Ace-Garageguy

Bugger. Procrastinated too long. Oh well.

Those are some fine looking illustrations. Very professional. They look like very well controlled watercolors. I assume water-based markers, water-soluble pencils and you did the blending with a wet brush. Correct?

There's things that can kill you or make life painful everywhere if you aren't careful. I live in the swampy SE USA and a friend of mine here went into anaphylactic shock after being stung multiple times by wasps, probably would have died without medical intervention. We have brown recluse and black widow spiders that have very toxic venom. I once caught a young eastern diamondback rattler in my shop. Lotsa other unpleasant things too. But usually if you don't mess with them, they won't mess with you. They bite when they feel threatened. And if the bugs and snakes don't get you here, the rust, mold and mildew will. Give me the desert any day.

Nice little P-40. Congrats on getting the decal off without damaging the covering tissue.

For the few of you who try to get the period details right on your older hot-rod models, this is an excellent online resource. http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/evolution-of-the-hot-rod-1930-1949.925033/

Same thing happened to me at Barnes and Noble on Monday afternoon. But she was not American. Interesting accent, maybe Brazilian Portuguese.

Just don't ask any recent high-school graduates to make change from a dollar.

I have to agree entirely. I once noticed they were playing something I recognized from another environment where "Christian" music was the norm, recalled the ownership and the fairly recent controversy, and the fact they're not open on Sunday, and happily went about my business of buying art supplies. The store I patronize is well stocked in that area, also has a ton of craft items that are useful for modeling, and not much selection in model-car stuff; the 40% coupon (and I don't even have to show a church card to use it ) is a very welcome saving...usually on things I wouldn't buy otherwise. Until someone in the store actively tries to influence my own spiritual position (or lack thereof), or supports violent acts in the name of religion, I just don't see any issue. I also seem to recall something about "religious freedom" and "free speech" being two of the principles this country was founded on. It might be good to remember those freedoms apply to people we don't necessarily agree with, too. And by the same token, at least as it stands today, anyone has the freedom to shop there or not, or to work there...or not...for whatever reason they may find to be in line with their own way of thinking.

Maybe it's time to beat the stampede out of town...and sell your house before its value plummets. Residents Abandoning Chicago: Is It Following in Detroit’s Footsteps? http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/25/residents-abandoning-chicago-is-it-follo

Walking out the door for a long walk before it gets too friggin' hot. Need to loose the lard I've packed on over the past two years.

Depends on the season, my mood, the time of day, and the subject I'm working on. Instrumental vintage jazz, classical, '50s-'60s rock, big band, club / trance, samba / bossa nova, etc. Usually only instrumental though. Voices break my concentration, interfere with being in the zone.

I mentioned earlier the need for hardening the systems against malicious hacking, and the fact that it's not even really understood fully what it's going to take to do it. System vulnerabilities are rarely all known until well after systems are in operation. You're right. It's a very real problem with potentially deadly consequences and not one that should be taken lightly.

Oh, the humanity.

I enjoy several other aspects of life, and I have several vehicles with automatics...but thanks for the advice.

The catalyst will usually last for several years. It will separate, but can be readily mixed again into a nice red homogeneous liquid, as you note. When it remains 'grainy' after mixing, it's toast. The small plastic tubes often crack and split before the material goes bad. The filler itself is usually good for anywhere from 6 months to a couple of years. A lot depends on how long it was on the shelf before you bought it, how it's stored, and what packaging it's in. I have some 801 in the metal tube that's two years + and still OK if I stir it with a stick prior to use. (The clear 'resin' component will come out of suspension on almost all of the inert-material-filled polyester products), but the same product in the larger plastic container (391) has dried out and become too stiff to use over the same 2-year period. In general, if you can still stir the clear component of the filler back into a nice creamy gray paste, it's good to use. If it's stiff and hard and lumpy, forget it. Some VERY old catalysts I've had have failed to initiate polymerization, but I don't think you'll ever face this particular issue.

If you had spent a large part of your life working with greasy fingers on machines, you'd know that this is pretty much the way things already work, to an extent. It's called OBD II (Onboard Diagnostics) and constantly monitors many of the vehicles mission-critical systems and reports to the operator, through the "check engine" or "service vehicle soon" warning (and will report specifics through the OBD interface port to a suitable reader). The problem is that in real life, inept maintenance often doesn't show up until a system failure is the result. For example, you can have correct fuel pressure (which the sensor reads and relays to the computer) even though a fitting is not torqued correctly. There is no "prediction" (other than statistically) of WHEN that incorrectly torqued fitting will loosen and spray fuel all over hot exhaust manifolds and incinerate the car and its occupants. Failures of vehicle systems due to unknowable poor workmanship (and downright stupid design and material selection) happen constantly every day. There can not possibly be enough sensors ever placed in a vehicle to monitor EVERY DAMM THING. It just doesn't work that way. And electronic systems are NOTORIOUS for failing intermittently, or suddenly, and the onboard diagnostics have no clue as to what the problem is. Spend 20 years under hoods, and you'll know this. Another LARGE part of the problem we see with vehicles of every description from almost every era and every manufacturer is that they were designed by engineers who'd never spent any time with tools, under cars, with barked knuckles. Some "engineered" stuff I see defies belief in its inept stupidity, as do many of the "repairs". It will make you ashamed to be human, and I sometimes cringe when I'm identified as an "engineer". The problem gets worse and worse with every generation of vehicles. Stupid, poorly-thought-out over-complication combined with insane cost cutting, with clean-hands dweebs doing all the design and management without ever having input from highly skilled AND critical mechanics. Of course, you can find a lot more clean little mediocre middle-managers and computer-console "engineers" than you can find competent and articulate mechanics. There's no reason to expect things to change, especially as long as most management types refuse to even acknowledge these problems exist. They build their retard carp, they get their paychecks, they play all day on social media, they neither know or care they're making junk. The consumer sees shiny new things with all kinds of bells and whistles and never thinks beyond that.

Yes, and you have to remember the stuff was invented for and is made for easy body-shop use, where the typical practitioner wouldn't measure anything even if it WAS necessary. It is nothing more than a fine-grained bondo, chemically identical. The original "Bondo" catalyzed polyester filler introduced in 1955 was made to get around the high degree of skill required to work with the lead fillers previously used. There is a wide latitude of mix ratios that will "work" just fine, specifically because it's aimed at 1:1 users who are, let's say, less than precise in their approach to life. But the problems people have with the stuff come from failure to mix the catalyst (and resin if it settles) properly PRIOR TO MIXING THEM TOGETHER, failure to mix the combined components properly, and failure to stay within the mix-ratios that will give acceptable performance A little practice is all anyone needs to get consistent results.

Excellent, and much the same way I use it. The separated "soup" is the actual MEKP component of the catalyst, and it's imperative the tube is thoroughly kneaded prior to dipping out your material, as you note. There actually IS an ideal mix ratio when dealing with this species of polyesters, which in this case is about 1%-1.5% catalyst to resin. Because of the thickeners and inert components, it's difficult to get this ratio consistently in small quantities by measuring...which is why the manufacturers added the colorant to the catalysts. "Light pink" is without doubt the post-mixing target to shoot for. (And there IS a lower threshold of catalyst below which the material will NEVER cure properly).

All well and good, Tom, and it all sounds lovely. One little fact is that I'm more cognizant of the mechanical aspects of machine failure modes, particularly surface vehicles (and ALL of their components), and their "predictability" than probably anyone on this board, and I'm also much more well versed in the realities of Artificial Intelligence and "machine learning" than you could possibly imagine. No brag, just stating fact. It's going to be rather harder to accomplish this on a large scale than the VAST majority of people seem to realize. I'm fully aware of all of the possibilities for failure and mis-communication between various "intelligent" machines in our coming future, and I'm also fully aware of the massive amounts of code and prediction of machine behavior by humans that will be necessary to turn everything INTO code before the fact. The appalling lack of early-on industry-wide standardization in the information-management sector should be a warning that if the need for these systems to talk to each other...which implies they'll need to have EXACTLY the same coded definitions across the board from day one... isn't addressed IMMEDIATELY, we'll end up having the equivalent of Microsoft and Mac (and who knows how many other 'proprietary' self-drive systems) that do essentially the same things, but speak entirely different languages and don't even really think the same way. That will be an intolerable situation, and as little standardization as there exists even in the automotive industry today mechanically (which is a HUGE waste of effort and money that seems to be totally ignored), where is the indicator that things will be any more rational in a self-drive-car world? When I stand back and look at the lack of a coherent energy policy worldwide, which is a perfect indication of humans' inability to work well together on large-scale issues of global importance, even though the root technologies to end our dependence on traditional fossil fuels have existed for far longer than I have, I'm not encouraged that humans will get this right. At least, not for quite a while, if ever. There's also every indication that the self-drive world will be every bit as vulnerable to political posturing and idiot rule-making by inept government intervention as most things are today. You only have to look at the state of the "climate change" controversy to see how people REALLY work together. There is NO DOUBT THE WORLD IS GETTING WARMER. Any fool with access to the internet can find raw data (as in glaciers that were there when I was a child now simply GONE) to PROVE it. But rather than accepting the reality of the situation and saying "OK, it's happening; what do we need to DO about it", there's still an ongoing petty war about WHY it's happening and who should be to blame...or not...instead of a concerted global effort to DEAL with the reality. AI is rather a lot farther along than most people realize too, because of advances in the understanding and modeling of the hierarchical information processing in the human brain and its mathematical simulation that have occurred over the past decade. AI development hit a wall when people were trying to code for every eventuality, a series of "if > then" scenarios that soon became entirely unwieldy. When it became apparent that modeling a thinking machine on our emerging perception of how the human brain assembles concepts and pictures from tiny bits of data was the way to go, and then allowing it to learn based on its experience, everything changed. As of 2012, there were three essentially stand-alone systems that, if integrated, could easily have passed the classic "Turing Test" that is considered to be one proof of true artificial intelligence. I would not be surprised to find that a thinking, self-aware artificial mind exists as I write this. We can only hope that they'll proliferate, and do a better and more efficient and cooperative job of managing our future than we, as a species, have done up until now. I personally don't want to live in an interim self-drive world where, besides being continually on the lookout for sleepy doofy unskilled texting human morons, I'll have to be keeping in the back of my mind the very real possibility of self-drive failures of the vehicles near me. The transition period from the way it is to the way people envision it is going to be a killer.

No need to hit walls. Learn to go around or over them. A good place to begin learning 3D modeling is to download a FREE copy of Google's SketchUp. http://www.sketchup.com/ Much of what you'll learn here will work in other CAD programs, and there are interfaces to take files produced in SU and translate them into STL that 3D printers need. Once you have decent STL files of the parts you want, Shapeways will happily print them out. http://www.shapeways.com/ It's ALL possible with some applied intelligence and effort. A member of my club created the files to print this car body, and Shapeways did the print several years ago. It's 1/24 scale. Cost to print it was about $30.

Glad you feel like building again. I've always been a vintage Fiat fan, particularly the 806 just because of its looks. Started half-azzed looking for one after seeing it built elsewhere on this forum, I believe. Seeing your typical museum-quality results should inspire me to part with more money.

Jus' 'bout my fave-o-right summer cruise toon, since '74. Top down in the '63 Olds, beautiful girl, life was good. Until reality set in.

I pile on the Bondo Professional product. Never any futzing around waiting overnight to cure, no noticeable shrinking, almost no limit to how thick you can put the stuff on. ONLY time I'll use one-part is for tiny imperfections, for which it works a treat (Squadron Green shown here).

Boy...that's quite a lot of gadgetry and complication just to clean your backside. Looks like it even has a blower. And an LCD screen readout too. Man. That's some high-tech carp. Ain't technology grand? (Does it come with an emergency roll in case of power failure?)

I SHOULD have mentioned on this thread that it's Rik Hoving's work. I DID mention that on another thread where I used the image. Anyway, it looks like .040" or so to me.