Ace-Garageguy

Pretty cool. As a kid in both Cincinnati and Baltimore, I watched a lot of Baltimore and Ohio trains. Rode on a few too.

Testors "metallics" look like bass-boat or dune-buggy flake that was embedded in the clear resin gelcoat on a fiberglass part...not very realistic in 1/25 scale unless you're doing kustom kars, wild dragsters, etc. Many other "metallics" have flakes that are still well oversized for scale work too. Duplicolor rattlecan touchup paints that many of us use also usually have flakes that are too large when the colors are labeled "metallic", but flakes tend to be smaller when the colors are called "mica" or "pearl" (which is what I believe Bubba may have been referring to). Tamiya has colors with smaller flake as well, and some other manufacturers do too. Alclad has a couple of very fine metallic colors, for example. The green below is an example of a Duplicolor "mica" color. It's still really too large flake to be scale-correct, but the flakes would pretty much disappear completely if they WERE scale-correct.

ONE OF THE BEST WIRE-WHEEL TUTORIALS EVER...RIGHT HERE:

This short documentary about the last days of steam on the railroads is one of the best things I've ever seen...

I don't now.

Hmmmmm.....avatars now appear square if you're NOT signed in, round if you ARE.

BIG NEWS !!! The store-brand ziplock sandwich bags I favor have been redesigned to be big enough to actually accommodate a sandwich !!! Will wonders never cease ???

Yuck. Why would anyone want to emulate Fazepuke? Shortly after I posted 40 minutes ago, they were square again. Now they're round again. Must be A-line drift. Seriously, PLEASE do square. Information in avatars gets lost around the edges of round.

Weren't the avatars square last night, or am I seeing first-hand evidence of the Mandela Effect?

Nice new look. Functionality seems to be just fine. Thanks.

NO. That's a heavily textured product for exactly what it says...UNDERCOATING.

Ummmm...yeah they were, and they started in 1895...which was about the time they started modifying cars too. https://www.bustle.com/articles/110248-the-history-of-breast-implants-enlargement-from-cobra-venom-to-silicone-gel

How many of you fellers ever saw the LAST PRODUCTION generation of the Pantera on the original main body shell and chassis? Styled by the same Marcello Gandini who did Lambo's Countach and Diablo, the chassis is heavily modified with a tubular rear subframe and tubular suspension control arms, rather than the stampings under the original cars. Roughly 40 were built, only 4 as targas.

Remarkably, the underside of the black model shown above has the structural elements in more-or-less the right places, though the hat-section stiffeners should be much deeper. Still, it's not a terrible place to start should some enterprising modeler wish to make an accurate representation of the chassis. This is under the front of the car, facing rear. Below is another helpful shot of a bare chassis on a spit... The stock engine bay looks like this from above, facing forward. The 4 ears sticking up are the trans mounts, and the engine mounts sit on the triangular areas just forward of the wheel-houses.

Yeah...we had some hackers here as well who'd do that sort of thing. It takes a LOT of care to splice two unibody car clips together, primarily because the rockers are essentially tubes-within-tubes, and it's difficult to get inside the outer skins to connect the inner ones. You have to understand and respect the structure as-designed, and most body shops just don't. What you'll usually see is slabs of 1/8" plate "welded" over the seams to "reinforce" them. Yeah...right. There was a lot of this kind of "rebuilding" of late-model totals going on until one of them broke in half...in Buckhead, the ritziest part of town...and the media storm and lawsuits brought the practice to an end.

Yeah, "back in the day" the Pantera was one of the real cars I specialized in (because the exotic-car shops wouldn't work on them due to their plebeian engines, and the Ford guys couldn't work on them...other than the engines). This is the correct ride height for an early small-bumper car before they got slightly jacked up for headlight and later bumper height requirements. The big-bumper cars sat like this from the dealer (orange car below) but most knowledgeable owners almost immediately had the spring spacers removed and the suspension re-aligned to get them back down where they didn't look like Jeeps... And most of the cars with riveted flares sat lower as well, because part of the flare install includes removing the lips of the steel fenders, resulting in more clearance for wider tires.

Except for the 4X4 stance.

Most attractive photographs.

EDIT: I certainly do NOT pretend to be an expert (or even well versed) in this field. The most impressive scan-to-print model products I've seen to date are the military figures produced by Reedoak. Real people in period costume were scanned in high-res (but I do NOT know the particulars of the process). EDIT: Unfortunately, the PizzBucket debacle has resulted in a lot of the images on various scanning / printing forums to disappear forever.

If you don't like it and can neither identify nor fix what you don't like about it, this is always an option for the skill-free crowd...

The Earth is flat too. Really.

You'll find that most 3D printed model products available at the moment are designed in CAD, and converted to STL for printing. If you can do your own CAD work, you're golden. Shapeways will still print piecework for reasonable money. But a hobby-priced scanner with sufficient resolution to do what you want doesn't yet exist (to the best of my knowledge today). Making molds and casting parts is easy if you can follow relatively simple directions, but reproducing complex shapes with undercuts and allowing for draft-angles that will allow parts to come out of the mold takes some thought, and may require disassembly and modification of the original. Here's some of what's available in low-end scanners. https://pinshape.com/blog/the-11-best-3d-scanners-on-the-market/ There are also shops in some areas that offer scanneng and printing services, like this... https://www.paliproto.com/index.php/services

Looks like the styling department still had some of whatever they were smoking when they came up with this...