Erwin , I’m playing Fallout 76 right now .
Next up is a civilian contractor Chevy , side tool bins , ladder rack etc. This is an AK kit which I have built a few of and I’m very impressed with everything , well almost , no engine . So far fit is excellent , chassis went together - no problems . Minimal to no seam lines , zero flash .
Nice work as always!
Did you scratch build the box or is it a kit? Nice either way. Wayne
Thanks Erwin , thanks Wayne , … Wayne the boxes are scratched , rogue pe and 1/48th scale diamond plate which doesn’t look like 1/48th , looks too big for 1/35th ,
can’t remember the manufacture , got it ages ago , I do remember being a tad vexed at the look of the scale vs the scale the manufacture sold it as . Thankfully there’s no official book of Marquis de Queensberry rules on diamond plate pattern size , my bucket truck when I was a lineman had three diff size patterns , the deck , the rear platform and the side bin boxes .
Yeah, during my years running heavy equipment I saw many different types of tread and diamond plate. Looks fine to me. Wayne
Oh no it’s dog meat!
Were you a lineman in wichita?
Very nice work Glenn, esp that fine-a*s pe chain!
Dave 
Just an OFL [ old friggin lineman ] , … also a splicer , installer ,repairman . thirty one years , half of which I spent on hold standin on a pole somewhere . Also spent about eight years hangin strand and cable as a journeyman lineman for cable tv systems in the industry’s infancy , cross country .
Your handle suggests some Wyoming in your life. I grew up in Casper, where (coincidentally enough) one of the earliest commercial cable television systems was installed. Probably not as far back as those photos tho.
Cable tv started in trailer parks and areas where air broadcast rf was poor . In the early seventies investments were made to basically cable the whole U.S. - the race was on , dollar signs were seen . There were no freelance journeyman linemen . Linemen were , phone co. , power co’s etc. established jobs . For reasons I won’t go into between the army and being laid off from the phone co , I became a cable tv lineman , building cable tv systems cross country for one of hundreds of companys wanting to get plant up on the poles and charging customers asap .
I got back in bell Telephone before judge Green broke up the nationwide phone co monoply , late seventies .
Cheyenne comes from a pup I picked up while building cross country , she went everywhere with me . Funny you should mention Wyoming , that was where two American Indians joined our crew and my dog was named Cheyenne , so they nicknamed me Little Cheyenne , I dunno injun humor , well it stuck . Most of it was a daze , stringing strand and cable in just about every state . Working and climbing poles from dawn till dusk , then hitting a local bar for the three " B’s " , booze , burgers and broads . Then doing it all over again the next day and the next etc.
Oh the good , the bad , and the ugly stories I could tell .
Like I said I managed to get back in the phone co [ building cable tv systems had no insurance , just cash on the barrel ] and spent the next thirty one years there . Retired and got a job as a maintenence man for a local school system , hvac , plumbing , elec , carpentry for the next eight years , retired again , and here I am … worse for wear …
I think back on everything and sure there were some reall bad times but I’d do it all over again … without thinking twice .
You sound exactly like the kind of person to sit down with at the bar and listen to their wild tales. Sounds like you have had a wild and good life. You’ve had hands on part of this nations infrastructure building and maintaining it you did a dangerous job that many wouldn’t so nothing but respect for that.
I remember when the cable crews came thru our area back in the late 70s early 80s.We were small town bikers and partied with them a lot. Right after they left a body was found near an old rock quarry and people wondered if he was one of them. Cops were sure we had something to do with it. Years later it turned out that a guy had killed the guy in Kentucky and for some reason hauled his body all the way to our part of central IL.to dump it. The body was finally ID’ed because he had a tattoo of a skeleton firing a double barreled shotgun.He had nothing to do with the cable guys or us, just chance. Anyway, were you on that crew? Wayne
Rocky , I wish it was as glamorous and noble as you think , truth is Wayne’s kinda right on the money .
Twenty , thirty dirtbag lookin , ex military , ex bikers , shady lookin black dudes , hippy types , blowin into town , guess what , instant dislike . Something went wrong , blame the cable guys who just got to town , I’m not sayin we were angels , we got into our fair share of barfights but ten linemen in a bar full of locals , pretty even odds .
Wayne’s right the only people that accepted us right off were the bikers , the brothers , the riff-raff and all the people in town that the townsfolk didn’t like before we got there . Then there were the towns that didn’t exactly like black guys on our crews , remember this was the early - mid seventies and a lot of towns we buit cable in were 99.9% white . People were always scared of us .Then after we started working in a town we started dating the towns wimmens , real trouble .
First things we did when we rolled into a town was assign guys on our crews jobs , someone had to hook up with a chick that worked in a bank [ no check cashing hassles ] , someone had to hit on a chick that worked in a supermarket [ two full carts of food that only rang up twenty bucks ] , My favorite was hooking up with the barmaids [ the crew drank all night for a few dollars ] .
It wasn’t all ice cream and strippers but like I said oh the stories and the fun times .
Wayne , yeah there were some fatalities , on the job deaths , shady local deaths but it ain’t murder if they shoot at you first . I was never involved in anything like that but the nationwide cable lineman grapevine had its stories , No Wayne I wasn’t in Illinois at that time that I can remember but we did build a lot of plant there , who knows , maybe one of the dirtbags up on a pole was me , we hung out with reprobates like yourself , you might have even had a beer with me . Small towns were month or two jobs , big city suberbs could last a year or two . Linemen were always coming and going , some guys hooked up with a gal and stayed . We always had the ability to go work on another job , just up and leave after getting an offer from some outfit somewhere else in the country . Some guys didn’t like the town we would be working in and went to work someplace else . I remember I was building cable in Altoona Penn. in the winter and some of my buds said there was an outfit down in Jacksonville Fla. looking for linemen . I should have stayed in Altoona , Jacksonville in the early seventies was not cool . I also equated Jacksonville Fla with the beach , being a Jersey beach boy I was in , little did I know at the time it was a fair piece from Jacksonville to the Atlantic .
I’m trying to find some photos but like I said most of my photos from my early days are with exes or just gone .
Damn you made it sound even better 
… I’d watch a movie all you just said. Forget the avengers, well maybe not black widows fantasstic rear view.
The guys we party’ed with were always righteous dudes. A couple of the guys bought bikes and one night comin’ back from a party they hit some deer! They didn’t understand about midwest deer at night. The one hit 1 and it flew up and hit the 2nd guy, killing him with a hoof print in his forehead. We treated him as one of ours and made sure he was taken care of . Sad deal. Sorry, back to you amazing build. Wayne
“I hear you singing on the wire, I can hear you through the whine”…great to see you’re very much “still on the line” 
Wow , I can’t believe I found this in an old cigar box of old photos , probably the only photo from those cable building days . I might have one or two more but finding them is a roll of the dice right now , I mean this was over fifty years ago . We were subcontractors , cable tv system companies hired our outfits to build all the outside , pole to pole plant , cut in the taps at each pole along with amps and line extenders .
If I remember correctly [ foggy , sex and drugs and rock and roll , a lot of booze too , along with wife # 1 ] this was in Teaneck N.J. early , early seventies .
Oh yeah , that’s me on the right .
I haven’t been on this site in a minute but I am always rewarded when I look at your threads buddy. That bike is coolness personified.
J
Ok , no kit engine , kinda sucks but it’s not a deal breaker , I’m kinda planning on
the hood being closed any way , also not a deal breaker but very , very annoying are the clear doors with no option for open windows , get the micro bits out , drilled out the wing window . The ladder rack is complete , just needs rust and weathering .
