Ace-Garageguy

Exactly.

Welcome. You have some nice work so far on that little Bantam comp coupe. One of my favorite classes...

Ah yes...real tools as opposed to cheap tools. Quite a difference if you care about what you're doing. While you don't always get what you pay for, you almost always pay for what you get.

Welcome, Jen. Like Bill Geary says, you're well on your way. Being an artist and having a father who's passionate about the work he does in the car biz...pretty cool too.

Good man. 3 more trees to make oxygen and remove CO2, provide shade, privacy, and got yourself some exercise too. Most excellent.

Lotsa folks have said that about sports-car drivers over the years too, especially in the case of the more expensive ones. There might be some truth to it in many cases, as there usually is with stereotypes...but if you're a real enthusiast...not just a poser...and know and use your specialty vehicles for what they're made for...as you obviously do...it gets tiring to hear it repeated endlessly. I've driven a LOT of sports cars over the years, some mine, some not, and the two best "chick magnets" (neither of which were mine) were an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, and a red '57 T-bird. So fellers...if you're having trouble getting noticed by the birds, get yourself one of these. NOTE: Once you get noticed, it's a big help to have something like a personality too.

Sounds like a great way to spend the day.

If there's a HobbyTown near you, they often stock a beginner casting kit with small quantities of the mold-making two-part silicone goo, and the casting two-part urethane goo...for not a lot of money. Just a thought, but it could get you started without having to buy expensive amounts of the materials. You can also get it direct from Alumilite. https://www.alumilite.com/store/p/948-Mini-Casting-Kit.aspx

Actually paying attention and having a clue as to what you're doing is good...and increasingly rare. Two separate auction sellers: One states SPECIFICALLY in the auction text to combine auctions for savings on shipping. Then at checkout, there's a big RED message that says seller has disallowed combined shipping. Got it sorted after several emails. BS. Other one sells several kits for good prices, and even though shipping is a little high, they're still under market. Tried to get a combined invoice, and apparently one kit is "lost" or "sold earlier". Thing is, it's the one I wanted most, and frankly I bought the others because the one I REALLY wanted was such a good deal....so I figured I'd give the guy more money. More BS. And never a word like "sorry for the inconvenience". It's obviously just too hard to get it right in the first place, and too hard to exercise common courtesy afterwards...and I'm the backside orifice for expecting either. So...are these things really worth whining about? No, obviously not...on their own. But they're endemic of the can't read, can't write a sentence, can't spell (or bother to use spellcheck), can't return an email anyway, can't make change, can't find North Korea or England or Arkansas on a map, can't read a map period, can't change a flat, can't understand the most basic science, can't think, and can't say "thank you" or "sorry" brave new world we live in now. Stupid, ignorant, incompetent, and proud of it. It's everywhere.

I favor a .357 magnum with a 12-gauge pump for backup. Crude possibly, but highly effective.

I would respectfully caution you against trying to melt sprue with heat in order to cast parts. The processing temperature of styrene (where it will actually flow) is in the 400-500 deg. F range, MUCH higher than any conventional mold-making polymers like silicone are designed for. Unless you have steel molds, you're probably going to have serious problems. And steel injection-molding dies are heated to allow the molten plastic to flow into detail cavities (under extreme pressure, averaging 15.000 psi.), and then cooled to force it to solidify. These extremely high temperatures (over twice as hot as boiling water) are also dangerous unless you have special equipment and experience.

The postman just dropped off one of these. Though I know next to nothing about big trucks, I had the pleasure of working on and driving one of the real ones back in the mid-1980s, so I kinda had to have it. The truck guys will know that these had a one-piece fiberglass nose, and it's a huge, heavy, expensive part. I did extensive fiberglass reconstruction work on the one that belonged to my business landlord at the time...still cheaper than buying a new nose...and it was a challenge. Only the nose would fit through the rollup door in the shop (which hadn't occurred to me when I volunteered to do the work) and I wanted to leave it bolted to the rest of the truck to hold everything in alignment while I rebuilt it. I ended up working on it with the rear axles literally out in the street, and painted it late one night after building a visqueen tent around the nose to serve as a paint-booth. Driving her was great fun, and ever since, I've kinda envied the guys who make their livings behind the wheel of things like this.

I've been moving towards getting back into model trains, and I've found that locomotives these days can be very expensive, and a lot more sophisticated than 50 or so years back. Well duh. That said, I've also found that there are real deals to be had if you shop carefully...even for state-of-the-art DCC-equipped units. Another thing I've found is that a lot of "broken" equipment and rolling stock can be had very cheaply, as one of the SOPs of the train crowd seems to be to take things apart to "fix" them, lose or scramble most of the pieces, die, and then have the bits auctioned off for pennies by the surviving relatives. I've acquired quite a few vintage classic locomotives recently, cheap, and most with easily-fixed problems. I now have WAY more cool old locos than I ever imagined I could reasonably afford, and it's looking like my first layout will model either a railroad museum, or a servicing / repair / rebuild facility. In the interest of getting some of the worst of the junkers running again, I've been buying motors, gears, trucks etc. as they come up, but only if they're cheap. While internal hardware probably isn't too exciting to most folks here, I LOVE fixing things that were considered junk. Other interesting train acquisitions of late included things like these vintage "craftsman" kits... ... a few new-in-the-box vintage switchers that I snagged for well under market value... ...as well as one of my all-time favorite road engines.

Fine old truck. The wrecker part, if not production, looks to have been at least built by a competent fabrication shop.

Yes, and the OP requested information specifically for a '65 A/FX Dodge, which is what I responded to. Every time.

Wow...seeing is so important, and we tend to take it for granted sometimes. I'm really glad they were able to fix you up. I didn't know you were having cataract problems, so good luck with the rest of the work. Wishing you well.

You lived near the factory, so you could have seen something I never did, but to the best of my recollectory, it was the NSU Sipder, built on the Prinz platform, that had the Wankel (as well as the much larger Ro 80). The Prinz came with a little 2-cylinder early on, and a 4-cylinder inline later. I had a 1200TT for a while over here. A race-car shop I worked with in the '70s inhabited a building that had been an NSU dealership. The attic was full of dust-covered NSU bits that nobody wanted (it was all going to be scrapped) so I hauled them out. In about a container-load of stuff, I found two large illuminated dealership signs, an entire front clip (!), lotsa sheetmetal including doors and quarters, 3 complete crated 4-cylinder engines, and a full set of Ro 80 factory engine tools...including the fixture required to assemble one. I kept one of the engines for a spare for my own car, as well as the factory tools, and found a home for the rest with the NSU owners club (which at the time was somewhere in Michigan, if I recall correctly). Sadly, all the factory tools were stolen, along with all the rest of my tools, in a break-in in 1977. I imagine they ended up in a dumpster, or pawned for $10.

1965 NHRA rule book, page 6, section 1A. FACTORY EXPERIMENTAL (FX) begins. page 7 "ROLL BAR: Refer to ROLL BARS, SAFETY REGULATIONS" (which begin on page 32) page 36 (SAFETY REGULATIONS) ROLL BARS begins page 37: "Minimum requirements are 1 1/2-inch inside diameter steel tubing, with 1/8-inch wall thickness (1 3/4-inch outside diameter)............ ........Minimum requirements for cage type roll structure are 1 5/8-inch outside diameter steel tubing, with 1/8-inch minimum wall thickness..." Feel free to read the rules: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2006u57wp7sqpxt/eZJPZZcJdZ?preview=1965_Drag_Rules.pdf

It's just a 351C, and there are a few around with Windsors, even one with a Hemi. The real problem is getting a correct-looking ZF gearbox.

Absolutely not. More something along these lines...smoothed, de-chromed, maybe a very mild top-chop, Minilite wheels...still very Jag but avoiding the necessity of sourcing all the missing (and expensive) trim bits, and the costly replating of what's there. Though we have the original 3.8 engine, we also have a wrecked XJ-R with a good engine / gearbox that might go in the thing. I recently bought two XJ-6 rear suspension (IRS with inboard discs) assemblies, cheap, and one of them might end up in this thing. Selling off the original parts to a serious restorer can contribute additional funds to the project too. Every little bit helps...but we're still in the just-started-talking-about-it phase. The car's been in limbo for years, and it's probably never going to be worth a straight restoration. It's just missing too much stuff. At the same time, the body-chassis is remarkably solid, rust-free.

I LOVE to see old models brought back, and this is moving along nicely. That steering rack is pretty slick, too. Nice work.

None of my email accounts have been hacked...yet...but I routinely get stuff sent to me from the names of friends and family who HAVE been hacked. I always check the originating address before opening anything, and when it's in Belarus or Nigeria, it's a pretty good bet it's not really from my cousin. EDIT: And speakin' of which...I just got a bogus "notification" from one of my email accounts that someone has my password and tried to sign in somewhere else. Highly unlikely, as the "notification" has the other account name wrong. I'd like to personally cut a hacker up into little pieces and feed him to rats.

A far more worthwhile use for that fine copper armature winding wire would be as detail material. Like everybody has said, those little motors are jokes, probably intended to start the whole migration away from skilled work in this country because it's too hard, too frustrating...and so it would be for the vast majority of kids. I've rarely seen a motorized kit that worked for more than a few minutes anyway. I had one of those "diving" ITC subs. First time out, dive she did, once, to the bottom of the pool...as the shaft seals on the props and dive-planes were nothing more than Vaseline. Probably why they didn't say "diving and surfacing" sub on the box. When I salvaged her and got her dried out, I tried every engineering trick I could think of (as a kid with zero practical experience making things) to get those shafts to seal. She sank and sank and sank...and I finally gave up and let her be a shelf model. She'd spin the props and wave her rudders and dive planes happily, so long as no actual water was involved. I built a lot of motorized models back then, and MOST of them came with factory-assembled stamped metal things with fiber bearings...bearings which were almost invariably loose and caused the motors to shriek in agony, or allowed the armatures to jam. And if they DID run OK, the tiny brushes would fail in about an hour...which was probably just as well considering the attention span of most kids. I'd tend to think the chances of getting your little wind-it-yourself motor to spin are pretty good if, as an adult, you carefully follow the instructions. But I'd think it's also kinda pointless. I mean, they make tiny motors and lightweight batteries these days for things that actually FLY. Swapping in a powerplant from a cheap drone would make more sense...unless it's just the challenge of getting that awful kit motor to work...which I can fully understand. Good luck.

Nice haul.