Rick R

Yep. GM killed it long before it stopped breathing, unfortunately. We'll be doiing a coffee table book on the C/D GTO in 2013, the pics are just stunning and this will tell the whole history of the car at a point near its 50th birthday. Till then, check out www.GeeToTiger.com, Jim Wangers' website. Jim has been the standard bearer for the Pontiac hobby for decades, and was the original owner of the C/D GTO...

A friend's mom when I was in high school had a surf green '57 BA Vert, so rusty you could look through the windshield and see the ground behind the car. That might be a neat one to do...

Just a great kit, one of the foundations of Monogram's re-emergence as a force in the hobby starting in the early '80s. I did the cover article in Muscle Car Review magazine (August '07) on the Car & Driver magazine GTO v. GTO road test '64 GTO, probably the most significant Pontiac on the planet, and this kit is spot on for every element of a replica of that specific car.

One of the best kits the hobby has ever seen, period.

I like the early 60s Pontiacs too... My dad ws working for Chrysler Corporation Aerospace in Huntsville and got into the new car thing in '60 with the first of five new Pontiacs as he worked up the line and added options every year. His '64 was a Nocturne Blue Grand Prix, and of course I got the promo and the kit. The resin body is definitely the way to go...

I LOVE this stuff! Oddest Box art is a tossup between the AARI cop car kits and the old Hubley '60 Ford wagon kit. The AARI Dodge/Plymouth Police car kits showed some kind of gunfight/shootout between the San Diego County Sheriff's Department and some miscreant, but the distances reminded me of the old Naked Gun TV and movies where the combatants were a couple of feet apart... The Hubley Ford Wagon art was dumb even when I was a little kid... the wagon, festooned with dopey flame decals, tack-on mirrors. antennas and spotlights, was depicted as competing... winning!... a dirt track stock car race, with the flagman leaping skyward waving the Checker as the car careened through a corner, its inboard wheels aloft. It was a confusing image probably rendered by a 'square' illustrator who had never seen or heard of any racing events ever. Funny. Dumb. So bad it was good. The AARi kits got critical of American society through the 70s and 80s and I always thought they should have been more appreciative of the market. After all, we were buying their kits not to build, but to mine for parts!

Lookin' good, Mike! I have seen a few Starliners that have the roof trim area done in a different color, looks good sometimes. Lots of foil needed on these!

John DeLorean was heading Pontiac at the time and tried a coupla times to get a sports car for Pontiac, but GM never agreed. A couple of Banshees were prototyped, one an OHC six, then this one, GM brass still resisted, gave Pontiac a Camaro variant instead, it became the Firebird, they did well with it.

Nice work and as usual an entertaining and engaging story...

Lookin' good... I sense a theme...

CARS FOR THE MOVIE were built from wrecked/used Mark III Continentals at Barris' shops in SoCal. The main thing you'd be looking for is the 'chopped' roofline, best sourced from the AMT '70 T'Bird. the rest of te body was just rolled sheetmetal welded at the inside of the 'roll'. Do the same thing with sheet plastic... Hardest part will be the bumpers and grille... Good luck!

Interesting path you've chosen here! That Buttera chassis would probably cost $40000 to build today, and is a neat alternative to the truly ratty rat rod underpinnings normally found on those cars, so you may have invented a new genre'... the 'poser' Rat Rod!... Just think! All the technical advantages of a modern street rod with little to none of the polishing necessary! and NO JAGGED EDGES!

Re: The 4-4-2 Depending on the person filling out the order forms at the dealer, 2-tones were still popular into thee mid-60s. In '72 I bought a beautiful '66 4-4-2 post coupe in Fort Walton Beach Florida where I was stationed in the Air Force, and oddly enough it was silver blue with a white painted roof just like the new box-art car. The 'vert kit is a blast, best -up top ever- it's an A/C equipped 4-barrel car and of course the parts from the Hardtop are interchangable. Love the wire wheel covers in that kit! The kit replicates a pretty fast car, with the W-30 and a 4-speed. I wasn't so lucky, mine was an Automatic 4-barrel, still a stout car for all of $850, ($250 down and $53 a month/18 months) I put 23k miles on it in a year, had a blast, pretty much ruined it but I shoulda kept it. I'm why they're rare! re: the Z-16 Since this was a really high buck package for the Chevelle lots of dealers ordered the cars (only 201 were made) 'loaded' to the gills with options, including vinyl roofs. The Exact Detail line of 18th scale die casts offered the Z-16 in every color scheme available, red, yellow, and black, each color with and without a vinyl roof. Great models though the Revell kit is more accurate.

Nicely done! Always great top see a fine model shown the proper respect! A little Cobra trivia... Years ago I interviewed Dean Jeffries for TV, he painted the first Cobra, CSX2000, four different colors in four months for Carroll Shelby. Shel had only one car, wanted people to think he had more. Shel and his crew picked it up the first time (pearl yellow) at DJ's shop as they left L.A. to drive to Detroit for the first money meeting with Ford, towing the Cobra on a single-axle trailer behind a Falcon Wagon. Think about that... 2000+ miles towing an equal weight to the tow car... bias ply tires, crowned roads, drum brakes, one axle, towing a now-priceless car... Guys had stones...

Paint looks great, Mike, far better than the actual car! Are you going to shave the 'F' off the hood? Most episodes the car was without that. Re: Simon & Simon, it did last 8 seasons but only because of the writer's strike, same reason Crime Story had a second season. It was NOT a good thing for Jameson Parker, who'd been signed to do a sitcom which went away because S&S came back and he was under contract. Universal just re-shot old scripts in that last year, and most weren't very good. The series had done a great send-off episode at the end of S7, 'May The Road Rise Up...' partly shot at Barris Kustoms in North Hollywood. That one's worth a search, but the series DVD didn't sell well so it may never see the light of day.