Egilman

Whenever I was doing a mountainous terrain, I always affixed a wire screen over the cardboard/foam base shape, same technique as plastering a wall or stucco applied to a brickface on an outside wall... (chicken wire works well and is what holds the plaster to the base shape) With that, the plastering comes easy, you mix it the consistency of thick caking mud and the first coat just covers the screen... It's to fill in the spaces between the screen and base material.. Allow it to fully harden... (couple of days, don't worry about the finish texture this is just the first coat) Any cracking should take place here and is easily filled in by the next coats of plaster... The second coat should be a slight bit thinner than the initial mud coat, a gooey mud that will stand in piles... with this you skim the previous surface smoothing out the shapes to what you envisioned and filling in any gaps or cracks... If your going to use any rock face molds, this is where you attach them using the gooey plaster as the glue in the same technique as tiling a wall or floor.... When it is completely dry, then you think about texturing, you will have a completely rough matte surface, in your basic finished shapes, that will take any paint or texture application you might have a desire to try directly on it's surface using simple water glues or even the thinned paint itself.... Brush it on or spray it on... Yes it will soak into the plaster, this is what you want for good sound adhesion and color depth.... I would suggest making a small mountainous shape out of cardboard or foam, cover it with chicken wire and try it as an experiment, make yourself a little rocky mountain.... (maybe add a few trees and bushes in the cracks and crannies along the way) It's really easy... It is so easy, that once you have done it you will never forget how....

Difficult subject. very well done... Nice job Chris... It's the difficult ones that are most impressive.... And this one impresses...

A Beautiful rendition of a forgotten piece of Hot Rod history, and the trips down memories lane my friend.... Well done... VERY well done....

/A stands for altered, slash, type class/Altered... It's where gas/fuel dragsters went after '56... Consider it the unlimited class for dragsters... Anything goes class... Prior to this all Gas, Alcohol & Nitro dragsters ran based upon their body type classifications, Hot Roadster, Fuel Coupé, and Fuel Sedan... It is where some moderate alteration to the basic car was allowed... Moving the engine to a different location, altering the wheelbase, chopping and channeling made the car at least 25% different from a stock configuration... Essentially you could do anything you wanted to and fit the altered classification... Couldn't do this in the Gasser class, the car had to be basically a stock frame/body Originally there were three classes of cars, A, B & C which were weight classes based upon Cu In... A was a car that weighed roughly 7 lbs per Cu displacement... B and C were lower weight classes as well.... AA, BB & CC was the same thing except for blown engine cars... Altered's were essentially stock gas, alcohol, or nitromethane-class cars with parts removed or changed, making them ineligible for the previous classes... They were also known as the "poor mans dragster" You had A, B & C classes and AA, BB & CC for the blown engined cars... This was before 1957 when the NHRA blew it all up by banning Nitromethane in all classes as a fuel as just too dangerous for the hardware... They moved nitro towards the newly created class of Funnies, (eventually Funny Cars) and Rail Dragsters and away from the common everyman drag classes.... AHRA kept nitro in the fuel class but introduced TFE, Top Fuel Eliminator to the class to kinda balance the competition... The independent drag strips filled the gap by creating the whole class called Altereds.... Look up the U.S. Fuel and Gas Championship at Famoso Raceway in March 1959.... The first drag championship for Altereds.... (wasn't sanctioned by either NHRA or AHRA, but the altered's had to go somewhere so they created their own championship) Bob Hansen won the first Top Fuel Eliminator (TFE) in his A/HR, with a speed of 136 mph (219 km/h). All this was before funny cars became a thing.... Back in those days you would see class designations like FC, HR & FD... (Fuel Coupe, Hot Roadster & Fuel Dragster) in NHRA & AHRA... in the independents you had A/A, B/A & C/A with AA/A, BB/A and CC/A for the superchargers.... after banning Nitromethane in all street/stock classes, NHRA moved nitro towards the newly created class of Funnies, (eventually Funny Cars) and Rail Dragsters and away from the common everyman drag classes.... AHRA kept nitro in the fuel class but introduced TFE, Top Fuel Eliminator to the class to kinda balance the competition... The independent drag strips filled the gap by creating the whole new class called Altereds.... (you would see classes designated like Supercharged A fuel altereds, or AA/FAs for short, or stuff like B/Econo Altered for racing in Competition Eliminator... (it got real class crazy there for a while) It was up to the individual sanctioning body, (or race track) to inspect and decide what class your car would race in.... There were so many different classifications based upon opinion that some days you were the quickest in class, but come back the next day and you would be classed so you were the slowest in class... It made for a lot of angry car owners... Today they are all encompassed in the eliminator classes and everything falls into an eliminator class... Gassers, Fuel dragsters, Pro Street etc etc.... Funny Cars are a separate class as is Top Fuel... it makes a lot more sense today and is a lot fairer this way...

Same here, I got my start on my Uncle's '38 rat rod....

Agree, an absolute truism... BUT... I've seen a lot of very cool iron come out of the backyard shanty garage... Those were the days of sky's the limit, a tarp strung between a couple of trees would suffice... {chuckle}

Oh yeah, point ignition... I remember... By that time I was already an HEI advocate, I would convert every old engine I could over to it.... The only way the ignition failed was a bad module or burnt cap....

The chair is fine, '60's modern, it has four feet not five and the protective cover on the back of the seat back covering the hinge... Right in that era.... the Extension yeah might have an '80's feel to it, the '60's version was more skeletonized/utilitarian, but rest assured we had them.... usually 50ft 12-3 stranded with a 4 gang plug in box wired to the end.... Sometimes they were more of a headache than they were worth...

If you remember back, all of us semi-shade tree mechanics had a helper, usually a small screwdriver.. The kind you kept in your shirt pocket... (the ones with the pen clip on the handle) Mine was kept in my tool box in the trunk... We used it for checking spark out of the distributor... and anything else you would need a little driver for... But mainly it was for diagnosing misfire/spark plug issues.... Pull the boot off the plug, insert the driver and hold it next to ground and crank the engine... Locate your misfire within minutes.... Usually a bad plug wire.... Occasionally a badly carboned up plug.... Sometimes a bad distributor cap.... That's why I always had an ignition set in the trunk as well... Just once by the side of the road was enough for me... The stuff they can do today is amazing....

Amen Brother... But if you really wanted to date it, make up a gallon can of "Marvel Mystery Oil" Every shop worth it's salt in the '60's had one, or several sitting on the shelf.... OH, and STP stickers, gotta have the STP..... {chuckle}

Yep the server tower, the crate of wheels and the telephone all date this to the early '90's everything else except the labels are period correct for the 60's.... (of course IMHO) Of course the Server Tower does more to say where this came from than anything else... You wouldn't find a server tower anywhere near the tools or parts if the shop even had one...

The last vehicle I built was a '72 Chevy C-10 long bed stepside, old forest service truck.... Straight six and 5.72 12" rear end.... (but it had the rare turbo 400 long shaft truck tranny) Couldn't locate a 4 bolt main 350 for it (LT-1 motor) so I settled for the next best thing, a CJC motor out of a '69 Impala SW... Everything the LT-1 had except the 4 bolt mains... I had a guy offer me 400.00 for the 2.02 heads alone... (chuckle, they were getting rare about that time) Bored .60 over, polished the intake & heads, didn't shave the heads though I wanted it to run smooth at idle, custom camshaft from the local cam shop, Hooker Tuned Headers, 4" collectors to glass packs to turbo mufflers, (to keep the cops happy) dumping from under side step in front of the rear tires, all nice and tucked away couldn't see or hear anything just driving down the road... The friend who ran the local dyno shop gave me a tip about pulling the Cadillac quadrajet off of it and getting a '67 T-bird quadrajet to put on it, the difference between the two? 400 CFM!!! the Caddy Quad ran at 850 cfm max the T-bird quad ran at 1275 max but only when the secondary's were wide open, which means it didn't load the manifold up until you reached 2/3rds throttle, just before the T-400 detented... {BSEG on that one) Never did get to re-gear the rear end, was going to put 3.72 zoom gears in a posi into it, but ran outta money and then got hurt at work... Would leave everything at the line, didn't matter what it was, get 4 car lengths ahead then squat like a turtle at 92.7 MPH... They would blow right by me halfway down the track.... Turn it around and drive back to the pits and it would sound like typical quiet everyday pickup truck... But when your foot was in it it let you know she was there... Everyone paid attention... AHHH those were the days....

Yep, them, Warner T-10's and narrowed Ford 9" rear ends, Buick dropped front ends as well... (especially the axels) There was a LOT of repurposing of old automotive parts back then... You know, the need for speed is the mother of invention... And the drag strip was all about what an item could do versus what it was designed to do... (then the big money came along and built all the speed shops and custom parts designed to do it better than the old modified parts) Like all other forms of racing, it became a sport of the rich guys.... That's why bracket racing went away, sport racing disappeared, eventually USAC went away as well... When some investor gets the idea that he can make money off of someone's love of tinkering that is when the heart and soul of such goes away, the tinkerer can't compete... That's what makes people like Big Daddy, Shirly, Ed the Snake and Tom the Mongoose, and any number of others the legends they are and always will be... Today anyone can bolt together a 9 second car, they don't need to know why or how it's a 9 second car, just which bolt to tighten and how much... Ruins it for me....

Back in the '80's I was associated with a wrecking yard that supplied merchandise to the rodder's runnin SIR and some of the other local tracks... It was hard to come up with Powerglides and used steel belted conveyer belts.... Powerglides were a cast steel two speed automatic transmission, GM manufactured millions of them and NHRA & AHRA teams burned up most of them... The old asphalt vulcanized rubber steel belted composite conveyer belts, 32" wide were used as tranny shields cause when the tranny let go it was usually the central clutch that would fail... The clutch pressure barrel would explode blowing the tranny case wide open... Then, it would throw the razor sharp clutch and friction plates around the inside of the car... They acted like throwing stars except being thin as a steel ruler and ground sharp as a razor, it was like trying to play frisbee with circular razor blades... Nope, I recovered two cars from SIR that had blown their powerslide trannys, I refused to drive them, ANYWHERE, faster than they were designed to go....

Bamboo is a critter all to itself, that is why the best, top quality fishing rods are made from it, they don't take a curve... Very springy and bendy yes, but no permanent curves.... The admiral in her younger days used to make garden trellis's from some bamboo stuff she grew in her garden, made all kinds of nice spirals and bows and such, but she glued and tied the ends to get it to hold it's shape... One that broke apart from a storm, returned to it's natural straight state after four days... As flexible as young willow and ten times stronger....

It was very difficult to turn, she liked to drop the inside wing when attempting to turn.... The reason was loss of airspeed on the inner wing causing a corresponding loss of lift... The design was at fault... Dumont had used Otto Lilienthal's table of pressures to create his rib curves and did not believe the Wright's published table of pressures... It was this that caused him to add so much dihedral to get it stable, but it still didn't solve the wing stall problems in turns... He made the forward fuselage so long to increase the combined box elevator and rudder's leverage and it was his best idea on directional control... At best, it lumbered through the air like a scow with a drunk helmsman... But it could get into the air.... What amazes me is the almost total lack of insight in most of the aeronautical community in those days, almost the entire world's best and brightest scientists and engineers couldn't see the way to go... It took two inspired bicycle mechanics from Dayton Ohio... The Wrights didn't get any respect from the rest of the world, their discoveries were ignored, until the lauded and storied university degreed world was shown the light of day.... This is going to be a beautiful, Stunning, model...

In 1906 Santos-Dumont, in Paris, made a straight-line hop of 726ft. (not as far as the Wrights did in 1903) And he was proclaimed the first... (by the french) His 14-bis couldn't fly as everyone recognizes flight today... And there were a half dozen people around Europe who were doing the same thing... He was only the first to actually get a crate in the air and then land it, IN Europe... {chuckle} "WE ARE BEATEN!!!!" Is what Santos-Dumont exclaimed in Paris during the 1908 exposition when he first saw the Wright Flyer III actually fly a smooth figure eight right over his head and then land... Everyone who was anyone in Aviation was there because, it was widely reported that the Wrights had accepted their invitation to show their accomplishments... Very few in Europe believed that the Wrights had flown in 1903 despite the published reports coming out of Hoffman Prairie during 1906-07 and the patent granted them in 1904... In 1908 they settled all questions....

A little further into the story, it wasn't just a show rod, it started it's career as a track runner, it took the '61 Winternationals, both on the track and the rod show afterwards, took the America's Best Competition Car trophy at the '61 Oakland Roadster Show and was the cover car of the Feb. '62 issue of Hot Rod Magazine... It ran at the '62 Winternationals as well then went on a nationwide tour as America's Best Competition Car winner once it won for the second consecutive time at the Oakland Roadster Show... (it was after the US tour that Revell asked for and got the measurements for the model) In '63, it made it's last appearance at the Oakland Roadster Show and won it's third consecutive trophy as America's Best Competition Car at which point it was retired... It resided at the owners custom car shop for a number of years before it was sold off.... It is truly an American classic.... (both the car and the model)

Companies have been known to license their molds to other companies, they also sell and trade them between themselves all the time.... The kit has a market in the HO scale area being 1/76th... There is a long history of them....

I agree with Andy, it's not time to make this decision yet..... The only issue I had with the kit tires was that they were shiny vinyl in my version of the kit, they needed to be dulled down a bit without discoloring the black vinyl...

Yep, the scale difference is going to change the weathering a bit.... But you know that already... {chuckle} Congrats on the wins, (I thought your artillery train would win one as well) At least they saw the fineness of it.... I'm in for this one brother.... Dreadnaughts aren't my real cup of tea, (more along WWII era) but then the Arizona is a superdreadnought and is one of my favorite ships.... Maybe I'll learn something....

I know that, mine was the early 70's pressing, which had a similar problem.... (eveil grin)

I missed the finish of this one Brother, my apologies... Fine work I assure you... Very well done.... There is one more foundational machine tool.... The Shaper..... With that you can manufacture anything... (in miniature) {chuckle}

I spy some small amount of twist to that frame as well, definitely old molds... ('88 pressing notwithstanding, it's still the molds from the early 70's) I'm sure you can handle it....

Sure looks the part brother.... Well Done...