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Ace-Garageguy

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Everything posted by Ace-Garageguy

  1. Here's a thought...electro-luminescent sign experimenters kit made for small scale model trains... http://www.microstru.com/Experimenter-Kits.html
  2. Yup...complete panel with all the gangster bits and a black cabriolet body too...
  3. Ah yes...I remember that one. A real knockout. Not the Batmobile you're referring to, but I have this under construction from a later one...
  4. Picked up this sealed repop for a decent price. A while back I bought a first-issue built-up intending to do an old race-car, but the model was just too nice a survivor to hack up. The repop is molded in the softer gray plastic I've come to dread painting, but we'll see. Picked up one of these too, molded in white... ...and somewhat miraculously, crammed inside the same box was a complete kit of this, molded in black...
  5. Just a word about terminology: that would be a ladder or perimeter frame, part of the body-on-frame type of vehicle construction. A "space frame" is made up of multiple tubes, or tube-section stampings, like this:
  6. You know it started out as the Lincoln Futura car-of-tomorrow concept by Ford, right?
  7. But having them glued really takes the fun out of pushing them around and making vroom vroom noises.
  8. Wow. And all this time, I just thought of him as an overpaid mass-market pimp.
  9. I've built many of these engines. I've never had that problem...and I'm one picky SOB. It's not a scaling issue, though there IS some tolerance stack-up on both the heads and the block, and the locating pins can be too high, all of which makes a less-than-careful assembly look that way, but as I always deck the block, and surface the heads, it's easily corrected to look just like it's supposed to (I have a red Ivo engine and a chrome parts-pack version on the bench as I write this, and checked carefully to verify the accuracy of my statement).
  10. The BIG question (pun intended) is whether or not the diecast in question is ACTUALLY 1/24 scale, or some off-the-wall-pick-a-number-and-call-it-1/24 krap like Jada and a few others have put out. 1/24 is 1/24, and if both your plastic model and your diecast model are done correctly in 1/24, the parts from each will look right swapped on to the other.
  11. Here's a little piece of photography trivia (I used to be a pretty serious photog in the pre-digital age). Color film was supplied with different dyes depending on the kind of light it was going to be exposed in. There was "daylight" and "tungsten" (for the old filament-type bulbs) and some other oddball ones. "Tungsten" film used to photograph something in daylight would produce a distinct cool blue cast to the entire image. I'd just about bet the farm that's what we're seeing here...or the dyes have simply faded over time, which is also quite common.
  12. I guess you didn't get the memo. Photobucket suspended access to photos on all the free accounts some months back unless the account holders coughed up $400 per year. The low-cost paid accounts will soon follow.
  13. Great to hear from you Nie. Glad you're enjoying your stay.
  14. Like you said...having fun. There's no need to feel any guilt about having kits you may never get to. I have quite a few. But who gets hurt? Nobody. And you have them right there if the mood strikes you to pull one off the shelf and work on it. There have been a few folks on here who have tried to make the ones who "collect" more than they "build" feel bad about it, but choo know what? It's no different than some guys building scale-correct and historically-accurate models, and some guys enjoying the simple pleasure of assembling a kit with no embellishments whatsoever. Enjoy the hobby as you see fit to enjoy it. And on the '48 Ford thing...I've been made aware of some things as a result of this hobby that I never really noticed much otherwise. There are subjects I've seen here that, like you, I developed a new interest in. Learning and change is good. Keeps your mind young and fluid.
  15. And lookit those skinny plug wires...
  16. Which leads me to one of my other favorite soapboxes...there's a wide spread belief in business "expert" circles today that a good manager can manage any type of business without actually knowing anything technical about the business. And it's 100% bull. The marginal shop I described above is a case in point. The owner-manager knows so little technically about the product his company is supposed to deliver that he can't identify competence, and accepts the rampant excuse-making the sub-par performers make to justify their sloppy work and appalling number of comebacks. Since I've been working with the company, the quality of cars coming in has fallen off markedly, but management doesn't seem to notice, and if they DO, I'm sure they blame it on "market trends" or "fickle customers" or "the uncertain economy", rather than placing the blame squarely where it belongs: incompetent people doing half-assed work. Word gets around...quick. It's been my own experience over the past almost 50 years that, if you consistently provide high-quality in ANYTHING you offer in business, with no excuses, you will have a following of loyal customers or clients who appreciate and understand just what they're getting, and how it's rare. It's easy to find a shop that can't, or the world wouldn't be full of people complaining that "every time I get my car worked on I get ripped off and it still doesn't work right". It's a lot harder to find a shop that can, and the quality-minded end of the market will remember that. People may whine and complain about high prices for competent workmanship, or the fact that it usually takes longer to do something right than to fake it, but inevitably, you will keep and grow the only customer base worth having if you do GOOD work every time. But in order for any endeavor to consistently produce quality product, all the personnel need to be capable of and motivated to produce it. If management has so little technical knowledge of the product that they can't tell the difference between competence and hack-jobs, the enterprise is doomed.
  17. Double cool. I've only ever seen this thing two ways...either a horrible gluebomb, or an unbuilt kit. You've done a fine job, especially considering it's a resto.
  18. Oh boy...I envy a man who has real heat in his house.
  19. Textspeak for "let me know". I'm an old fossil and even I know that.
  20. It may interest you to know that much of the enabling technology for driverless cars that has seen significant development in recent years was originally developed under a DARPA-funded program that focused on an off-road course intended to roughly simulate terrain that might be encountered in military operations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Wherever there's a line-of-sight to 3 GPS satellites, most current-developmental systems should be capable of working...in a rough sort of way...but there's a wide array of additional sensors that tell the car's brain where it is relative to other vehicles, the road, buildings, obstructions, and pedestrians, plus its own speed, the relative speeds of other vehicles in the immediate area, their closing rates, weather conditions, traffic conditions, etc. The reason a very rural setting was chosen for the early development was simply to minimize the number factors the car's brain would have to manage simultaneously. I personally don't believe we'll see fully autonomous vehicles until there's at least one more doubling of the capabilities of machine vision and AI in general. AI is already a whole lot smarter than most people realize, but it's still a long way from being able to rival a reasonably competent human vehicle operator in a congested urban environment. And whatever you put on the road, somebody is going to do something stupid. Not reading and understanding the directions with these things can get you killed. And no matter how idiot-proof something appears to be, there's always a bigger idiot just waiting to test the limits. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/business/self-driving-cars.html
  21. The wheels supplied in the Slingster kit are 16". This was a common enough size for recapped slicks in the time period represented by the kit. The Radir catalog chart (link) I posted shows repop 16" slicks currently built for nostalgia racing and restoration to have an overall height (diameter) of 32", but anything in the 30"-32" range would be about right. If you have a digital caliper, this will be about 30 mm to 32 mm in 1/25 scale.
  22. In my mind, the benchmarks for accurate representations of many of the classic V8 production engines are the 50+year-old Revell parts-pack versions. I've had occasion to measure real ones and compare the dimensions (admittedly not ALL dimensions of EVERY engine), and have come up with only trivial errors, way too small to be noticeable in 1/25 (even to an anal-retentive jerk like me). The accuracy even extended to the exhaust-port spacing of the Revell parts-pack Buick nailhead (which is correct, but the port spacing on the nailhead engine in the MIA '29 Ford is not). Your remarks above may very well be the reason why some manufacturers' kits' engines supposedly scaled in 1/25 were identical dimensionally to others labeled 1/24.
  23. From my personal experience and professional knowledge of the principles of engineering involved with steel structures, I'd say you're probably right. Anyone who's ever lived with a body-on-frame vehicle, especially an older one without "boxed" frame rails, will have surely noticed that it sags and twists on a lift, or even if parked with one wheel higher than the other three. This twist...even when frames have an additional X-member...is often so severe that the doors won't open or shut. Ford's "unibody" pickup shell would have countered this lack of torsional rigidity initially, but the thin-gauge sheetmetal it was made from would have lacked sufficient fatigue resistance to have lasted. A typical older pickup frame twists very noticeably just going down a potholed road, with the bed moving relative to the cab. Though this would have been minimized when the "unibody" trucks were new, I would suspect metal fatigue at the junction of the cab and bed would have begun quite soon if the trucks were operated on anything other than smooth pavement.
  24. Yeah, that can be a problem.
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