* How can one man own every model Mercedes ever built? Easy: He owns every (scale) model Mercedes ever built. What’s more, Mihail Neagu has taken to photographing them all, Michael Paul Smith style, and creating tiny people to populate his 1/18-scale worlds. (via)
* As we noted a few years ago, Clessie Cummins, in his efforts to get automakers to adopt diesel power, installed a Model U diesel engine into a 1920s Packard. Over at The Old Motor, Gene Herman recently posted some more information and photos of that exact diesel Packard.
* If you’ve been following the Dakar this year, you’ll note the usual amount of misadventure. What you likely won’t see, however, is the lead competitor’s vehicle stolen, but that’s exactly what happened in 1988, as Andy Hallbery wrote this week on Motorsport Retro.
* For a supposed abandoned Soviet-era automobile factory, the unspecified ZIS/ZIL one that English Russia recently posted photos of looks rather well kept.
* Finally, our research on opposed-piston engines this past week led us to many more examples of those strange and uncommon creatures as well as a history on the type by Edgar T. Westbury at ModelEngineNews.
