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Coversion kits of the 90's-00's


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Anybody remember this god awful idea? 137737210yoiHs1IgIMG_3192.jpg I remember a friend did this to his 86 Elky he spent like $3000 to do it. I seem to also remember a kit to convert your chevy truck with a 49-53 chevy looking front end. what other silly kits where out there? I have another in mind but don't

remember much I think it was a lincoln that you

could convert into sometype of duesenburg looking thing

I want to see silly conversion kits

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I didn't take any pics but just last month I was at a car show and saw a 90's T-bird with the 49/50 Ford front and rear conversions........it didn't look any better or worse than the car they started with.

There is something like that around here in Milwaukee...90's T-bird with the conversion. It's at just about any car show in the area and I still refuse to take a picture of it. This is just my opinion...it's just too stupid and it's not even cool. I guess beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

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The period styling of the custom parts just doesn't jell well with the modern lines of the donor. I don't get why people do this kind of thing, but whatever floats yer boat. I've seen a number of the C5-based Corvette conversions that use '50s and '60s front and rear Corvette styling and they just don't look right...something always looks odd about them.

One truck based one I saw a while back was an S10 w/ a late '30s style Chevy truck nose, just hideous.

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They're still around...only now they try to make a new Challenger look like a Barracuda, or make a new Camaro into a GTO Judge or a '69 Trans-Am. Great idea...spend thirty grand on a new car, then tack a bunch of fiberglass parts on it. And if any of them get damaged, you're locked in to one source for replacement parts, so you pay their price...if they are still around later.

A while back, there was a conversion that was supposed to make an S-10 look like a '39 Studebaker pickup. But when you have to paint "39 Studebaker" on the front of the thing to tell people that's what it's supposed to be, then maybe the conversion isn't too convincing.

There was one with a Deuce grille shell, that went on a VW Beetle. The '40 Ford nose is passable (a Chrysler Airflow would have been more so IMO) but a '32 Ford don't look anything like a VW.

I've actually got one of those '49 Ford/Thunderbirds pretty far along, with a Revell '90 or '91 kit. At first, it was pretty close to the way the 1:1 conversion was done, but the '49-'51 hood rises up too much at the center to look right on the T-bird body. I did flatten the hood out, it looks better, but right now it's back in the box awaiting further inspiration. The T-Bird only cost me three bucks...

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Does any one remember the VW beetle conversions for a 70's Lincoln hood with a Continental kit for the rear deck lid or a 40 Ford Hood ? They Actually had a Lincoln kit made up for the Ford Pinto as well.

My best friend had the fiberglass 40 Ford nose on his 58 Bug. He spent a fortune having a metalworker duplicate it in aluminum, and then modifying the rest of the body to look like a mini 40 Ford. When he ran out of funds and needed a driver, he chopped the front and back ends off, made it into a Baja Bug and dropped a Capri V-6 into it. What a mess.

I had forgotten how hideous that Rollswagen was.

Edited by Draggon
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Then there was this awful mess built by Automobile Atlanta, loosely based on a design I did for them to stretch a 904 on to a 914. Again, bodged proportions and impossible to build as their "fiberglass expert" re-designed it.

i268.photobucket.com-12871-1353354463.1.

After it became apparent that what they had was junk, (it wasn't symmetrical, being as much as 7/8" different from side to side, some parts wouldn't come out of the molds properly and it took a VERY competent body shop to install what was billed as being a father-son project) I was commissioned to entirely re-work the car back to my original design. The work is shown here in progress at my place. This gen-2 version was never completed (due to financial and legal issues), though a lot of folks have taken credit for the design and the work.

9014-2.jpg

Edited by Ace-Garageguy
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