know exactly what that means?

Far as the matte finish goes, it's kinda interesting how old knowledge often gets rediscovered and is "cutting edge" again. A few decades back, wind tunnel testing revealed that a uniformly 400-grit finish on a laminar-flow aircraft wing would show a small but measurable reduction in drag under some conditions, by keeping the boundary layer of the flow attached just a little longer. Dull wings on competition sailplanes showed up afterwards, but I haven't noticed anybody doing it lately. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/boundlay.html Though they cite weight-saving, I wouldn't be surprised to find this effect has also been modeled in Ferrari's CFD simulation. It's extremely difficult to reliably and repeatedly reproduce aerodynamic results like these in the real world however, because a car is constantly accelerating, decelerating, changing direction, side-slipping, and is mostly in ground-effect anyway. All these dynamic changes affect airflow over any given point, changing constantly, and as any aerodynamic flat-finish or low-drag decal effect would be tiny, it's of dubious value other than as a psychological magic edge, and getting everybody else to waste their time copying it. As your reference article states, Mercedes started running naked cars because they stripped the paint off their alloy bodies to reduce weight at one point. Silver became their signature color as a result. Just FYI: "unpainted" carbon fiber needs to be coated with a thick coat of UV-absorbing clear in the real world to protect the resin from guaranteed degradation from sunlight. Best to keep your bare-carbon car under wraps anyway. And as far as "forged" carbon goes on this build, it depends on what you want to represent. "Forged" carbon requires expensive matched molds that can withstand 1200-1500 PSI molding force, and around 250F. There's no benefit to making tooling like this for a one-off car, as it would be prohibitively expensive (unless it was a cost-no-object build). "Forged" carbon shows a cost advantage on production parts because the highly-skilled labor needed to make traditional hand-laid carbon parts is eliminated. Traditional woven-carbon layups are stronger anyway, and can be made in old-school open molds that only need to withstand a couple atmospheres of pressure during vacuum-bagging. If your build is supposed to represent a one-of-one custom, woven carbon would be the more rational choice.

Oh man, this is great. Now I can get at least reasonable accuracy on some newish-style race cars. Much appreciated.

Wow. Just wow. I may never be the same.

I'd like to see too...

Oh, you're too kind. I know a helluva lot, though far from everything. But now that you've admitted my vast superiority (totally inappropriately on somebody else's build thread, by the way), I just gotta say to Kurt... I'm still following, liking everything you've got going, and wish you well the rest of the way out. This thing is really cool.

It looks to me as though somebody glued the valve covers directly to the block, with no cylinder heads, so the engine is just about impossible to identify (and note that the valve covers don't match each other anyway)...though the valve covers do have the old smallblock Chebby bolt pattern. But...the trans CAN be identified, and since the trans is molded with the block, that at least gets the engine in the right manufacturer's ballpark. Far as the trans goes, it looks to me like a Ford C6. It has the big servo housing in the right place, the right general shape, the signature bulge immediately forward of the servo, an integral bellhousing and a bolt-on tailshaft housing, but there's a dip in the top of the main case probably put there by the tooling designers so it would clear something else on the model...kinda like they used to put holes in blocks for the old wire axles. This is a C6. Compare. You also have to remember that a lot of tooling designers don't really understand how cars work or what the parts do, so you often get blobular parts that make no sense and have no solid basis in reality. That's what we have in the white blob at the bottom. The intake manifold has non-symmetrical and incorrectly-staggered ports that don't exist on any real V8 engine, though they're sorta arranged like Chebby smallblocks and some others. But a Chebby smallblock (or big block) manifold would have a hole at one end for the thermostat housing, and a hole at the other end where the distributor goes. Like this SBC manifold: The white thing is so bad, you wouldn't want to use it in anything you wanted to be a "nice" model. Funny though...the trans looks like it might be OK. Post some shots of the trans and we'll see if we can tell what it's supposed to be.

The styling is by a well-known industrial designer. If you run across his name in your research, do an image search under him. Lots of wild stuff, not all of it really "pretty", but definitely distinctive.

Just an FYI...anybody wanting to put one of these in anything other than an airplane can dispense with the gear-reduction prop drive on the end. These big aluminum bellhousings replace the gear-reduction box. And here are a coupla threads that illustrate the above point, as well as many details concerning plumbing, cooling, etc.

One thing I really enjoy about the Autoquiz series is the opportunity to research cars I've never seen or only recognize vaguely. In trying to pin down exactly what year this thing was, I even stumbled across a company that specializes in NOS parts for them. Who woulda thunk it. Fascinating little car. I had no idea of it's lineage.

I said it was a BS marketing term in the beginning. That's all it is. It isn't "forging". So we agree in principle, but the semantic derivation of the term that Spex was proposing is what I took issue with. Ain't no "metaphorical" or "deeply collaborative" mumbo jumbo about it. It's an allusion to forged metal. Nothing more, nothing less. I also have to really laugh at your highlighted phrases above, as I'm often accused of and derided for making sneering and sarcastic comments towards other members. Hmmmmm...who's the sneering sarcastic one on this exchange? But...that's absolutely all I'm going to say on the subject. I have no interest in arguing, being "right" or any further discussion. Anyone is free to believe whatever they want to believe, to understand or misunderstand anything I've said, to try to shift positions or pretend I've said things I haven't. And anyone is equally free to dislike me, think I'm a big pile of self-righteous poo, or anything else. But according to the rules of conduct as I understand them here, any personal attacks are out of bounds. Frankly, I think it is perhaps unfortunate I said anything at all. I actually like both you and Spex, and have much respect for the work I've seen you post here. Hopefully, we can let this silliness end, agree to disagree or not, and go on about our business as usual. And I really don't give a rat's rump either way.

Nope. Any point missing isn't on me. As I explained in the beginning, it's a somewhat misleading term that conflates the idea of forging metal under extreme pressure and temperature with the idea of match-molded composite materials produced at moderate temperatures and pressures. This is in contrast to the "open molding", "closed molding", "resin infusion", and several other common composite parts production techniques. That was the derivation of the term. And it is THAT specific meaning, not "the use of "forged"...semi-metaphorically...to mean "brought into existence". As in: "forged in a deeply collaborative environment" or "forged from only the highest quality materials", that was carried over to the marketing term as it's used now. No semi-metaphorically about it. "Forged Carbon" is a simple but slightly deceptive allusion to the idea of forging metal...which the Car and Driver article makes abundantly clear, but about which apparently there is a lack of understanding here. You do, however, make a good point. You say "Unless we're sitting in on the marketing strategy meeting who are we to say how they intended the word to be understood?" Well, you were NOT sitting in on any such marketing strategy meeting, but you still insist you know the way the term is supposed to be interpreted. I have, on the other hand, been cognizant of this material and the processes used and the terms surrounding it since the beginning of its development. The allusion to the hammer-forging of metal has been intentional, because to anyone in engineering or metallurgy, a "forging" is well known to be among the toughest processed parts available. Once again...the intended meaning by the developers and the term as used for marketing the stuff is specifically intended to draw a comparison in the mind of anyone hearing it to forged metal...period.

Damm man, that is sad. She was a beautiful model and that would have ruined my day. I admire your attitude deciding to rebuild her. It should make a really fascinating thread if you do one.

Lots of folks want to believe what they want to believe, in spite of actual first-hand knowledge offered by someone with inside info. I've been directly involved with the composites industry for decades, and this explanation is just wrong. Sorry. One of my missions in life, usually a complete and total waste of time, and one that usually gets me ridiculed as pathetically needing to be "right" and a "know it all", is correcting patently false information when I can. The web is full of it though, and it's rather like trying to shovel water out of a swimming pool while a fire-hose refills it. Here's the real reason for the name, as I've tried to explain earlier. Maybe you all will believe Car and Driver. "The forged part of the FC name comes from the goal of replacing metal forgings in cars. While FC suspension control arms and wheels are risky because it’s difficult to tell when they need to be replaced due to pothole or curb-strike injury, the ACSL has FC engine connecting rods in its showcase that may be closer to fruition. The most promising candidate delivers a 39 percent weight savings over a forged-steel design for that part." https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15347161/lamborghini-is-forging-ahead-with-forged-carbon-fiber-we-visit-their-u-s-based-lab/

Nice rework, much more attractive lines than the kit comes with.

It's a "concept" computer illustration...so I guess you could say it's P'shopped. In some ways reminiscent of Luigi Colani's work from decades ago.