Ace-Garageguy

How about cabbage? Hairy? Roofing paper? Those terms are as relevant to that particular model as "pro", so why not?

Good looking model. More pix please...

I believe the problem is the "pro built" moniker in the title. Otherwise, it's not a bad price for a rebuilder...but WHY call something "pro" when it's obviously a hack-job? Sad thing is, I see real cars come in every day where a client has paid many hundreds or many thousands of $$ for work of a similar caliber...and somebody was proud of it. Actual recognizable "professional" quality is a disappearing concept. Must be the participation-award-effect again. Barely mediocre is the new excellent.

The Meteor had a 22 foot wingspan in reality, so if it's in about the same scale as the Lindberg GeeBee, the kit wingspan will be around 10 1/8". I'll be very interested to know, as I've been looking at getting one as well.

I've got part 2 almost ready to ship, but it needs some editing I just haven't had time to do. Working most of seven days a week lately, trying to finish up a 1:1 custom Jag project that's dragging out long. I'll probably have the next Ala Kart segment up around Labor Day.

Yes, beautiful, both. The P3/4 cars rank in my all time top 5 favorite race car designs. I wonder how these exquisitely styled cars would do in wind-tunnel testing compared with some of the recent purposeful-looking but often ugly CFD-designed prototypes. My guess is pretty well.

Thanks.

Definitive, researched answer. I just checked. Your chrome trans is indeed, definitely, positively from the Revell parts-pack Cadillac "354" engine (it's in quotes because there was NO Caddy first-gen OHV V8 in that displacement). It is chrome. The tooling is very similar to the Orange Crate / SWC Willys / Anglia / Thames gearboxes, but it's not identical. As an aside, I have an extensive collection of the old Revell parts-pack kits. Some of the earlier ones that came packaged with a 'vacuum-packed' clear plastic skin over the sprue and card, with no box, have yellowed considerably. The chrome is still in excellent condition other than the fact it's yellow-gold.

Correct. The original Revell '41 Stone-Woods-Cook Willys kit with the opening doors (and subsequent reissues of the tool) is the one. The engine and gearbox also appeared in the Revell Thames (Anglia van), but none were plated to the best of my remembry. The SWC engine was blown, while the Anglia engines ran Hilborn fuel injection. The blocks, heads, gearboxes and some other parts were the same. I'm pretty sure the plated one you have is from one of the old Revell parts-pack engine kits. It's slightly different from the red one, I believe, though it's hard to be certain in your photo. The parts-pack engines were all plated...though it's probably not "gold", but just yellowed chrome. Anyway, they're both old GM Hydramatics, which the B&M HydroStick was built from.

Not hard to use the existing frame to build a gasser, and lotsa gassers got built with transverse front leaf springs, though parallel semi-elliptical is a little more common under a heavy car. To go with parallel leaf springs, you need to remove the big heavy crossmember and put in lighter tubular ones, and then it's quite easy to make up leaf springs from styrene strip. .020" X about 1/8" will give you an acceptable looking spring leaf, and the ends will be stout enough to support the model. Something like this modified Corvette. The monoleaf spring is made of the .020 styrene, with simple ends made of 1/8" round rod. Brackets have been fabbed on the chassis for the ends of the spring, and an axle is being made of 1/8" tubing too. Assembled. The piece of channel is a temporary place-holder / fixture. Or...this is the AMT '41 Plymouth, which had independent front suspension. It's been replaced with a straight-axle and spring unit from the parts box. The '57 Ford frame esponds to the same treatment... Just measure as you go, to get the ride height you want with the axle you have or want to use. It's really not hard. Or...here are some transverse leaf springs under straight-axle gassers. Just be sure to use some kind or radius rods to keep it square with the frame (the springs do that job on the parallel setup).

As said above, she may be in a "simple" build style, but she's an outstanding model, a real beauty, and a testament to how good a "simple" build can look with applied skill and care. Your work may inspire me to try something along these lines. Though I'm fully aware it takes time to achieve results like this, it also avoids the scale-re-engineering rabbit holes most of my models seem to fall into. Beautiful, beautiful model.

Excellent. For 1/25 scale, correct-scale plug wires will have an outside diameter in the .011" to .016" range. The thinnest are older-car factory wires, the fattest being recent racing-engine wires. You can find spools of colored beading wire at craft stores that will make perfect scale wires (though not always in the color you might want), cheap. Many people will also tell you "scale" wires look too small. I disagree. I'm used to looking at real engines day-in, day-out, and the proportions you get using scale-diameter wire look correct to my eye...because they are.

I can relate. I have a little old Kaw 600 set up as a cafe racer that I parked back in about '97 because the idiot density was getting so high around here. Hell, last time I drove my old Geo convertible here (before it went to AZ. to live as an airport car), some dizzy bidge in an Excursion almost ran over me, quite literally. I could see her yammering on the phone as she obliviously started squeezing me and my little car into the guard rail. No amount of beep-beeps, flashing lights, or increasingly rabid screaming on my part could rouse her lard-encrusted consciousness. Many thanks to the anonymous fella in the truck behind her who slowed enough to create a space for me to dip in between them. I'm about to put my 550 Spyder replica back on the road, and I've already bought a set of air horns. I think maybe diesel train horns might be a good idea too...and strobes aimed to the rear.

Sorry. It was my perhaps misunderstanding of the ban on "politics" as referring to debates between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, etc. Mentioning generic "politics", as well as greed and short-sightedness as the real reasons that our (global) energy policy isn't a policy at all, but a mess of fools all running in different directions, was intended to shed some light on a subject that many people take for granted (while assuming that there's somebody smart doing something about it) or simply don't know anything about. I am suitably chastised.

Yes, same stuff. Though the terms often get used interchangeably and sometimes misused, LNG refers to "liquefied natural gas", whereas LPG is "liquefied petroleum gas", and over here, LPG often refers to propane specifically (and also butane and isobutane, or mixtures of these). LPG is most easily described as a purified form of natural gas (which can be a mixture of a lot of different hydrocarbons including methane, propane, butane, pentane and ethane) or as a byproduct of oil refining. Propane dual-fuel conversions were popular in Europe (and to a lesser degree in the USA) for some time after WW II due to the high cost of gasoline. An old client of mine way back (in the 1970s) brought in a number of gasoline fuel-injected Mercedes that had been setup to run dual-fuel in Europe...which is how I became interested in the technology. Interestingly, the buses at Yellowstone National Park are said to have been powered by propane in the 1930s, and have been restored and upgraded to true contemporary dual-fuel specifications. LPG isn't often encountered on private road vehicles over here, but it's very popular for vehicles that operate indoors (warehouses, large aircraft hangars, etc.) because the exhaust is much less noxious than what gasoline and diesel fueled engines produce. Both LNG and LPG have seen significant road use by fleet operators (taxis, police departments, school systems etc.) because of its low relative price and its kindness to engines. Gasoline engines converted to run on gaseous fuels show a loss of power due to the fuel's lower specific energy content, but engines optimized to run on gaseous fuels can utilize the higher effective "octane" rating and run higher compression ratios or supercharging, along with more ignition advance, to regain any lost power. Some European-designed diesels designed specifically to run on gaseous petroleum fuels and hydrogen actually make MORE power than their oil-fired counterparts, while producing much cleaner exhaust gasses.

You do NOT want to use "blue" tape for solvent-based paints, specifically because you'll get adhesive transfer just as you have. GREEN 3M masking tape works perfectly for large areas, as it's designed to work with REAL car paint. Tamiya or 3M for fine work is the way to go, as mentioned above. Two commercial products, "GOO GONE" and "GOOF OFF", should remove the residue, as should plain old garden variety mineral-spirits or paint thinner. BUT TEST WHATEVER YOU USE FIRST ON AN INCONSPICUOUS AREA.

My thoughts exactly. Nice life, Dennis.

No lie...I saw a lovely young lass the other morning in the lane next to me doing her makeup, talking on the phone (not hands free) and drinking a cup of coffee while driving. I think she had breakfast in there too (and an open laptop on the passenger seat) but when the car behind her got on his horn after she sat through all of the left-turn light (and her signal was NOT flashing), I believe she dumped the coffee in her lap. Time to sue McDonald's because it was hot.

Nobody is talking about a "filling station". The scenario I referred to is for a home installation. Obviously I didn't make that clear. Said installation produces sufficient fuel for the "average" commute in a reasonably fuel efficient car. Honda, as I said earlier, has already demonstrated a workable pilot program. Most of the time, I drive a gas hog pickup, but my commute is only 4 miles each way. One gallon equivalent of fuel per day would fulfill my commuting needs nicely. If I drove a vehicle that got only 25 MPG, just TWO gallons would be sufficient for a 50-mile round trip. The numbers work. And for those who probably don't know this...when I was a member of the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition (paying $1500 dues per year for the privilege)...there was on the market a home-installed device called FuelMaker. It was a compressor that hooked into a residential natural gas line, and would safely and efficiently refuel a NAT GAS vehicle overnight. At the time, before the electric utilities began stupidly burning NAT GAS to alleviate peak demand requirements, the price of the energy-equivalent of a gallon of gasoline was about 64 CENTS per gallon. Gasoline was hovering around $1.85 then, if I recall correctly. The mission of the NGVC was to make the world aware of the whole natural gas vehicle fuel thing, but they mostly had conventions for industry insiders, not really very much else (though the honchos paid themselves VERY well and traveled the world in first-class style) and the public and government remained blissfully unaware you could even RUN a car on NAT GAS. The infrastructure was already in place to refuel a large number of vehicles daily with NAT GAS, it was cheaper and WAY cleaner than gasoline, engines last a LOT longer burning the stuff, the vehicle conversions were relatively inexpensive and the payback time was relatively short due to NAT GAS's low price. But what happened? Not a damm thing. Politics, slow moving minds and greed dammned the whole movement before it really got started. Hydrogen made-on-the-roof-at-home is only a short hop from where we'd be if we'd phased in NAT GAS in large numbers, instead of the quantum leap necessary to go from liquid-petro-fueled vehicles to total electric. I've been watching and dealing with stupidity, foot-dragging and know-nothing naysayers for decades, which fully explains my lack of patience with the way things are, and the way they're headed. Idiots are driving the bus, and I want off.

You allude to two very important points. The first is that human population is increasing at a rate that is unsustainable, and is the real cause of a lot, if not all, of humanity's current problems. Global population has more than doubled in just MY lifetime. And the folks who are breeding the fastest are NOT the ones who are in a position to do anything to solve the problems human numbers are causing. The second is that there's no global energy initiative, but instead a lot of disparate groups pulling in different directions, and many of them are politicizing issues that need to be addressed by the best technical minds on the planet rather than being used as levers to gain political power. There's also the problem of rabid mismanagement by the capital sector. One of the companies over here that had developed a brilliant and sustainable growth model for installing local solar generating stations let the wheeler-dealer MBA set get carried away, began playing the fast-and-loose "business" game (rather than focusing on the tech and hardware that need to be fully developed and debugged) trying to gobble up other companies and expand as fast as possible, and in the process burned through $24 BILLION of investment money prior to filing for bankruptcy (leaving NOTHING for the shareholders). The Idiocracy is here. Welcome to the future.

Best laugh I've had all week.

X2. However, in general, it usually takes a significant other who thinks a little outside the box and is secure enough in herself to allow YOU to do what YOU enjoy (for a hobby) with no criticism or whining, and somebody who has known men who have actual physical hobbies (drinking beer, watching sports and playing video games don't count). It also helps if SHE'S creative and has some kind of actual physical interest too, like photography, painting, etc. Trying to not make a mess is good, kinda like putting the seat down, and simply shows respect for the other party and the joint living space. I met a very attractive younger woman not too long ago who I thought might have some potential, but when she visited my house for the first time and asked, kinda sneeringly "why do you have so many cars that don't run?" (all in various stages of storage, restoration or repair...and all quite valuable AND significant parts of my life), it was obvious from that instant that she'd just never get the old car thing, probably not the model car thing either. Next. Life's WAY too short to have to kiss azz to get some.

Unfortunately, the Revell piece noted is ugly (in my not-so-humble opinion...and this is NOT my model...) The MCG piece noted above is a fair rendition of this, and to my eye, is MUCH better looking... One of my own favorites for scratchbashing comes from this vintage kit... ...and scales up very well for '20s and ''30s cars... Another nice nose comes in this kit... ...and also works well on other bodies...