Thanks for the comments and compliments guys. Both are always appreciated.
Here’s a minor update having very little to do with anything. Working out in the yard last Saturday I somehow managed to come up with a pretty significant abdominal injury and have been on a self-imposed bed rest/light duty schedule since then. I’m doing the best I can to pretend it away, before I’m compelled to spend thousands of dollars on medical tests, and so far at least it hasn’t gotten any worse.
So in the meantime, I started to spray the interior of a resin 46 Ford fordor a few days back (which I had not properly cleaned) and it started blotching up right away so I quit. I scrubbed the outside with Wesley’s tire bleach, but still needed to remove the spray paint from the interior. Needing a tub to soak it in, I remembered I dropped a 64 Valiant in Simple Green a few years ago, so I pulled it out and rinsed it off.
It turns out it was 14 years ago that it went into the Simple Green bath! I painted it Testor’s red enamel back in the late 70’s, and it came out dull and uninteresting. Here’s what it looked like in 2001:
I wrapped up the chrome, glass, and chassis and stored them in the original box. Every few months (years?) I’d pull it out of the tub and check the stripping progress. My intent was to strip it back to yellow and sell it on Ebay, as these things have really increased in value. Everything looked look new, except the seats would always retain a tiny bit of red paint in the creases.
Pulling it out this time, I was really impressed with how nice it looked. So rather than spending more years in the tank, I sprayed the interior semi-gloss black, and the dash gloss black, followed by reassembly:
The yellow color really pops and will now remain in the collection. I’m not really sure why I ever painted it red in the first place! It’s just nice to know you can leave styrene models in Simple Green indefinitely and it doesn’t hurt the plastic at all.
Also, about 10 years ago I picked up a cheap display box at Michael’s to house some antique/collectible items. Problem was the box was lined with black fuzz which made it difficult to see the contents. So I tore it apart and relined it with blue material my wife offered up. Here’s an old flash photo of how it looked previously:
And here’s how it appears today:
It turned out to be a pretty nice zero cost improvement. And for those interested that's a Uberti replica 1851 Navy. It's accurate and was fun to shoot, the last time being about 15 years ago.