The Rivals

I am generally out of touch with social networks in my town – and with business affairs, cultural groups, and academic circles. I can be said to pretty much live in an intellectual bubble that is insulated from the rest of Western Australia. I have never been happier.

It is not that I do not welcome social interaction on a personal level – a conversation, a joke, a shared cup of vitriol. It livens up a day that might otherwise be given over to dragging a plough through flinty soil then falling exhausted into a ditch at nightfall. Retail trade was like that…

But being unaware of the world has the delightful advantage of rendering me neutral, by virtue of ignorance, in most of the deadly competitions and rivalries of the day. I can be in the company of people in my old trades – dentistry and retail photography – while they are frostily ignoring each other or cattily circling for commercial information…and I am unconcerned. If I occasionally ask one about the affairs of the other, casually revealing the extent of their spy network and causing alarm bells to go off in the mind of the listeners, it is all innocent. Perfectly innocent.

And then there are the firms that rep for other firms – the agency men. I’m old and I forget things and I cannot be held responsible if I blurt out secrets of the delivery date of a product to someone else in the mistaken belief that they are the firm handling the account. One lens can look very much like another when it is top secret and hush hush.

Likewise, I can hardly be expected to be up to date with all the staff hirings and firings unless someone tells me and generally they tell me only when a coroner’s report is delivered or a trial date is set.

Of course, once I have been entrusted with a secret I am the soul of discretion. Wild horses could not drag the parlous financial situation of ———- from my lips. Who knows, they may trade out of it.

It always pays to play fair.

The Little World – When You Cross the Line…

The line? The line between a toy and a model. And who says that you only have to cross it in one direction…?

I purchased a number of Schleich dinosaurs and animals to help with my studio composites. They are a wonderful toys – well-modelled and painted, and as real as anything you can purchase in the stores. For a person who does not do figurine painting or modelling, they are a godsend. I freely confess to admiring the horses and ponies as much as any 9-year-old girl would.

When I saw a Schleich tank-trailer in the shop I grabbed that, and had a glorious time dirtying it up as a oil tanker. The fact that it is 1:16th rather than my preferred scale of 1:18th is neither here not there – I can position it in studio shots to make it any scale I wish. Far better to be larger and more detailed than the other way around, I find.

Then I googled around to the toy stores in the eastern states and found a Schleich barn. It is a beauty, but up until now has taunted me with a plastic-play appearance, even though it is largely made of wood. One week I set out to remedy that. My only problem was that I had no idea what a barn looked like or what the various bits did.

Oh. I knew that the Scheich horses and cows fit in there – I tried them for size. And I get the idea of putting real beasts under shelter in the northern winters – but the ins and outs of doing it were a mystery. I started with airbrushing the plastic base inside with a varied mixture of dung-brown colour and left it at that. The only other interior bit I felt confident about was to scribe wooden floorboards into the loft. I painted the pulley of the barn lift a rusty iron colour.

The roof came as three pieces of 5-ply in blond wood. I printed out sheets of shingles with a wood-grain pattern onto matte inkjet paper and glued them in rows to the ply roof. And then weathered it with moss stain between the shingles. The theme for the barn is dirt and age.

The external walls remained in their wooden form – I didn’t incise them for boards for fear of spoiling the surface – either it had to be smooth toy or perfect model. The plastic masonry, on the other hand, got some pretty rough stonework painting in matte and then the mossy green as grouting flowed down the channels between stones. Then green moss spray from the bottom and dust from the top with the airbrush.

I also researched period barn stickers with advertisements for suitable rural specialties like Red Man cut plug tobacco and possibly a Dr. Pepper sign. I tried the experiment of making these sorts of signs as stickers rather than decals…. the idea was to make up sets that can be stuck on or removed depending upon the era that the barn depicted. I could not made up my mind whether to have a Pennsylvania hex sign on the end or not…

I can hear the farmers amongst my readership laughing at my amateur efforts but I assure you that when the farm ute and the tractor are posed there it will all look as rural as hell.

 

 

 

 

 

All At Sea In The Car Park

I am a car expert. I can tell, after a hour’s careful observation, the difference between a 1973 Chevrolet Impala and a 2002 Hyundai Getz. No problemos. I can sort out Hupmobiles from Mattel Barbie cars. It’s a gift…

But when I encounter the out-of-the-ordinary car that has been rescued from the restoration fiends and made into a proper street rod I can flounder badly. Such was the case with this car in the car park of the 2017 NSW hot rod show. I knew it was gold, I knew it was good, and I knew it was locked up and impossible to steal ( don’t ask…) but I was in trouble as to what sort it was, and how much what I was seeing had departed from the original.

I know it was metal, because when you hit all the various panels with a ball-peen hammer they made a ” Doing ” sound. Not the windscreen. That was more of a crunchy noise, but we won’t dwell on it.

I was pretty sure that the mirror-polished engine compartment panels weren’t stock…unless the owner was the King of Sweden. Also the Mr. Horsepower logo on the side. Few cars of the period rolled out of the factory with a woodpecker. But I fell into a revery when it came to the shape of the fenders – they were distinctive and complex, and not the sort of thing that you generally see in ads in Street Rodder magazine machined out of aluminium. They looked suspiciously real – if enlarged a bit for the wider tyres.

Likewise the three rivets on the front to the windscreen posts. This sort of detail is not the kind of thing that rodders add to a car – they are generally grinding everything that they can off flat. These rivets argue that they are an original feature of the car…and they also suggest that if you did grind them off the windscreen would fall into your lap.

The roof worried me, frankly. There are three longitudinal strakes up there and the last time I saw a car with this feature was my old 1966 Renault 10. I haven’t seen that car since 1972, and anyone could have gotten hold of it. I was trying to picture this gold one in a two-tone blue to see if it was just a re-paint but decided in the end that it wasn’t.

Nothing else helped at all. I looked carefully at all the external lines, trying to imagine whether they had been altered or were a faithful reproduction of the original car. The dash and steering wheel were no help. No help in identifying it, I mean. I’m sure they are very useful for turning and that.

In the end I had to give up. I’d gone from the front of the grill to the back of the rear panel and the only thing back there was some pinstripes, tail lights, a square bumper and a paint job that said 28 ESSEX, so the whole thing was a mystery. Unless I can see the DMV records I’ll have no idea what brand of car it is.

Blue Shoe

This single-spinner shoebox Ford seen in the car park of the Rosehill Racecourse during the afternoon of this year’s NSW Hot Rod Show attracted me immediately – 49-53 Fords always do, no matter how they are presented. They are the first car I ever saw that I wanted to own entirely upon their external looks. Many others have come along in the meantime, but I still love the shoebox…and a few of its overseas copies.

But this car and the afternoon I saw it have pointed out something I did not realise – the fact that satin or matt paint can be a difficult thing to photograph. Until now, I thought that this sort of finish made car shooting easier, but now I see that this is not the case.

This will not be accurate in scientific terms, but the satin auto finish is suspended somewhere between shiny and dull paint. Apparently there are 5 different grades between flat and glossy. How they do it is a mystery, but I’m betting on some form of particle or filler in the fluid that makes up the paint along with the pigment particle. The look is unmistakable when done well.

It also needs to be completely done – you’ll note the doors on this Ford seem to have a structure showing – that may be because it is not yet the final paint coat. More rubbing down, more coats.

The car itself is a work in progress, as evinced by the rear bumper and the multicoloured nature of the interior. It is perfectly in order for the builder to drive it to the show and park it out in the car park – we are grateful to him for doing so to show us how the car is progressing. New enthusiasts who only see finished show cars may be discouraged when they return home and see their base car nowhere near the show condition – it’s good for them to see how others are managing the tasks.

I am pleased to be able to record the neat and unobtrusive nature of the tail-light treatment. I’ve seen some surprising ideas bolted and leaded into custom cars in the past , and even if they are marvellous jobs of work, some of them have not been good looking. This use of the classic shoebox design is fine. Likewise the decision to clean up, but leave undisturbed, the classic front end. No drawer-pull grilles needed here.

The stop light? Well, that is a matter of taste – like the Tiki shift lever. Both are certainly period-correct, but…

Okay – back to the paint. As a photographer of car shows, I am equipped with a good mirror-less camera and large flash. I expose for the general scene and then throw fill light into grilles, interiors, or shaded portions as needed. The overhead lights and/or sky will always be a factor in any scheme, and the way the car reacts to them will make a great deal of difference to whether the lines of the car are well seen. Show shooting for the visitor during open hours is entirely different from work done after all the crowds have gone home. You don’t get to do lighting set-ups or multiple pops. It is all in one and frequently the window of opportunity is about 3 seconds! It’s like press shooting.

Note in the featured image how the sky light glares out the line of the fender and bonnet. On a gloss finish that would be a brighter specular highlight, but very much narrower. Surprisingly , it would be less obtrusive and one might almost PS it out. Not here – the specular highlight is a diffuse patch that you just have to put up with. And it seems in some cases to delineate the panel contour more than a gloss would do.

Looks like there might have to be a lot more experimentation with these finishes in the future – I like ’em but they are a menace.

 

The Little World – Hindsight Is Perfect

They say hindsight is 20/20 vision. They never say where the eyes that do it are meant to be placed…

For the Little World worker it hardly matters, as they generally do not bother looking closely at their own work. At other people’s, yes. That needs critical laser vision and acid comparison. But a model that we have made five years ago never really gets the going over that one might expect – even after all the effort we put into it.

However, the exception can occur. Five years ago I made a model of a Hollywood – style set and produced a little book of it for the actors and actresses who posed for me. The model went under a heavy drape and was duly forgotten…forgotten until I met a lady from the miniaturist’s society at a model train exhibition*. On a whim I asked whether her society would be interested in having it on display at their fair in August.

She leapt at the chance, and so did her club secretary. I’ve been in touch with them, arranged to deliver it for their day, and they’ll display it prominently. And that has triggered off an entirely new phase for the model.

It was a project that could be photographed for still pictures as if it was a motion picture set. Now it is being completed as a film set in the process of filming…I’m adding the equipment and structures that the film makers…the legendary Goldfisch brothers…are using. Camera, lights, dressing room ( well it’s actually a sheet–iron toilet in use as a dressing room ), makeup benches, sound desk, recorder, boom microphone…etc.

Even the wooden structure of the set is being enhanced with scale 2 x 4 framing. Signs are sprouting everywhere.

In short, the model has come alive again. And this time I know what each part should be doing, so the components can be placed and fastened rather than being swept away into a cardboard box and eventually lost.

I cannot afford to have custom-made figurines for the set, though they are done by artists in the US, but I have a sort of sneaky plan to populate the model nevertheless. I hope the miniaturist ladies have a sense of humour. After all it is a fancy house…

Dominion Day, 2017

Well it is that time of the year again, when all loyal Canadians assemble to make sure the Americans know that we exist. We have been dancing up and down, in our modest sort of way, for the last 200 years to make the point but no-one seems to care. But at least the people who kick-started Ottawa way back when did one thing – they made us a national holiday that is three days before the Yanks’ day and we can get in a little glory before it all rolls over us and swamps us for another year.

Here in Wet Dog we are going to have the traditional parade up Pearson Street ( formerly Diefenbaker Street ). Since the unification of the Canadian Armed Forces and the closing of RCAF WET DOG as a serving station, we have fewer Air Force personnel available for the march, but this year we have organised a fly-past of two Ansons and a Canadair Sabre at 12:00. Apparently they will be in tight formation for only a very brief period of time, so shutterbugs are advised to get their cameras set well before noon. Refreshments at the RCL Lodge 123 Hall will commence at 12:01 and continue until the mounties break it up.

This year we are going to have visits from First Nation representatives and the deputy vice-speaker from the Societeé Nationale de Francais from Chicoutimi, so be sure to give them a great big warm Wet Dog, Alberta welcome. But make sure you don’t get caught.

The July special down at Mangina Motors is snow tires and chains. 50% off if you have them fitted before August. Better safe than sorry, eh?

 

 

The Golden Woodie – Part 2

I do not pretend to understand engines. With the possible exception of the .049 Cox Thimble Drome model airplane engine – and that impressed me with its ability to bite into my fingers. But all the rest are intricate mysteries. People ask me why I include pictures of engine compartments in my reports if I don’t know what I am seeing – I do it for those who do.

Other people are more knowledgeable – This 350 Chevrolet seems to have been neatly fitted into a place that once held a considerably smaller Ford flathead engine and presumably moves the car along at quite a bit faster pace. I salute the skill that does this. My complements to the chef who also decided to do it without cutting horrid holes in the bonnet and poking industrial machinery through them. Perhaps the owners of this wonderful custom car have passed the stage of wanting to have things look like an Ed Roth cartoon.

How much shoe-horning was required? Well the show sign said they sectioned the bonnet and reshaped the fenders so there must have been some squeaky moments. I have a 1:18th scale die-cast model of a 1948 Ford Woody so I will go look at it to see if I can see where the cutting took place. I can’t see a bad line anywhere here.

Likewise, I am going to have to consult a 1:18 model of the Ford convertible of the time to see if I can pick out how the shape of the boot lid was done. I can’t say whether the body is a readaptation of the original or a new construction but if the car comes back onto the Perth display scene and we can get closer to it past the honour barrier, I will examine it closely.

Note the wheels. perfectly chosen combination of modern spoke design relieved and highlighted by the repeat of body colour and the period-correct effect of wide whitewalls and substantial tyres. Some stylists might have been tempted to put in thin rims and strip rubber tyres, but I am glad to see they did not do this here. The Ford tragics in the crowd might have looked askance at the Chevy bow ties in the hubcaps, but then it has a Chevrolet engine after all. And all the bow ties were lined up for smooth appearance.