Nice work Zen too bad nobody makes a GMC grille since GMC used Pontiac engines back then.
from the Lindberg kit:
leafs shortened 1 mm:
To make the change I simply cut the leaf just in front of the rearend pearches and shortened the front segments. Then I drilled all of the pieces out and super glued a piece of wire into the holes to pin them together and give them some strength.
The K member was much more involved. In the Lindberg kit there are 8 attachment points for the front end parts, 4 blocks where the K member attaches to the front frame rails, 2 blocks that attach the lower control arms, and the 2 upper control arms where the spindles attach. First thing I did was cut off the lower control arm "blocks" and attach them to the actual lower control arms on the K member piece. On a real 62 (or any year Mopar B body) these pieces wouldn't actually exist, they just give the plastic pieces extra support. Well, actually, just the part that ataches to the frame rails wouldn't exist, part of this piece would be part of the real lower control arm where the torsion bar enters it. Next I cut away all 4 of the blocks where the K member attaches to the frame rails. Again, these pieces wouldn't exist on a real car. In 1:1 the K member would bolt directly into the frame rails. Once the blocks were removed I white glued ( I can't tell you how much I love Micro Krystle Kleer) them to the K member and relocated the K member where the wheels were centered in the wheelwells and marked where the blocks should go.
"stock" K member location:
"new" K member location:
I moved the K member back 2 mm. I left the upper control arms in place for all of this work so that I had a reference point to work off of. The blocks are now glued into their new location on the front frame rails but the K member still isn't glued on yet. Next step will be cutting the upper control arms from the frame and relocating them. Side note; if I was working with an AMT chassis (68 Road Runner, 69 GTX, or 70 Coronet) all of this work would have been MUCH easier as the front frame rails are molded as a seperate piece and I could have cut the mounting pins and slid the whole thing backwards 2 mm. Second side note; I was discussing all of this work with my friend Chris (von Zipper) and he asked a simple question. "wouldn't it have been easier to cut the frame rails and remove 2 mm then reattach them?" Short answer.......YES !!!......but.......I would have had to have known that the wheelbase was going to be adjusted before starting this build. When I did start, you might remember, the chassis out of the box didn't fit under the JoHan 62 body so I had to cut away at the rear of the chassis and the front splash pan. If I had known ahead of time I would have to adjust the wheelbase I could have cut the frame rails then and although I would still have had to trim the front splash pan it wouldn't have been as much. Since I had already cut the splash pan if I had cut the front frame rails I would have ended up with a gap at the front between the body and the chassis. The way Chris suggested doing it would actually be the prefered way to do this as it would move the radiator back also which would be more correct than the way I'm doing things but as I've stated, I didn't know all of this when I started. Who would have though that it would have been so much work to put a 64 Mopar chassis under a 62 Mopar ???.....in 1:1 they are essentially the same, in plastic, the Lindberg kit is VERY off in many dimentions compaired to the real car. Its surprising that nobody on any forum has ever called them out on these kits (the 64 Plymouth has many of the same dimentional problems). Now that all of that is sorted out the only real hurtles left are correcting the dept of the interior and paint. The interior should be pretty easy, I'm not even going to bother trying to add more detail to the JoHan door panels even though I'd like to, that seems like too much of a challenge, I think I'll just add the arm rests from the Lindberg kit and extend them down to meet with the chassis. Paint might give me a problem as I've never tried to paint in this kind of climate and I'll be using an old can of Testors enamel rather than the new laquers I've gotten used to over the past few years.
Edited by slantasaurus, 10 August 2012 - 05:05 PM.
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