CDW

Love the model, Chris. The Italian aircraft subject matter is a favorite as well.

I've come to the end of the road with this one and am calling it finished. Decided against more clear coats and am satisfied as it is. Thanks once again for following along, your likes, your comments, and very interesting discussion. It was lots of fun. See you again soon!

But I have only found one dealer in the USA who carry the Cobra Motors paints right now. More European based as are the actual colors.

Ammo by Mig have come out with a new line of paints for autos called, Cobra Motors Paints. The paints are acrylic flat colors in a large variety of color and shade. They are designed to be used as a base coat with a gloss clear coat. They have their own clear lacquer and a hardener too. The purple color in the middle is what I will use on the Wild Dream. It’s metallic. I’ll use my own clear coat already on hand.

Don't need that toothpick now. Here is the folding body prop mechanism in the raised position. Then here it is in the folded down position.

It all gets foggy over time. There have been so many changes and variations.

As I recall, AA represented blown nitro as opposed to A, blown gas, but I could be mistaken.

Not a lot of decals. I like it that way. I believe under the old NHRA scheme, A/A represented blown gas altered. @mtaylor is that the way you recall it, Mark?

I watched my big brother and his friends do it all the time at our house. All of them had street rods when I grew up. That was my education on mechanics. They would let the kid hand around as long as I kept my mouth shut and helped out when they asked me to help.

There is no one garage scene that's going to fit all eras. Just ain't gonna happen. As it turns out, I love model cars from the 1920's all the way up through current era. Not going to build four or five garage displays to fit all occasions. I think the best approach may be to build as modern then we could pretend an old car is inside a modern garage, but a new car inside an old garage would be weird.

On the particular instance I referred to, it turned out to be a bad condenser. Until then, I never had one act like that. Usually when they failed, you got no spark at all, not a misfire.

I don’t think I showed a photo of the cassis with the seat installed.

My granddaughter has an Infinity G37. It developed a misfire, so we called our mobile mechanic to come out and have a look about it. He plugged in his tablet/laptop where he could make a complete diagnosis on the spot, then repair the problem. I watched him shut down each cylinder one at a time at the touch of the screen, and as he did I was thinking to myself, imagine if we could have done all that back then...I remember piddling around most all night on the roadside trying to diagnose a misfire on my '64 Chevy Nova back in 1979.

We'll just convert that server tower into a locker, or something similar. No biggie. It's 2023 and there wouldn't be no stinkin' server tower in my garage. 😀

It’s time to build a garage for these 1:25 scale model cars. About 20 years ago I bought these Fujimi diorama kits but never built them. Thinking how ridiculous my 1:12 sawhorses look together with 1:25 model cars, decided it’s high time to build these for photos and display. Will start a separate thread to present the build.

The first of what will eventually be three clear coats went down today. With tomorrow being Thanksgiving, will give this coat a couple of days to cure before laying down the decals, then two more clear coats following the decals. There are a few more parts to attach but don't want to handle the body until the paint is thoroughly cured.

I agree with you, Kev. It's a fine-looking model.

Put on the orange base coat today. Will give this time to cure before the clear coats to come later. This was a custom orange I mixed more than a year ago when I built a Can Am McLaren M8B and wanted a match for the McLaren paint. I had plenty of it bottled up and thought it looked good for the Orange Crate. Nothing I had on hand looked the right shade of orange straight from the bottle. Can't recall my formula for this mix as primarily, I did it by eye not by specific ratios of colors.

Bracket races! I couldn't recall the name of them for nothing. Thanks for jogging my memory! Bracket racing was a blast. So much fun. But consistency was the key. You had to run your best qualifying time consistently. Whoever did that eventually became the "top eliminator" that evening. Rail dragsters ran against completely stock cars.

My brother raced NHRA sanctioned matches in the early '60's with his '55 Chevy, competing in a stock class. I don't recall him even wearing a helmet back then. He took top of his class in a number of matches including the state championships. My old boss ran in one of the stock classes in his '62 Biscayne 409. He held some stock records for a period of time with that car. After he wore out that 409, he became a Mopar man and bought a Dodge with a Hemi. It was another stock class demon. The early 60's to mid 70's were golden years for drag racing IMO. I have so many good memories of drag racing on the weekends. Our local track held handicap races, so you could "run what you brung" on Fridays. For those who were never involved in these types of drag races, the following is a basic summary of how it worked: All competitors ran three qualifying races. Your best time of the three became your ceiling. The lights were timed so that each pair of competitors were evenly matched. In other words, if my best quarter mile time was 14.0 seconds, and my competitor's best time was 11.0, my light flashed green 3 seconds before his light turned green. If by some chance you clocked a faster time than your qualifying time in a match, you were automatically disqualified and thus eliminated. These matchups continued until there was a top dog at the end. They were so much fun because everyone could compete even if you were driving the family station wagon.

Thanks OC

PS: If I was the driver of the 1:1 race car, I would be a bit nervous about having that transmission and driveshaft between my legs like that without a shield between them and me. I never had a desire to be a steer.

I thought I was going to have a more difficult time getting the exhaust headers to fit, but it was easier than I imagined. There's one little issue that some minor filing and sanding can correct where the belly pan meets the chassis. The exhaust pipe on number one and number five cylinders rub against the pan causing it to pinch a bit. This is why so many dry fits are needed. Sometimes you can't tell where problems lie until you get further along in the build. If you're wondering why, I decided to go ahead and use the custom raised white letter slicks after all. I had already enlarged the inside of a tire to make the wheel fit the tire, so it didn't make sense to not do the same to the other slick and use the pair. Otherwise, they would have gone to waste. I'll just throw the stock pair of slicks in a large box I have that is slap full of tires from many, many model car kits I've built or scrapped over the years. The toothpick is used to prop up the body as this is the way the model will be displayed when it's finished. This was all that frame and engine assemblies can easily be seen. The finished model has a folding prop mechanism that holds the body in a raised position and folds down if you want to display it closed. Same for the radiator shroud and bonnet. She's a hinged folder. The mechanical body props won't go on until the model is painted and finished. They are fairly delicate and would easily break if mishandled.

Beautiful, Alan. How much do you estimate this castle will weigh once it's all finished? What are the finished dimensions of it?

Thanks Ken. I'll look him up.