Ace-Garageguy

Bugger. I'm going to be in Az. the week before that...but I can't stretch the trip out that long. Damm damm damm. All I really need is at least one set (or 3) of their "medium duty truck tires and rims". I'd happily pay a generous premium if somebody could grab me a set or several...if any are available.

Should be a good choice too. It's the longish cellulose fibers that give certain types of paper their strength and flexibility, especially when supported by a matrix of some rigid material (superglue or epoxy or polyester resin) Interesting related historical fact...during WW II, Britain didn't have a lot of aluminum to make airplanes. As an experiment to find a viable replacement, a Supermarine Spitfire fuselage was constructed with parts made from linen cloth (also cellulose fiber) saturated with phenolic resin (think old-school brown circuit boards with a visible weave pattern in them). Though the plastic fuselage never flew (to the best of my knowledge) many Spits were delivered with plastic seats made with the same material, and these paved the way for the composite materials and related construction techniques we know in aircraft and race-cars today.

And I'll bet you more than one person bought a Suburban because if they were impervious to molten lava, they must be pretty much indestructible otherwise.

VERY nice!!

Last time I was in Europe and the UK, it seemed almost all of the available rental cars had manual gearboxes. Fine by me, but many Americans I encountered over there weren't too happy about it...which struck me as pretty funny.

I missed that part. Perhaps you could direct us to it. Or possibly, do you mean the reference to fact that the producers cared so little for technical accuracy that they portrayed nitrous oxide as an explosive? That's not old men screaming at clouds, that's just calling out stupid when it's stupid. And there's plenty of just plain stupid in this series. A reasonably smart YOUNG man could recognize it too. But any stupid-bashing done by a geezer here is somehow always turned into youth-bashing, and then the personal insults inevitably start.

Shouldn't require somebody in the "construction trade" to answer this one. I've been around garages and shops all my life, and it's really entirely up to you what you want to depict. Shops behind houses were / are usually built with standard dimensional lumber. 10 foot and 12 foot 2X4s were certainly available during the time period you mention. Taller is more expensive, naturally, so if cost is a consideration (to your supposed garage owner) go shorter. I've seen plenty of 8-foot ceilinged home shops, and plenty with 16 foot ceilings where the guy had a lift. If you intend to do a "storage loft", remember that your floor joists will need to be heavier than what would be required to support nothing but a sheetrock ceiling. My last house was built in 1969. It had a stick-built 2-car attached garage with plenty of headroom for a lift...but the framing was not strong enough to support a loft.

I got the dryer-sheet idea from somebody else, and tried it when I ran out of my tissue-thin real fiberglass material. As with any repair of this type, the thickness of the final laminate needs to be taken into consideration...on real parts or scale parts.

Used dryer sheet material works very well too.

It's YOUR day off, YOUR life, so do what YOU want to when YOU have the ability to choose. There are times I feel like working on the real cars, times I feel like driving pointlessly, times I feel like working on the little cars, times I feel like hiking for miles...don't allow doing the things you love and enjoy to make you feel guilty.

WARNING: This post contains sarcasm, and may not be appropriate material for some readers who are easily offended or see everything as being about themselves, particularly those who see griping about creeping societal ineptness in general to be only the province of past-it old men. Just another one of the vanishing "irrelevant" skills...like being able to write a coherent sentence in English or make change from a dollar. What a great time to be alive. Nobody has to know how to do much of anything. Brave New World meets Idiocracy.

I'm entirely aware of the differences, but the similarities are this (which was the point of my earlier post)...hysterical idiot panic hoarding and price-gouging are the same, no matter what the cause. OMG OMG OMG...run around in circles and buy every one we can lay our hands on...OMG OMG OMG...and then jack the prices WAY up to screw the other panic buyers who think the sky is falling but were late to the party. I can't understand why anyone would pay the stupid money some people are asking. There are many ways to build a '30 Ford coupe. This kit is NOT the only way to do it.

Here's another one...starting bid 99 cents. http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Revell-Special-Edition-1930-Ford-Model-A-Coupe-Mint-Sealed-/162441360775?hash=item25d2427587:g:gDcAAOSw32lY0waw

How soon we forget...

Sure is. Wow.

The Farcical and the Fatuous.

Cool cool cool. Seriously cool. Probably way beyond cool. I'm in.

I've been stocking up on aftermarket bits when they come up cheap, or when I happen to connect with a favorite vendor at a show. Last two times I saw Replicas and Miniatures, I bought a lot of stuff I'd wanted for a long time but hadn't got around to ordering, and some things I didn't even know he made that looked really useful. Same with some Historic Racing Miniature bits, etc. I probably buy more now, as I put off buying bunches of stuff from Modelhaus...and then one day they were gone forever.

I agree. Chris gave the idea everything it was lacking and more. I'd done the initial mockup and got stuck on where to go with it, tried all sorts of windshields, swoopy curved ones, veed ones like Hallock and DuVall, everything I could think of, and nothing rocked my socks. Chris' ideas made it pop. This is one of those rare things I see that make me think a full-scale version ought to be built, and I'm working towards that goal as I write this. But the model WILL happen, if nothing other than to help sell the idea to somebody with deep enough pockets to finance it. Stay tuned.

Looks like a fun place to visit...and to work.

Just sold for $725.

Cute little bugger.

Hmmmm. In my 3rd post above I mentioned the necessity of using sulfur-free clay if you plan to make silicone molds of your work. As I said, good luck. It's very enjoyable to make something entirely from your own imagination, and the soft clays are acceptable to develop sculptural skills if you haven't done much of this stuff before. The soft clays do handle and finish very differently from the real "industrial design" product, so just keep that in mind. I'm sure many folks here would be interested to see your experiments and practice results, so be sure to share your experiences. One more thing about the hard clays...if you keep them free of contaminants, they can be recycled almost indefinitely. I'm still using clay I bought well over 20 years ago.

I'm glad I stocked up on them when they were cheap, after the first feeding frenzy had died down, but before the tooling went MIA.