Ace-Garageguy

Nice work. This is the first one of these I've seen finished. Interesting mods. Those 4 velocity stacks kinda put me in mind of an Offy.

In several photos of the finished models, I'm seeing what looks to me like a disturbing flat-spot and / or jerky curvature in the roof. Anybody else notice this? The real car has a very smooth curve. (Photos copied from Porscheman's thread here: http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/topic/114807-revells-new-48-ford-coupe/#comment-1655652 )

Here ya' go. http://vs57.y-block.info/vr57oiling.htm

I'm confused. First you say you don't know who owns the rights to the Cheetah and then you say you contacted Shelby. Are you saying Shelby owns the rights to the Cheetah now? As of 2007, this company was doing full-scale repops, so you'd think THEY would own the rights. http://www.billthomascheetah.com/

X2. And many MANY happy returns !

Excellent and on-point post from mikemodeler. Thank you.

For what it's worth, red pigment "bleed" was a real problem when color-changing over red enamel in the early days of this writer's car-painting adventures, and one of the reasons "sealers" were developed in the first place. Different pigments react differently to various solvents, too.

Helped, maybe saved, a big 'ol turtle today. Like this. Weekends I often go for long morning walks in a nearby office / industrial complex that has lots of trees, birds, and several ponds. There are a couple of year-round families of Canada geese, and it's good to see the little ones grow up during the summer. Today as I was heading home, passing one of the ponds, I noticed what looked like a big turtle sitting in the gutter next to the curb. It wasn't moving and the sun was really beating down at around noon. It hadn't been there on my way out, and I assume it was trying to cross from the woods on the eastern side of the street to the pond on the west, got overheated on the black tarmac, and didn't have the strength to make it over the 7" curb. Judging from the size, shell shape and markings, i guess it was a female yellow-bellied slider or an Eastern river cooter. Pretty big turtle, about a foot long, and without the typical snapping-turtle snout. Anyway, I picked it up and took it to a shady muddy spot on the water's edge. It sat there for a minute or three and I was a little concerned I may have been too late, but it suddenly put its legs out and dashed into the water...as much as a turtle can dash, anyway.

Stance, proportions, presence, feel...just about perfect. Very tasty.

Oversimplifying the problem to make a point is simply avoiding the issues, and it's thinking like that that got us where we are today. To go farther with your example and inject some of the rest of the reality of the situation, in the US market, the $5-to-produce widget will sell for, lets say, $10 (twice what it costs to produce). But YOU WILL NOT GET THE CHINESE VERSION FOR $.70. You'll get it for maybe $6. Enough of a difference in price to get morons to ignore quality and shop price only, while still leaving plenty of do-nothing middlemen markup. I've already stated that the typical Chinese-made model car would cost only approximately 15% more (based on extensive research and LONG conversations with people in the US injection molding industries) if it were made here and could avoid many of the scale and accuracy issues we're all familiar with. Only 15% more. Think about it.

This is from someone INSIDE the parts industry who understands the problem. See? Idiot management has its head firmly up the idea that ONLY price matters.

It's just stupid, and you can't ever fix stupid. As I used in the example previously, a $25 item that lasts one season is much MORE EXPENSIVE than a $100 item that last years, but stupid sees nothing but the price on the item today. Still, the low costs of offshore work forces aren't exactly passed on the the American consumer. Factors like production delays due to misunderstandings and distance (like we're always hearing about from the model companies), shipping costs, and a variety of other things (like pushing up the markup for sub-standard products so the middlemen make more profit on the carp) drive the prices the US consumer buys up to the point where a lean, mean US product COULD compete...if the effort were put forth to make it happen. But all the "experts" naysay the possibility of making cost-competitive products in the US because that's what everyone else says. Nothing ever changes, really. People are sheep, and they willingly follow along without ever bucking the system...for the most part. They'll give you 1,000 reasons why something won't work without ever really trying to MAKE it work. That's why, if it hadn't been for occasional tenacious visionaries who saw possibilities and WORKED to make them realities, we wouldn't have airplanes or electric light (among many other things we now take for granted). Everyone, all the "experts", KNEW they were impossible too. With the high rate of failures and downright defective offshore parts the company I'm working with now is experiencing, and my constant harping on how poor quality parts are costing us much more money than anyone saves on carp parts by having to replace the stuff for free when it fails (cutting into billable labor time significantly), we are ONE company that's actively searching out good quality parts as a way TO IMPROVE OUR BOTTOM LINE. THE HARD PART NOW IS FINDING ANY PARTS THAT ARE ACTUALLY WORTH ANYTHING.

Nice dragon.

To Alan Barton...good to have some input from someone else who's familiar with the real cars. It always helps to have information gathered from first-hand experience.

There's both the "chicken and egg" effect and the "snowball effect" to blame for the current state of affairs. The beginning was when some little bean-counters realized they could get a bonus for cutting costs by going to other countries (that paid their workers a LOT less than any Americans could work for) to have manufacturing done. Management thought it was a good idea, because they could sell at a slightly reduced price and pay themselves and upper management a LOT more money. Greed, pure and simple. Nobody was content to make a decent profit while paying a fair wage to US workers. Nope, they had to make FAT profits and end employment for the workers in THIS country who would have done the jobs. The chicken-and-egg phase...which came first? Management blamed offshore-sourcing on the American public not being willing to pay for US-made quality goods, but the truth is that the prices of offshore-made carp goods undercut the prices of quality goods to an extent that people who are simply too stupid to know the difference between carp and good stuff buy carp 'cause it's cheaper. Example: buy a $100 pair of hiking boots and a $25 pair of hiking boots. The good ones will last for years, the cheap ones will disintegrate and split in one season. Which is really the cheaper deal? If you say the $25 pair, you're the kind of moron consumer who's driving the problem. Rather than seeing the inherent and illogical long-term fallacy of implementing this stupid policy, management everywhere embarked on a pathetic monkey-see, monkey-do course of action...like they usually do. OMG...we HAVE to do what everybody else is doing to keep up. OMG OMG. When the manufacturing jobs began disappearing in this country, and with them a large chunk of the middle class that used to make the stuff and got paid enough to buy decent stuff, the problem began to compound and feed on itself, because there were fewer and fewer well-paid middle-class Americans who could AFFORD to buy good stuff. This is where we are now...the snowball-effect stage. Short-sighted maximize-today's-profit-screw-tomorrow management has done this to us, and nobody had the nads to stand up and call it like it is. Every time YOU buy some cheap junk, YOU make it worse. But a large and scary part of the problem is that a good deal of what USED to be American manufacturing expertise and capability has simply evaporated. Getting it back is going to be a pretty tough act. What to help rebuild the American economy? Don't buy carp from companies that cut American workers out of work. (Speaking of which, I'm working on an article about the US plastic-injection-molding industry. I've been in talks with several companies in THIS country who are capable of doing what we're told only the Chinese can do now. While initially it looks like kits produced here would probably cost around 15% more than what we're getting from China from all the manufacturers today, it also looks like with some tuning of the system the costs to have completely US-made models could be easily competitive. Frankly, I'd happily pay 15% more RIGHT NOW to have all my kits made here. Just in case you're number-challenged, that would make the typical $25 kit cost $28.75.)

Assuming that EVERY red styrene formulation is identical and that they will all bleed or not bleed equally is probably a bad idea, as are most assumptions. Until every red styrene has been tested with identical prep and coating materials under controlled and repeatable conditions, there is simply NO BASIS to make a blanket statement either way.

The aftermarket parts situation in this country is really getting to be pretty bad. I deal with vintage cars and hot-rods almost exclusively now, and most EVERYTHING that's sourced from "overseas" or "south of the border" is garbage, pure and simple. In the last few months, I've had brake master cylinders come in with the seals installed backwards. The wrong threads on "OEM replacement" hydraulic parts. Electric fuel pumps that failed in a week. Mechanical fuel pump diaphragms that dissolve in gasoline. Carburetor kits missing half the parts, and others that were labeled right but the contents were just flat wrong. Radiators that had the brackets in the wrong places. "Custom fit" disc-brake kits that required entire re-engineering (but were supposed to be "bolt on"). Temperature sending units that weren't even close to the temp range they were supposedly spec'd for. Water pumps that started leaking in a week. And on and on and on and on. It's frustrating enough getting cars in that have had nothing but jacklegs and chimps working on them most of their lives and having to undo all the "expert" repairs all these morons have done over the years, but now we're having to re-do our OWN work because the "offshore" absolute crapp that's getting pushed off on the American consumer is trash. Either that or we have to re-engineer stuff that just doesn't fit or work as delivered. There's something wrong. I've been doing this stuff off and on for over 40 years, and I've NEVER experienced such a high rate of JUST PLAIN JUNK getting sold as replacement parts ever before.

Last coupla times I drove the old truck, she pegged the temp gauge within a few miles of the house. Let her cool down last time, limped her back home. Got lucky...all it was was a failed stuck-closed thermostat. Most-excellent-Yankee-just-for-you Chinese top-of-the-line parts-store "OEM QUALITY" replacement, less than 3 years old. Who knows how long this new one will last? I'm thrilled that it wasn't something major like a blown head gasket, but still...3 years for a thermostat? They used to last 10 to 20 when they were made here. And the "OEM quality" lifetime-guarantee Mexican-rebuilt water pump is starting to leak too.

I lived just inland of the Jersey shore when I was a kid. We'd go to the beach a lot, and I remember when the wind was off the land, the biting flies on the beach would drive you crazy. Of course, when the wind was off the ocean it was heaven. We had mosquitoes inland, for sure. I used to love the smell of the spray from the trucks that came around in the summer, and I'd ride my bike as close to the billowing white clouds of the stuff as I could get. Probably why I have three eyes and 15 toes now.

For shaping aluminum ,you may find that real tungsten-carbide burrs avoid the loading common to grinding. It will depend on the alloy you're working with to a degree too. Lube 'em and they'll last just about forever. Also, you MAY find that an occasional lube with a bar of paraffin wax or even bar soap will keep your saw blades and grinder discs from loading so fast. A squirt of WD-40 may also work. I keep a bar of soap on my band-saw for just such operations. Works a treat, saves blades. There are specific lubes made that do the same thing, but try the soap trick. You may be pleasantly surprised. And fully cured, properly mixed resin should dust when hit with a grinder, not gum up the stone or disc. Be sure to wear a respirator when grinding the stuff, too.

The real one... The "reproduction"...

They both sound like a lot of fun, Scott...though I don't remember seeing either one.

My final kid-bike was one of these. At 26", pretty tall for my legs at the time; I could barely ride it, but was expected to "grow into it". I eventually ended up stripping off all the extraneous stuff...lights, fenders, chain-guard and tank, fitting a generator and better lights, and painting it black. My first hot-rod.

I assume YOU strip it and do your parting-line removal and whatever repairs are necessary first, correct? What kind of repair material can they plate over, and what grit sanding is required in worked areas?

Mmmmmm...If I was getting fresh-from-the-garden vegetables rather than modeling, I'd consider it time really well spent.