Ace-Garageguy

That's pretty cool. Start 'em early. Cute kid. Looks like he's really into it too.

I got paid for all of my last 30 days billings, and after expenses and overhead, there's still a little left to bank. Not much, but enough to make working feel just a tad less like slavery...which it has for several years now. Whoopee. It's your state, your lawn and your water, but I'm kinda surprised everyone in Az. hasn't switched to sustainable xeriscaping in light of the roughly 16 year ongoing drought and the fact that Lake Mead has lately been bouncing off its lowest level since its first filling after the completion of Hoover Dam in the late 1930s. I've been following Arizona's water woes with great interest, as I'm in the planning stages of moving out there (after having worked in the state off and on over several years). It's my understanding that Lake Mead is the primary water supply for Phoenix. Seems like the responsible thing to do for residents out there would be to trade green grass for gravel and native plants as is done in many other desert communities. At some point, youse guys might wish you had a nice cool glass of water instead of a green patch of yard.

Some shots of the Packard plant above, the Continental Motors plant below.

American Industry: Almost gone, along with the values that once made this a great nation. Photo credit (above): FarzinPhoto

I searched the videos and came across a name I recognized. James Reeve was the guy who ran the crazy ASR Corvair. He did very well racing normal Corvairs too.

LOVE IT.

The Corvair ASR 427 Spyder belonged to the son of the owner of Atlanta Orthodontics, If I remember correctly, and was painted red. I can't remember his name, and web searches have come up blank so far. I used to have tons of film and prints from those days, but they've all gone away over the years.

...AND...a Porsche 908 Spyder won the 1970 CanAm at Road Atlanta here after the big cars all broke. Yes, there is a 1/24 kit. There's also a 917 PA kit in 1/24 (RCM) EDIT: It MAY take combining the 917PA bodywork and a 908-3 chassis to get a close model of the 908 Flounder Tony Dean won with.

OK...a little off topic, but not really by much. and if anybody doesn't like it, I'll make it go away and say 30 hail-MCMs. There's a very little-known car built locally (local to where I am) that wanted to be a CanAm car and might have made it except for a few unfortunate turns of fate. In SCCA club racing in the late '60s- early '70s, ASR (A-sports racing) was the top class, pretty much run-whatcha-brung. The class was mostly "old" CanAm cars, and one well-known club racer usually had last season's cars. An enterprising private entrant built a Corvair convertible with a big-block Chevy in the back seat (mid-engined of course) and managed to qualify it (same guy had the Corvair-powered Myers Manx that was the unbeatable slalom car in the region). The only time I ever saw it run, it looked pretty fast...shortly before it launched the flywheel, if I remember correctly. Seeing an old Corvair running with a gaggle of CanAm cars was quite a treat if you tend to root for the underdog,.. It's a stretch, but the car could maybe possibly have qualified for a CanAm event towards the rear of the pack if the project had continued. Might be a fun one to have on the shelf sitting next to a McLaren and a 917.

Correct. You win a rubber duck. The engine in that kit and in its cousins like the the Buttera T is pathetically underscaled. IT IS NOT CORRECT AT ALL. It's WAY UNDER SIZED and looks ridiculous to anyone who is familiar with what a 1/25 smallblock Ford engine should look like. Try making the engine bay fit a correctly-scaled engine. We do it on real cars all the time.

Thanks fer the innerest, fellers. I'm thinking old-school car, probably a 4-71 blown flathead this time. Works with the narrow no-name piecrust recap slicks and early-style Palamides / American solid mags on the rear, though the front wheel / tire combo needs to be changed for narrower bias-ply tires and (?) wheels.

Ah yes, the mockup phase. By far the most fun part of the hobby for me.

This AM Mclaren M8B is in Autoworld's livery

That's my story and I'm sticking to it...or maybe sharpened rebar punji sticks to hold up the poor little plants? Hmmmm...great idea.

Thanks again for the interest in this thing. Bob, this one is supposed to be a streetable car, and keep the "traditional" look on non-stretched rails. From that standpoint, the front-driven blower setup wouldn't work. It's just too long to go in the available engine bay. I've been picking up odds and ends of 1/8 stuff for several tears as it's become available, and I found a set of American mags for the rear (not the rear rims in the photo above) and much wider slicks. The wide slicks really make me want to do a blown car now...and they'd be silly overkill on a naturally aspirated car anyway. So...if I can fit the top-blown rig under the hood with the width-of-frame channel job (the blower WILL fit if it's not channeled), that's the way we'll go. If not, it's back to narrower slicks and three 2-barrels.

I agree with this thought entirely. Though I have no interest in playing the game and personally think it's a stupid waste of time, it's up to the individual's sense of taking responsibility for his or her actions, 24-7. Cars and guns are potentially deadly too...and don't anybody dare to try outlaw them for "our own protection". The problem isn't that there are possible distractions in the world. The problem is that people make poor choices about living from minute to minute. Somebody in this great land needs to stand up and remind people to think before they act, and to try to act like responsible adults. This simple concept seems to have been forgotten, and putting it out there as important could solve a LOT of problems. That said, I DO think it would make a lot of sense to disable the screens on smart-phones when they are in cars that are in gear. The tech would be EASY to implement, and it would simply remove the apparently irresistible temptation to text and use the net while driving.

Only two on the verboten list at this time, and both were grail kits that I got probably about 6 or 7 years back. One is a first-issue Ala Kart, 100% complete, never molested, still smells like a new kit inside. It's to replace one I had as a kid, and it's kinda like free time travel. The other one is one I NEVER had but always wanted...the old Aurora '34 Ford double kit, again virgin and unmolested. It's not really that great a pair of models, lotsa scaling problems, but I like it. I have builders of both kits too, so if the desire strikes to hack one up, I'm covered.

Just a note on the nailheads...the suggested one in the Tony Nancy kit is basically the excellent Revell parts-pack engine from 50+ years ago. It's very well scaled. Unfortunately, if you want to use the headers from the NEW nailhead engine in the Revell '29 kit on the Tony Nancy nailhead you'll have a little problem. The Revell crew somehow got the exhaust port spacing wrong on the new engine, so the exhaust primaries don't line up exactly with the ports on the old parts-pack or Tony Nancy nailheads. We've been all through this, and even measured real engines to verify the information. It's not hugely noticeable unless you're very familiar with the real engines. And in all honesty, most of the parts from BOTH engines will interchange quite easily. If you want to correct it, it's not really very hard either. All you have to do to make the NEW headers fit the OLD engine is to take a small section out of the center of the headers. Be sure to pin it for strength if you do. I did it to this set to fit them to the ancient parts-pack heads I elected to install on the new engine (because I wanted to use the stock-style water pump and timing cover that are very well done in the Revell '29 roadster, but I wanted accurate-looking headers too). If the header port-spacing doesn't bother you, you can use the new engine (that fits the incorrect headers) and adapt the Tony Nancy blower manifold and blower drive parts. OR, you can put the heads that fit the new headers on the Tony Nancy bottom end. Lots of ways to skin this particular cat, depending on how much a stickler for accuracy you are.

Cool backstory. She has a very convincing rode-hard-&-put-up-wet street-race look, too. Nice ! (I'm sure you know...in real life, a smallblock Ford is just about the perfect engine to swap into an old Z-car. Better swap than a Chebby, by far. )

See, here's the thing...in real life, I HAVE to stay on pretty much one project all the way to completion, or at least through to the end of my part of it, which is usually when the build becomes a running-driving-living-breathing car. The last one was almost two years. It's part of what I love to do, but it gets a little stifling sometimes. Sure, there's creative work every day, lots of technical problem solving, but a lot of the functional guts of the things aren't much fun to look at. Honestly, I'd really rather be designing cars and having somebody else build them, and models let me indulge my design fantasies. Starting model projects where I get a visual-creative-outlet-fix is I think the only thing that keeps me relatively sane. Actually finishing them sometimes seems too much like real work, but I DO come back to all of them...eventually.

Thanks for the interest. I stopped after the pretty awful crazing problem on the hood, but several careful coats of PlastiKote scratch-filler primer have got it saved. I need to do some tests with the stuff on the undersides of some of the kit parts, scuffed like I did the body, to make sire it's not too hot for this particular bare plastic.

Thanks for the interest, gentlemen. Not a lot has happened, because I was waiting to figure out just exactly what I want to stuff under the hood. I'd like to do a blown car, but I didn't know what would fit and frankly, I was just too damm lazy to measure and scale up from a little car. So...I scored this. All kinds of goodies for a smallblock Chebby and now I can start fiddling the fit...