Fleeting moment in time...

Went out to clean the snow off my '94 Buick the other day, and I was stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this. Neat stuff!

I usually do not do posts like this on my blog, but this picture is just too neat to only have on Facebook, and the forums that I am a member of. This to me is an incredible act of God.

The temp at the time that I saw this was about 37 degrees, and the thing was fast melting, when after I saw it, ran into the house grabbed the camera and snapped four pictures of it. Then I put the camera away and continued to sweep the snow off the hood of the car. I did not drive the car at all, that day, as I took a snow day leave of absence from my work. Engine heat, in other words was not a factor, as the car has been sitting since the day before that. It was the warming up of the ambient air temperature after the freezing rain/ ice storm ended earlier in the morning. That is all. It was just neat the way the ice released from the ornament intact, and slowly started to slide down the slope of the hood with the snow toward the grille in slow motion, when I caught it with my camera. It was on the verge of collapse when I was photographing it. I thought it was going to fall apart until I got back out there with the camera.

Jim.

Growing up with American Plastic Bricks: Coming full circle.

 My dad introduced me to American Plastic Bricks for my sixth birthday in December of 1963, fifty years ago. Since he and my mom had realized that I developed a love for houses and architecture at an early age, and I told them I wanted to be a carpenter when I grew up, my dad started coming home from work with all these different construction sets, starting with Lincoln Logs in 1959. I would really get frustrated with these earlier sets as there really was no specific way the blocks or logs would really lock together to make what I wanted to be a realistic looking scale building. Then he came home with American Bricks. He showed me how they interlocked together, how to use the short and long blocks to build interlocking brick walls, and make the rectangular openings for windows, and it just clicked in my head. Once I mastered the concept by age six, and dad had gotten me enough sets, I was able to pretty much build everything in the instruction books that came with the sets, and as I got more, I started to design and build my own stuff. When we moved to Fulton Street in 1964, I tried to replicate that house in American Bricks, but I was JUST a little bit short in pieces and know how to do this. Nonetheless, this was one toy that kept me quiet, and I would play with for hours if not days on end, taking time out to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and school.Yes I loved this toy that much, as it spurred my creativity in me at a young age, that has never dimmed to this day. So now I have come full circle. I have enough sets that I was finally able to prove to myself that I could build a somewhat close replica of our Fulton Street house after the fact after all. And without any instruction sheets to guide me. It was/ is stored in my memory as to how to do it. That is why I chose to build this house first. I have returned to the toy of my youth as it still makes you think, analyze, and plan in your head as to how you need to work stuff to get the results you want with them. It will keep my mind sharp into old age.

This American Brick hotel (above) is somebody else's work, who's image I grabbed from another site.

A garage (above) with an included unbroken working overhead door, that I built from the first new set I got through an eBay sale about 5 years ago.

A set from the 1950's (above).

All of these subsequent images are of my Fulton Street house that I just built about two days ago with newly acquired sets, that I bought from a guy locally through eBay.

I figured in order for me to build this 1890's style Lancaster PA. townhouse when I was a kid would have required about 4 of the bigger medium sized sets, which my parents could not afford to buy for me back then.

This house is not in any of their instruction books that they published back in the day. I designed and built this model, myself. It is very large and heavy. It is 7 inches wide by 16-1/2 inches deep by 11-1/2 inches tall at the dual gable chimneys.

It took me just a little over two hours to build this to begin with.

I tore down and rebuilt the second and third floor attic gable walls on the main house as the windows on the second floor were just too short, as I originally built it. So I replaced them with like windows that the first floor has. I also moved them down one course of brick away from the white lintel capstone brick course. Gives the house a more balanced look than it did have. I also moved the attic gable windows down three courses to center them better in between the white lintel blocks. Looks alot better this way. A "course" is one brick layer in height around a wall being built. The three images immediately below this text are from before I tore down and rebuilt the second and third floors. 

American Plastic Bricks is one Boomer toy that has grown up with us Boomers, as they still have a big following,today, even fifty, sixty years later. There are many sites on the internet that attest to this. They were/ are a very well engineered and thought out product, plus they were American made to boot.

I spent most of an afternoon and evening, and most of the next day dismantling and reconstructing the model permanently by rebuilding it with Testor's plastic model kit cement. I wanted this to be a permanent display. These bricks are 50 something years old, and the plastic in them is starting to get somewhat brittle with age, and really, they cannot handle the rigors of building up, and tearing down repeatedly anymore. In the process of dismantling the house I'd say about 40-50 of the bricks cracked or broke out of the 500-600 bricks this model has. Fortunately, I have plenty of spares. It took 7 tubes of Testor's plastic model cement to assemble this model together!! 

Gable and 3 chimney bricks waiting to be re assembled, along with the long cross gable wall brace assembly (long white blocks in left of picture).

I also made the permanent roof out of a nice textured piece of dark green matte board, which really looks better than a roof made out of a greasy Little Caesar's pizza box lid, as this last added pic shows.

A couple of days later, I glued the roof on permanently, added the roof fascia mouldings underneath the eaves of the roof, and completed the front and rear door stoop steps. The fascia mouldings are made out of the same matte board that the roof is made from, but I glued it to the underside of the roof with the white side facing outward. The stoop steps required me to cut some of the damaged plastic bricks longways in half to make somewhat realistic steps for the door stoops, and using modified American Brick cap stones as well.

Adding these fascia mouldings around the eaves of the flat secondary roof hides the locator pegs of the top course of bricks on this section of the house. That has the effect of cleaning up the overall look of the model as well.

Completed front door stoop steps, above. Completed rear door stoop steps as well as newly installed roof eave fascia mouldings, below.

Adding these little details to a model like this overall are really starting to make it "pop". I may make a pair of dormers for the main roof, yet. I have the extra windows to do so. One dormer on the front slope, and one on the rear.

If I make dormer windows for this model, I will make them up to look similar to this.

This is where I am at with this model project for now.

Completed making the roof dormer window assemblies for the American Plastic Brick "610" project house model. I just need to prepare the roof on the main house before I install these by first cutting the rectangular openings in the roof, then gluing the dormers in place, over the openings. I'll do that tomorrow. It took me a total of about 4 hours to make these, using some American Bricks for spacers inside these assemblies for the window frames, that are also American Brick units. The dormers, themselves are made out of the same matte board material that I made the roof of the house, itself, out of.

Just got done installing the completed dormer window assemblies on the roof of the model, as these pics below now show.

Jim.

Plastic Parakeets Never Die!!

 Plastic parakeets never squawk, shed feathers, need fed, bite, poop, or die. They just get dusty. Here is an old Bachmann "Birds Of the World" series Parakeet model kit from the 1960's that I bought on eBay about 5 years ago, built it up and painted it to look like our late parakeet that we had that we named "Beak" because he had one. Here are pictures that I took of the life sized model recently.

Here, below is another plastic parakeet model that started out as a robotic toy. But because of how that the batteries had to be placed inside a cavity through an access door in the front breast feathers, and a head that looked like it was partially popped off or severed, I decided to modify it into a static, more realistic model, if you will. I filled in the battery compartment cover cracks, as well as the screw holes where the screws go that hold the toy together, using a plastic filler putty. After it dried, I sanded the breast back to its original contours, but I purposely left it a little rough to simulate the layered look of the bird's breast feathers. I also did before I did all this removed the button cell batteries, and disabled the heads animated movements, by cutting off the metal motor shaft that the head was mounted to, and crazy glued it directly to the birds body. While the thing was still animated, my wife said it's head moved when it chirped like it had Turret's Syndrome, the animation was that bad. After I did all this stuff, I went to my True Value store, and bought a small bottle of "Folk Art" brand acrylic paint in bright green, to repaint the breast back to the green color it originally was before I partially sanded it off when I resculpted the breast feather features. Here are the results.

Jim.

Cecropia Moth pair.

Springtime. That time of year when a young man's thoughts turn to... Giant Silk Moths! (At least me, anyway!) Here is a female/male pair set I just mounted in this display box for Jamie, of Cecropia Moths, North America's largest indigenous giant silk moth. Jamie helped me to raise these in the summer and fall of 2006. The two specimens emerged from their cocoons in June of 2007. I just built this display box for this pair, tonight so that Jamie would have a complete set of the more common giant silk moths of eastern Pennsylvania. The four most commonly found giant silks in PA are the Cecropia, Polyphemus, Luna, and Promethea Moths.

Here are two more specimens from the same 2006-2007 brood. This goes to show that Cecropia Moths are like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike, as this is another pair of male and female in another set I have, but are shown in separate images.

                                                               Female.

                                                               Male.

Here are 16 more moths from that same rearing project back in 2007 that I just mounted and sealed in this 16" X 20"  Riker mount style display box this week, on July 17th. Males and females, both shown here. This display shows that no two specimens of this species are identical. In that aspect they are like people or snowflakes. Each individual is unique.

Jim.

1975 Buick Electra 225 Custom Landau Coupe, coming of age at last: Revisited!

Post Script; I no longer own this car. I sold it today, December 3, 2021. A new owner is taking it to Northern North Carolina as I type this, ending 36 years of ownership. This post will remain as a dedication to this car and my late father who originally bought it in 1982. RIP.

Or let's call this post, "Everything you always wanted to see in a 1975 Buick Electra 225 Custom Landau Coupe, but were afraid to ask!"

I finally was able to pull out my 1975 Buick Electra 225 coupe out a week ago to do a digital picture shoot of the car, finally. I took almost one hundred pictures of the subject at hand.

I have posted less than half of them here, for now. I will probably add more as I get the time to edit the images. Remember, now, this is an all original paint, meaning it is still wearing it's original GM factory applied paint. As such, there are chips, scratches and some small minor dents in the body of this car, but NO rust, or rust out at all. The interior is still all original, complete with about 10 years of wear and tear, until I pulled the car out of circulation in 1985. In other words, you are looking at a preserved 10 year old car, here, even though that vehicle is 38 years old as of this posting, now.

The 1975 Buick Electra's front end design in my opinion is just plain old majestic, and elegant. No plastic was used in the making of that grille at all. It is all metal. Chrome plated "Pot metal", if you will. I made the "1975" licence tag, myself by painting a tag blank black, and attaching brass house numbers to it that I bought from a hardware store in the mid 1980's

1975 was the first year for rectangular sealed beam dual headlights, in the full size Buick series. They were only available in the Electra line that year. LeSabres for 1975 still had the traditional round sealed beam dual headlights, yet. In 1976, the LeSabre received rectangular lights as well. Parking lights are mounted in the ends of the front bumper. In 1976, these would be moved out of the bumper to just below the headlamps, above the bumper.

Big 455 cubic inch V-8 engine was the biggest engine that Buick ever built. The only GM passenger car engine that was bigger was Cadillac's, That V-8 engine was 500 cubic inches. The big A/C system was problematic, to say the least in these cars. They were always springing leaks, losing the R-12 "freon" that they used, the compressors would seize up, and or burn out their clutches, etcetera, addendum. As such, the A/C system in this car is not in working order, right now. It is still complete, and intact, and could be rebuilt with new seals and converted to 21st century R-134 tech to make it work, and to work more efficiently.

Brushed aluminum speedometer face with black numerals lights up very bright at night as opposed to a more traditional black faced white numeral speedometer face. Buick coat of arms shield mounted in the center of the steering wheel, as well. The green, yellow and red gauge on the right side of the speedometer is a "fuel usage" gauge. Basically all it does, is it tells you how far you are pushing the gas pedal down. with me, it was always in the red, saying that I'm wasting gas. The big 455 inch V-8 engine under the hood, even in it's 1975 detuned state was still a gas hog, regardless on how hard or soft you pushed the accelerator pedal to move the 5,000 pound automobile.

 Automatic Climate Control A/C and heater systems was designed to keep you comfy during all times of the year in all climates. Headlight switch and windshield wiper with delay controls are visible here in this picture, below the driver's side outboard A/C dashboard vent.

 Buick coat of arms shield theme carried over to the trunk lock cover, as well.

 Basic dash controls shown here. Notice the HUGE  A/C dash vents.

Early stereo  four speaker AM/FM radio, for the time put out a decent sound. By today's standard, though, the sound is kind of tinny. Not much bass, compared to 21st century automotive sound systems. But it still works great.

"B U I C K" spelled out in individual chrome plated pot metal letters across the front of the grille header panel below the very dignified Buick coat of arms shield header panel ornament. Each letter is individually held in place with stamped sheet metal nuts that are threaded onto the integral molded on studs that are on the back of each letter. No "peal and stick on" letters, here, folks! this is the best you were able get in Buick for 1975.

 Fenderskirts really dress up this car, and give it alot of aristocratic dignity and class.

Side swipe damage from 1982 is evident in this driver's side shot of the whole car, as you can see the screws my dad put through the moldings to keep them from falling off the car after it got hit.

The interior armrests have cracked from 10 years of use, as you can see from the tape at the bottom left of the picture.

Mechanical digital "chronograph" type clock still works above the "Electra 225" script on the genuine fake wood grained plastic dashboard panel.

 Dashboard in this car seems like it is a mile wide compared to the cars that are built, today.

The 1975 Buick Electra 225  was a very elegant and aristocratically styled automobile, in my humble opinion.

 Bright metal trim was still in use profusely on the interiors of these cars, yet in the mid 1970's, as this picture of the passenger side interior door panel and armrest shows.

 1975 Buick Electra meets 1994 and 1992 Buick Park Avenues, respectively.

Period correct PA licence plate, although it is not registered, showing what tag you would have been issued for your new Buick from the dealer in 1975-1976 in Pennsylvania.

Massive 1975 grille is all metal on these cars. No plastic was used in these at all. This grille design was unique to the 1975 model year, only. The 1976 Electra had a smaller chrome plated rectangular plastic grille with the parking lights moved up from the bumper corners to right below the dual rectangular headlamps, above the bumper. This necessitated the shorter grille, for 1976, as the parking lights now occupied the space that the '75 grille end extensions originally occupied, making the 1976 Electra grille less elegant than the '75's.

"Egg crate" theme used on the long taillights was a bring back design from the 1969 Buick Electra, as this year had the same basic design for their taillights, as well. The '69's were three grids high, whereas the '75-'76's were 2 grids high.

The car was very lightly sideswiped while it was parked along the street in 1982 shortly after my dad had bought it. You can still see one of the sheet metal screws used to reattach the bump molding above the driver's side fender skirt, as well as the long parallel scratch in between the skirt and the molding. I tried to buff the scratch out, but it was just too deep, even though it was not the whole way through the paint, there.

Optional Buick crested side corning lights at the front ends of the front fenders. Also optional fender corner top turnsignal headlight indicator lights are visible in this image.  Manually retractable antenna on the right fender (left side of image above the "portholes") was a dealer install for  installing  a CB radio, which as you can remember, those of you who were alive during the 1970's, was a bit of a national craze, back then.

Buick coat of arms shield theme is carried on from the steering wheel to the header panel ornament, to the trunk deck lid lock cover, to the wheelcover centers, shown in this picture.

 They just don't build them this big, anymore!

As you can see, this car is really a wonderfully rust free vehicle, as it does not even have the so typical rustout bubbles at the bottom of the landau top chrome vinyl top divider molding and the top of the quarter panel. 1970's GM cars with vinyl tops were notorious for rusting out in very short order, here when kept outside, continuously. This car was garaged almost from the time it was brand new until now. It was only parked outside in the weather during the time my dad owned it from 1982 to early 1985 when I bought it from him.

 "B U I C K" script on right corner trunk  deck lid edge, above the end of the taillight, inboard of the vertical backup lights in the vertical ends of the bumper. A neat thing about these, is while you are driving at night, these light up red as taillight, "outrigger" lights, if you will. But when you put it in reverse, they turn white, and put out quite a bit of light to let you see where you are backing at night, quite well.

 At 234 inches (19 feet, 6 inches) this car was the longest production Buick passenger car that was built. It was even longer than the Cadillac deVille series that was built during that same time period. And HEAVY! These cars had a curb weight in excess of 5,000 pounds, making it also one of the heaviest regular production GM passenger cars ever built. Not counting wagons, or factory built Cadillac Fleetwood limousines.

 The 1975-1976 full size Buicks were the last of their kind to be built. Starting in 1977, they would start to downsizing these cars. Never again would Buick build a car this big.

 Driver's side view of car.

Full size Buicks still wore rectangular versions of their famous"portholes", '"ventiports", as to what Buick called them in 1975. Electra's always had four on their front fenders. LeSabres had three.

Replacement period correct standard Electra specific wheelcovers that I found at the big Carlisle, PA big spring meet, two weeks ago, are like the wheelcovers that my first 1975 Buick Electra had when I bought it as a three year old car in December of 1978. See my original post about this car about that first Buick on the link I will apply later right here.  Link;

http://jayveejayaresjunk.blogspot.com/2012/08/1975-buick-electra-225-custom-landau_1.html

Jim.