Ace-Garageguy

I always use files to take material off down to the level of the surface. You need something RIGID that won't just ride over the high-spots while taking material off AROUND the emblem or whatever...like unsupported sandpaper will. Otherwise, you'll get a wavy panel, often with unnecessarily deep and hard-to-kill sanding scratches around the emblem site. You will almost always find that the area will "ghost", as the plastic under the emblem is just a little softer than the hard skin that was over the emblem itself. Sanding the area with 400 wet gets it all blended together, then sanding it with 800 gets it ready for primer. The only thing I've found that kills ghosting is to repeatedly prime, let dry, sand again, prime again, and repeat as necessary. And if you don't want to obliterate fine details in the neighborhood, you need to be using an airbrush with a narrow pattern to do your primer work. I removed the hood peak and emblem from this. It ghosted pretty badly. Now it's fixed, as described above.

Yes, thanks to all. Most definitely.

Wow. Seems like not so long ago, even all the girls I knew could drive a stick. My...how times have changed.

Forethought usually isn't a big part of idiots' lives. I'll betcha there are permanent wrinkles in the Challenger's roof now, and the weatherstrip at the sides of the roof where the windows seal is probably shredded.

Hmmm...maybe that's what my second-to-last ex was made of. She kept expanding and expanding and expanding...

Nothing wrong with helping friends, but when people I've never met who are friends of friends of friends want me to drop what I'm doing in my own life to help them do something an adult should really be able to handle on his own, it gets to be a drag. "hey man...soandso said you have a truck and would probably help me moving my poolboy's camping trailer to the other side of town so my wife can't find it" kinda thing. Nah. Rent a truck yourself.

Real tunnels like this are usually built in 3 sections. Styrene tube works great for the area over the driveshaft in the rear. Styrene sheet in .010"-.020" works well for the rest (and the driveshaft area too...tape it around an aluminum X-Acto handle and dip in boiling water. It will then hold the shape). Get your driveshaft area done, and mock up the other two sections, one at a time, with card stock (file cards, manila envelope material, etc.). Make your mockups fit dead on. Transfer the shapes to your plastic sheet, cut them out carefully, glue together. Kinda like this, though I cheated a little because it gets covered with a console. OR...you can often find the perfect tunnel area in an old blobular chassis plate, or some other leftover or gluebomb model. Just trim to fit.

Yes sir, I like both of those. Only change I'd like to see on the red one is either lowering the top of the grille shell slightly, or raising the body slightly...or a little of both...to get a level (more or less) line between the rad shell top and the front of the cowl. I always find it jarring, design-wise, if the two points are far out of a line level with the ground, or parallel with the frame rails ( the line, in short, a hood would have to follow if one were installed).

Extremely nice overall. Very, very clean, and your great looking metalflake paint looks just like the gelcoat these bodies were factory finished with. You hit the look of many of the interior treatments in these dead-on too. Your added hardware details, like the exhaust flanges and pulleys, also add much to the realism the model exhibits. One small FYI...your Webers are side-drafts, not down-drafts, and couldn't work as mounted

Yeah, you're right. I have a welder too. And a lathe. And a milling machine. And no end of tools people were always asking to borrow. Shhhhh...don't tell anyone.

THANK YOU !! Most impressive.

Thank you sir. Very much appreciated.

Any chance of getting a link?

Ranks right up there with people who know you're a "mechanic" and can "fix things" in general. Add to that knowledge the fact you have a truck too, and the phone rings off the hook...which would be just dandy if I were a handy-man-mover, but that's not the case. And freeloaders "needing" favors rarely if ever offer anything of value in return for wasting an entire day out of one's life, burning gas, etc. Nope, no more. I have two friends left who have been there for ME in the rare instances I've needed help. I'll bend over backwards for either of them, but everybody else..."sorry, that number is no longer in service".

^^^ Thanks Bob. Much appreciated.

And I'm not. Not at all. For every dirtbag that gets caught, there are millions of law-abiding citizens minding their own business, but they're living in a virtual fishbowl. I value my PRIVACY almost as much as I value my FREEDOM, and the concepts are intimately related. Abuses of data are common, and will be increasingly common. Trading freedom for muddily perceived "security" is not a good bargain in my book.

Few years back. some fellas here bought a new large appliance, and wishing to avoid the delivery fee, loaded it on the back of a car in some makeshift manner. It got away, fell on the interstate in front of a following car, and people died. The fine upstanding non-citizens just kept going. Sadly for them, the labels were still attached to the appliance, and after it was traced back to the store, they weren't hard to track down

Bob...unrelated question...would you please chime in on the thread below? I believe you've had considerable experience airbrushing Molotow refill material, and know what (or if) it can be cleared with for protection. Thanks (hope to see you at another ACME meeting if I ever get over there again).

And that statement is why I usually conceal the fact that I have a truck.

You would be correct. Small point of historical reference...the majority of "plastic" consumer items since the introduction of polystyrene has already been HIPS, but there wasn't an acronym for everything and its dog back then. And the word "styrene" is, in popular (non-scientific) usage, the shortened version of polystyrene that most folks use to denote it, in an effort to save typing a few more letters, or pronouncing a few more syllables. Many consumer products in the 1950s and '60s proudly announced on the package (or the instructions) that the contents were "made from the finest high-impact polystyrene"...including many model cars and other models. If you have vintage kits, pull some of them off the shelf and read the labels. You'll most likely see wording similar to the above. High-impact polystyrene is nothing new, and it's been standard fare as the material kits were made of for decades. It's only referring to it as "HIPS" that's fairly recent. When I made the remark above "if it really is HIPS", I was referring to the propensity for some offshore producers to refer to materials as something they're NOT, and as there's often little quality-control when their garbage arrives Stateside, mislabeled materials enter the stream fairly frequently.

Coupla daze bak, I got anudder wun a deez... an anudda won a deese... da ojek beun to make wun a deez... The Foosemobile looks like it's going to have to be de-sectioned just at the beltline, but otherwise seems like what I want to do should work fairly easily.

whining and crying

In general, I find it's becoming more challenging to get really good model-car paint jobs. Combine the cheapening and tinkering with many of the available automotive primer products (rattlecan) and the soft, less-solvent-resistant plastic many manufacturers are palming off on us these days, and you have a recipe for problems, if not outright disaster.. I personally refuse to complete a model if the paint isn't up to my kinda high standards, and whereas only a few years ago (2012) I knew exactly what I needed to do every time to get gorgeous paint, today, it's a never-ending series of surprises...and one large reason I don't finish anything. I haven't had the time recently to experiment to be as SURE that what I use and how I use it will always work, so seeing the methods people who consistently produce top-quality (like Steve Guthmiller) is a great help. But still, everyone has his own specific needs, and what may work perfectly for Steve every time may not be exactly the procedure I need to get my desired result. So...individual experimentation is key. And sometimes, you just have to beat the model and the paint products into submission.

When it was available at auto-parts stores, it was my go-to for many years. A lot of us used it. Recently though, Carquest was bought out by Advance, and Duplicolor replaced PlastiKote in the stores. The PlastiKote stuff available online seems to be a continually-changing formula, and many of us have had such inconsistent results, we've pretty much written it off. The last batch I got was literally unusable for anything but garden tools.

I don't mind at all, sir. These are also most helpful. The object is, after all, to try to come up with the best 1/25-1/24 scale SOHC Ford possible. The more info, the better.