Sammy Swindell Channellock sprint car kit

[Guest boyfiat]

Hello all. Does anybody know about this kit? Esp. photos of the kit. Would you call it an average kit or what? Does it have a lot of chassis detail? I intend to put another body over it. Thanks

[Casey]

Not sure how similar these two kits are, but there's some info and pice here: http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=53721&hl=%22sprint+car%22

[DaveM]

These all started as the Monogram sprint cars released in 1987. At the time, they were state of the art kits of an up to date, cutting edge W.o.O. Gambler car. The chassis parts have decent, but not perfect detail. The chassis itself features some squared off tubes where the real car was round, and has an insert section that takes a bit of putty and sanding to make perfect. I think the hoods and a few other parts have been updated again and again to keep up with the real cars, and the wheels are newer, but if you are looking for a state of the art sprinter, you will need to do a lot of scratch building. If you are looking to build an '80s or early '90s sprinter then get one of the older issues. They are pretty spot on.

Right after the first kit was released, two changes occurred in real sprinters. The hoods went from the old style with the airbox on top to a rounded off version that was referred to as a "Boat Hood" by racers around here. The second group of releases in the '90s had this hood, and they are well done. The second change was to downtube chassis. That was also added to the kit during one of the early updates, but the downtubes don't quite match up with the rest of the roll cage in terms of cross section. With a bit of sanding, it can look pretty close though.

If you are building the car without the top wing, you will want to either add some material to the front of the roll cage or clip the part of the wing mount off and glue it to the cage to cover up the big flat spot on the wing mount. It's no big deal and easy to do. That's about what I remember from this kit. Seems like about half of them were bought for the rear tires to use on street rods or pro street cars back in the early days. (People bought them in pairs to get two matching sets of rear tires) The rear tires are staggered, just like the real ones. Use the big tire on the right of course. The front tires are ribbed, not cross treaded. The rear tires are pretty close to the Hoosiers we ran, but they had GoodYear lettering on them. (We scraped off the lettering and stenciled them with either GoodYear, McCreary, Firestone or Hoosier markings as the real tires tended to have painted markings in those days.)

Hopes this helps a bit,

Dave