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Having worked with quite a number of kids of varying ages at our club's "Make & Take" events at our ACME show and through events at the Savoy Automobile Museum, I'd strongly suggest for the 6-7 year old range to use the Airfix kits. They look good finished, go together like Legos, have relatively easy instructions to follow. We've done enough of these events to know what works and what doesn't. All the other suggestions I've seen will end up frustrating most kids age 12 and below. Tiny parts, getting them to fit, etc. Kids that are teenagers can better handle traditional snap kits, and often don't require adults to help them. A lot of them are like adults, just sitting quietly working on the model at their own pace. As a general guideline, for those under the age of 10, definitely try to use Airfix kits. The next step up the ladder, for ages 10-12, Revell's simpler "Build & Play" kits are fine. For ages 13-up Revell's regular snap kits, any of the snap-kit Polar Lights kits as well as Aoshima's newer 1/32 snap kits are good. All kids are unique, so you'll see some have better attention spans than others in all age ranges. Some kids just don't have it in them, no attention span at all, others are like "I've got this, don't need any help". YMMV. The ones whose parents are involved in the process (interacting with them while helping the kids) seem to have better success. Atlantis is/was the only company offering bagged make & take kits, the problem is/was they were extremely janky 1/32 scale vintage drag kits that while simple in nature were a nightmare to deal with. We ended up painting a bunch of the bodies and pre-doing some sub-assemblies because those kits will frustrate adult builders as well. Revell & Round2 don't seem to be at all interested in providing make & take kits any longer.

Tamiya TS-101 Base White. By far the best white primer I've ever used. Very pigment dense, covers quickly, dries to a slight semigloss sheen. It's worth seeking out. Their regular white primer is quite good, but nobody's white primers I've tried even comes close to this stuff. Black plastic? No problem. Worth the $$, it saves you in the long run by conserving the paints applied over it.

That is amazing! Nice work 😎 Well worth the years of effort.

Great work so far! Interesting conversion, and I recently acquired the latest Monogram '64 GTO reissue to compare side-by-side w/the original built AMT '64 GTO I got from an estate sale collection, including fresh Modelhaus chrome the previous owner procured to restore it. I built the Monogram '64 decades ago in a very similar color to the one you've chosen, I want to build the fresh kit as a HT this time with skills acquired in the decades that have passed. Looking at your build inspires me to get my Revell '66 kit out and see what's what. I loved building the '65 GTO Craftsman kit and a pair of '68's as well in the past few years.

Looking forward to seeing this, it brings back memories! In the mid-90's someone local chopped a 1:1 Edsel and showed it at the Goodguys show in Perry GA, and it may have gotten a national Goodguys award as next year it was on their T-shirts. I fell in love with the car. Then surprise of all surprise, the Modelhaus offered a trans-kit of the same car for use with the then-updated AMT '57 Ford w/the new custom interior pieces. I had to have it! The real car was a 90's shade of teal (non-metallic). I decided to paint mine a pearl tangerine orange. IIRC the bumpers were molded to the body. This was peak '90's pastel look.

I find it hilariously ironic that the color I despise on a new Miata isn't terribly far off the color I'm currently working on with a new Tamiya GT3 RS 😁

Just like the tire melt from some of the original kits they cribbed. In my foggy memory, didn't the tires have a groove for a whitewall insert? If so, that whitewall insert will be the first thing to melt...the generic wheels were plated.

Not sure but it might be an old Entex/Bandai kit, IIRC theirs was 1/16th scale. From foggy memory this looks like it could be one of those.

Thanks! There's some major irony that I painted the Porsche Olive Green while complaining about a sorta/not sorta similar color Mazda is using in another thread here about ugly paint colors, specifically for their Miata. Somehow I accept the Porsche color while the Mazda Zircon Sand makes me barf when used on a Miata. Then again as a model builders we can paint any model, any color we desire.

Agreed. I have a few friends w/orange '19 anniversary cars. One got totaled at the race track unfortunately. One sold a vintage $400k Porsche at Monterey and bought a new Miata with part of the proceeds, his Turo rental for Monterey was an ND Miata and he fell in love with it, he was going to get a Boxster until that drive. I love that bright orange combo w/the Recaro seats.

One of my old friends, also a Miata owner, his wife has a Mazda3 turbo hatch in that color scheme. I haven't seen it, they love it. One of my friends showed up at the ACME show in his new/used Mazda3 hatch in Soul Crystal Red with a manual transmission. I hope to get to take a spin in it. He practically stole it from a Toyota dealer, he had to do all the driving to even get it out of the lot on a test drive because nobody at the Toyota dealer knew how to drive a manual LOL. I recently helped my sister shop for a new car, she got a pearl white w/dark red Nappa leather interior'd CX 70 Turbo S and she loves it. First new non-Toyota product for her (other than Mom's Z3) since the mid-80's. That CX 70 feels more like my old Protege5 than I could have imagined, weighs 500 lbs. more than the Lexus she owned previously and is now mine, but drives 500 lbs. lighter. It really scoots, and has actual steering feel.

It's 1/25th. All those Hasegawa American cars cribbed in the '60's were copied from American model kits.

Those kits are a completely different animal than the recent subjects I showed, it's been decades since I bought one of the old-school American kits from them. Fairly accurate bodies that were copied from US kit manufacturers, but with generic interiors/chassis. IIRC Tamiya even had a '65 Chevy (or similar) in their lineup, 1/25th scale, I believe primarily for slot cars. They pretty much match (body dimensions) 1/25th scale. With some work you can get a really nice model out of them, depending on your own level of skill and desired results. I built the Pontiac years ago, used some AMT guts underneath, looks pretty okay next to an AMT kit (they have their own design issues) and have the Cadillac in my stash. I'm not averse to making something from it...I had the opportunity years ago to drive a friend's Dad's mint '65 or '66 Coupe DeVille, I'd build my kit to emulate that particular car, maroon with a black vinyl top and parchment interior, but might make add some modern flair to it. They're curbside kits. I love curbside kits. I'm a designer and I'd make a lousy mechanic 😆 I'd love it if Hasegawa took even one of those vintage models they cribbed nearly 60 years ago and went full-bore on making a modern kit to their new standards. Probably will never happen...and it might be a huge financial mistake on their part.

I have despised the sea of gray scale that has dominated in the past 30+ years. Yet now I no longer have a Mazda (had a white Protege5, that cured me of white on at least a hatchback) and a bright red Miata, and now have a really nice Lexus in a boring shade of nebula gray. Go figure. I'm still a Mazda fan though, and I was disgusted when they started making (and selling very few thankfully) Zircon Sand Metallic MX5 Miatas. Saw my first one in Naples FL a couple years back, an RF retractible HT no less, it was way worse in person than pics and have only ever seen a handful of them since. Why Mazda offers only boring colors aside from Soul Crystal Red is so sad...they're built alongside nearly every other Mazda in Japan, some having cooler colors than any Miata (at least stateside). This color looks better in photographs than it does to the naked eye in person. It's almost okay on a CX-50, barely acceptable on a Mazda3, but on the Miata it's just atrocious. I did see one with a black soft top that wasn't as bad, the black contrast helped a lot...but still, NO.

Incredibly nice work on both!