BE A HERO

How much do you like racing? Enough to share it with everyone you hang out with? Enough to spend most of your leisure time following it? Enough to spend major bucks chasin’it around the countryside? Enough to be a hero in a kid’s eyes? Think you’ve got to be a big name driver or team member? If you’re like most of the rest of us you couldn’t make that grade but you have probably already got the skills necessary for the job.  
  What do kids really want? Acceptance and approval from the people they look up to. Hey, that kind of looks like what we all want, doesn’t it? If you read on then I’m gonna tell you a whole new way to enjoy racing and be a hero as a bonus. 

Do you remember the first time you finished a model (or any project you were proud of) and ran in to show it off? I hope you showed it to your Mom or Dad and not one of the “all-seeing all-knowing EXPERTS that populate “model world”. Most seem to have forgotten the time they put in as a glue-smearing, brush-painting beginner. If I would have had the benefit of all these modeling TITANS then I probably wouldn’t have gotten past those first few model airplane kits that I have such fond memories of. The “ruined” kits that I “wasted” were the foundation for the cars I now build that have brought me so much satisfaction and some notoriety. 

The next time a kid admires your collection, offer to help him or her build one of their own. A snap kit is not very expensive or difficult and can be a great time for the builder and the “mentor” as well. Introduce them into the wonderful, almost forgotten world of modeling for FUN!!! You guys with the clear-coated, fully wired, machined and photo-etched detailed miniature vehicles remember ‘’fun’’ don’t you? 
  I spent my youth happily ruining all sorts of airplane and car kits while learning that if enough glue was good then too much glue wasn’t wonderful. ( It would seem that glue is not like horsepower.) All you ‘’real modelers’’ and “kit collectors” just crawl back under those flat rocks because if guys like me hadn’t built all those old kits when they were new then your un-built collection wouldn’t be worth near as much today. So there, your welcome, case closed. 
  My modeling took an extreme left turn when I discovered what was making that wonderful noise behind that big board fence with the Coca Cola signs on it. The racing bug bit hard in the early sixties and I decided that airplanes were alright but oval tracks were so much better than runways because I could see me driving a car but wasn’t sure I’d ever get the chance to fly a plane. So I jumped into this new world with a vengeance..

 I learned things about real cars and things about modeling that I never would otherwise, if I wanted to build all those wonderful machines that I saw race on the TV and the local dirt tracks. It wasn’t like today when the kits of your favorite cars are on the shelf of the local Wal-mart and you can just take it out of the box and build it. You had to build the small ones just like the big guys did the real ones. You take whatever car you wanted to race and threw away everything on it that didn’t look like a race car and then you started over. I took out back seats, covered over holes where radios, consoles, and other road gear used to be and covered headlight and tail light openings with sheet plastic and 

sometimes even paper. I would carefully trim and smooth the runners that the parts came on so I could heat and bend them into roll cages for the interiors. OK, the careful trimming and smoothing came later. 
 The dirt cars had to have the fenders cut so I tried everything from pocketknives to coarse sandpaper until I found and got to the point I could afford Dremel Moto Tool. I learned to sand off the emblems and chrome trim that some poor guy had spent many hours engraving into the mold because if Fireball didn’t have’em on his, darned if I was gonna have’em on mine. I painted with brushes when I could get them and everything from twisted toilet tissue to magic markers when I couldn’t. I even tried ballpoint pens when I started trying to letter the race cars. It took me years to learn that those very expensive artist brushes everyone said to use were worthless for what I was trying to do and then another few years to perfect a scale lettering brush that would work like the big ones. But what I was doing then was laying the foundation for all the things I do today. Now if I find out about a model of a car I have always wanted to do as someone’s race car I don’t worry if it has a race car version, all I want to know is when is it getting here. Just like my friends at the airport in Charlotte at Holman-Moody, it may roll in the back door a street car but it’s gonna roll out the front door race-ready and spittin’ fire.