Ace-Garageguy

A competent machinist working with a mill and lathe in his back shed can easily command $100 per hour making real stuff, and depending on your market, being able to do one-off, non-CNC work, you can just about name any price you want. If you aren't going to be making a pretty fair chunk of money for HIGHLY SKILLED WORK (that probably only one in 10,000 people...literally...can do) using EXPENSIVE TOOLS, why bother?

Another Tuesday installment of "I'm totally ignorant of accepted and proven science, so therefore, when I see two things that look kinda alike, I immediately jump to the conclusion that I'm smarter than everyone else, connect dots that cannot possibly be connected by any rational process whatsoever, and tell all the world (via the internet...which I don't understand, but which provides a global platform for morons to make fools of themselves) that they've been being lied to for millennia...or at least a few days."

in mother's galoshes

I'd like the lost Segway prototype... Or this Weight-Watcher's Special Edition... And for Foose haters everywhere, this 100% talent-free exercise in being talent-free...

in your eye

Original Minis rolled on 10" rims. 12" was a common aftermarket "performance" upgrade. Bear that in mind when you're looking for rolling stock. A 10" wheel is about 3/8 of an inch OD...at the tire mounting bead...(approx. 10mm) in 1/25 scale.

These prices seem pretty intelligently reasonable when you consider a Beanie Baby was on eBay for $500,000 a few years back. Yup, half a million bucks.

^^^ Yeah baby, now we're talkin'.

I hope more folks chime in. There's a guy who did some really stunning work using a programmable cutter that cut precise shapes from sheet styrene, and another member here, comp1839, does spectacular work in larger scales, like this...

with road kill

Agreed. Looks great.

Maybe just for you.

with raw oysters

Though this model is NOT a gasser, it's close in general concept, and the overall design goals of the builders of a car like this would be very similar to guys building gassers back in the dim recesses of time. Getting maximum "weight-transfer" towards the rear under acceleration is Job 1, especially necessary where the width and rubber compounds of the slicks available then made them considerably less-sticky than what we're used to today. Contrary to widely popular opinion these days, the normal at-rest stance of a period gasser WAS NOT the nose-to-the-sky attitude in evidence in so many "nostalgia" cars, both real and model. Despite a FEW period photos to the contrary, the VAST MAJORITY of real in-period gassers sat LEVEL at rest, and only developed the extreme nose-high attitude during launch. Again, this is not my "opinion". It is a simple FACT that can be verified by anyone researching period class rules, and photographs of cars FROM THE ERA. One of the reasons the Stone-Woods-Cook Willys gasser became so famous is because of it's great and consistent ability to "hook up". The guys who put the car together were wizards who hit on a magic combination, and I've been studying it to use on this build. My interest in the SWC chassis setup began many years ago, but it's surfaced again because the leaf springs I fabbed for this build won't support the car's weight. I'm going to have to take that load with the shocks, and started scrounging through kits to see what I could find that's appropriate. I happened to look in the vintage Revell SWC Willys kit, and wouldn't choo know, I remembered a few things. Though there's never really been any in-depth engineering analysis of the SWC car's setup published (as far as I know), Revell got things pretty righteous back in those days, and the shocks in the kit add to an interesting story. The rear end of the SWC Willys gasser was set up pretty "loose", on quarter-elliptic springs that allowed the body to move quite freely up and down relative to the axle. Side-to-side motion was controlled by a simple Panhard bar, and axle torque-reaction during acceleration was controlled by long traction bars that also worked as "lift bars", very effectively raising the front of the car as the rear tended to squat on the softish springs. Smallish shocks at the rear prevented that end of the body from rising again quickly, while much larger shocks at the front tended to hold the nose high after those springs unloaded at launch. NOTE: The American term "shock absorbers" leads to much misunderstanding of what these parts actually do. The British term "dampers" is accurate, as they "damp" out excessive "boingity-boingity-boingity" as the springs try to oscillate after they're displaced. They do NOT absorb shock, nor do they add to the car's static spring-rate (unless they're specifically designed to do so, gas-filled or coil-over units). Old drag racing guys will remember that, before you could just buy everything out of catalogs (like 90/10 shocks), we'd routinely use worn-out shocks that were much stiffer in one direction than the other to get exactly this kind of car control (or hack them open, change the valving, and fill 'em with STP...) and this general combination of damping front-to-rear is largely responsible for the characteristic appearance of gassers maintaining the nose-high attitude well down the 1/4 mile, though they'd usually settle to level at the end. Anyhaps...I found some loose but clean Revell SWC Willys gasser parts hiding out in a mess of other miscellaneous bits I've never sorted, and as the rear end and lift bars in this thing are already based on Revell SWC Willys gluebomb parts, I'll be using the fronts, suitably modified to fit this build, and rears of a size similar to what was under that end of that car as well. Happy trails. PS. There will be a test on this material at the end of the semester.

Just tried it again...copied this directly from the page: Matt Bacon cannot receive messages.

A brain.

Because there's just no shortage of stupid...a sad reality in evidence everywhere, more so every day.

for green-haired screaming

or anyone else

"Matt Bacon cannot receive messages"

of any value

politicians stuffed with

where chipmunks developed

from planet Arrakis

and a sailor