Ace-Garageguy

Great model to go with a great story.

Maybe that's my problem. This year's finished project counter:

It's a rainy Sunday, but I worked big-cars most of the day yesterday so I can work on the models today with a clear conscience. Cold and miserable outside, nice and warm inside. View out the windows is beautiful fall colors, big ol' pot of chili cooking down on the stove, vintage jazz playing through the best speakers on the planet. Some days, life is pretty damm fine. I think I'll make a fresh pot of strong black coffee.

When the bench gets too deep in tools and parts to find anything within about 10 seconds, I'll clean up and put everything non-essential away. Some aspects of building make very little mess...like plumbing and wiring. Some things make a helluva mess, like heavy mods and bodywork. Just like real cars.

There's a lot to be said for knowing when to quit, especially when you're at the top of your game. If it's a game that demands 100%, if your heart and head aren't in it 100%, walk away.

If I have the money to buy what I want when I want it, I buy it. If I don't have the money, I wait. Then if I still want it when I have the money, I buy it. It's just not that difficult.

Wow. Just wow. I didn't know about that one. Thanks for the heads-up. Wow.

Exactly. I've been in the biz for over 40 years, and that's exactly what's going on. There is NO way to stop it, and if you paint over it without stripping, it will just break up and come off quite soon. Only cure is to strip it and repaint correctly. Sorry, but there just is no easy way out of this one.

NOTE: Though technically this is a drag-car and should possibly go in the "Drag Racing" section, I've posted it here because it addresses several of the many issues confronting builders of this particular kit (which can be built many different ways, but ALL of them will be affected by this kit's shortcomings). NOTE 2: I strive for technical and historical accuracy with most of my work. Though this class of car was one of my favorites in the way-back-when, there weren't a lot of them running in my part of the world at the time. Information on the web about these things is sketchy at best, so if anyone sees me doing something wrong, PLEASE feel free to mention it. I appreciate input from people who know what they're talking about. The build that follows is based on the fairly recent release of this kit... ...which I bought entirely because of the box-art. I'd wanted to do an old early-to-mid-'60s modified-sports (MSP) drag car for some time, and this AMT kit looked like a likely starting point for something along these lines (below). Look close and you'll see this thing has a gasser stance, but WAY more engine setback, and also appears to be a one-piece clone body (no door seams). This is in keeping with the MSP rules, which allowed 25% engine setback (defined as the distance from the front axle centerline to the first spark plug hole, as a percentage of wheelbase). True gassers could only run a 10% engine setback, and were built under more restrictive rules generally. The MSP class was never very big (though it was one of my favorites) and ended up getting lumped in with the "altered" class eventually, which was quite similar in specification...other than the bodies. When I actually OPENED the box, to say I was disappointed is an understatement. Though there are some neat parts in it (and the decals look GREAT), the body is really kinda poor, and the chassis is the typical old AMT blobular style with molded-in everything. The "gasser" parts are not well done either (I was hoping for something much better), so I decided to hack it into what I wanted while using up some other 50-year-old parts in the bargain. The first problem is the nose. The white body on the left is from the SITM kit, with ridiculously undersized headlights. The shape and profile of the front of the hood is also entirely wrong. Compare it to the red body, which is the old AMT '59 Corvette (Reggie Jackson version in this case). While the red '59 still isn't right, it's a lot closer than the SITM version. Next big problem is the chassis. On the left is the SITM unit. Wrong frame-rail design, stuff molded in, etc. Far right is the blue chassis from the Revell Miss Deal Studebaker funny car kit. It's obviously C1 Corvette...which I hadn't realized until this point...but Tim Boyd had used this chassis under something similar some time back, so I opted to use a glooey earlier MPC C1 chassis, in the center. I had an extra AMT '59 upper nose floating around from another project's leftovers, so it got loosely grafted to the front of the hacked-off SITM body, all on the old gluebomb chassis. I used the SITM firewall and some strip stock to mock up and jig the chassis in position with the rails parallel to the rockers, at the right height relative to the body. I found a mystery Ford 9" with some slicks, decided to use the lift bars from the Miss Deal kit, and mocked up a straight axle in the front. All mocked-up with the engine in about the right place, etc.

Probably not, but memory-seats for driver changes might be a good idea.

I seriously doubt most hipsters give a rat's rear about any kind of racing, much less high-powered, exotic sports-car prototypes. My guess is that the target for this marketing ploy is old farts like me who have enough money to buy one of the production cars (the money angle also leaves hipsters out) and who will understand what an achievement it would be to make a respectable showing at LeMans. Kicking some Euro tail with this thing would make a lot of geezers smile, I'm sure. Hipsters? Well, maybe if it ran on kale.

The design of these cars is very highly reliant on CFD (computational fluid dynamics) which, vastly oversimplified, is computer simulated wind-tunnel testing. If both teams are using the same or similar CFD programs (and there just aren't that many state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line CFD software packages to pick from), for the same set of basic parameters, the computer is going to come up with very similar solutions. That means the cars will look a lot alike...just like Can-Am cars had visual similarities because they were all based on the knowledge of aerodynamics of the period. No magic. That's just how it works.

Really looking forward to seeing her in all her glory. I had to stop holding my breath when I fell off the chair, but I'm still waiting...

Hmmmmm....

I will gladly delete all of my comments regarding "gassers" and replace them with smiley-faces if it will help to get the animosity quelled.

I noticed you haven't posted lately, but I checked to see that you had been online occasionally, so I assumed you were still with us. Glad to hear you're OK.

Hmmm. I guess you didn't read the title of the thread after you posted it. 67 GASSER 'Vette. A GASSER is a type of drag-racing car. Comments were relevant to the topic indicated by the title of the thread. If you had posted a title saying something like "Gasser-style street freak", we wouldn't be having a problem. Street-freaks don't get built to any standards or rules. Gassers DO. MY sincere apology for not being able to mind-read into the topic title that said "GASSER" that it wasn't a GASSER. NO DISRESPECT of you or your project was ever intended by anyone, nor was there any attempt to move the thread off-topic. This is an interesting project, and I look forward to seeing whatever direction you ultimately go with it. But if you're gonna call something a "porcupine", don't be surprised if you get comments about porcupines...even if it's not posted in the porcupine section of the board.

It's good to see the current thinking in race-car aerodynamics interpreted to yield a car that's quite handsome, unlike some of the earlier attempts. I hope it's very successful.

Nice to hear people are still spending some money in real stores. Hope your strong start continues.

I'll be following this one. The '66-'67 442 ranks as another of my favorite cars of the era, and I'm sure you'll do a fine job with it. I've been curious about how good or bad that particular kit is, too.

Never miss a chance to take a shot at old guys. Of course, a lot of the younger ones would be SOL if they lived on a planet where the general populace was expected to be able to get somewhere without talking GPS, write a coherent sentence, perform simple arithmetic, or make change from a dollar.

I personally find that around 75 to 80 F and humidity of 45% or lower to be about optimum for no-surprises results. Remarkably, we've had a really dry summer and fall so far in my neck of the woods this year...not at all as horribly humid as it usually is here. When I was painting real cars, we always had a hygrometer in the shop and would tailor things like retarders (for lacquer) or reducer and hardener "speeds" to give us consistent results no matter what the weather was doing...within reason. In extremely hot and humid weather, I've had to go into the shop in the middle of the night to lay down decent urethane clears with no danger of solvent-popping. You can't easily adjust most modeling paint products to maintain that sweet-spot, and controlling humidity is a bugger too. Even if you have a dehumidifier in your paint room, soon as you turn on the exhaust fan, you'll be sucking moist outside air into the room through every crack and crevice.

It's a good looking car in its own right, and of course it's your model, and you can build anything your heart desires. But to me, the inspiration car would be a lot more attractive and just plain mean looking if it had a real gasser stance. My only point is that to those of us who were into gassers and hung out a drag strips when they were real and not pretend, the nose-high stance makes us cringe. I always like your work, and I'm sure we'll all enjoy seeing whatever you decide to do with this.

1) I'll bet you $100 that if you put an angle-finder on the rocker panel of the car above, it won't be anywhere near as nose-high as the "inspiration" vehicle. 2) The problem is that people who have never seen REAL in-period gassers at rest and launching assume the way-nose-up attitude is how they sit normally. Wrong. The nose comes up at launch...WAY up...and "nostalgia" cars and models mimic the stupid-stance because they interpreted the photos of launch-mode incorrectly. The photo immediately above obviously has the front suspension unloaded (obvious if you know what you're looking at, anyway). There's no sidewall bulge on the front tire, and it appears to be almost coming off the ground. The wrinkle pattern in the slick indicates acceleration, too.This is "launch-mode". This comes up all the time, and for some reason, people want to argue that the cars all sat way nose-high. Nope. Granted, the noses come up at launch, and some cars sat nose-high...but most sanctioning bodies required the cars to sit level at rest. Look it up. NHRA also set a specific 24" height limit from the ground to the crankshaft centerline. Of course, what do I know?

Please don't put the nose pointed way up in the air. Real in-period gassers that were actually raced under sanctioning-body rules did NOT look like that, and it's only the uninformed "nostalgia" builders who seem to want to perpetuate the fallacy of that stance. Otherwise...good looking project, and I'll look forward to updates.