Mark

That other glass looks like the one from the MPC 1/20 scale AMX kit. That kit wasn't reissued until the Round 2 era, so it's strange that one wound up in a kit manufactured before they were doing anything with it.

The body got converted back to stock. Look at the inside of any of the reissue '67 GTO bodies, and you'll see where the wheel openings were moved back to stock, and the exhaust holes in the deck lid area were filled in.

I wish I'd picked up some of the prints of Tom West's cutaway drawings back when he offered them!

The AMT ('94) Lightning has been around in its current issue for awhile now. I picked one up a couple of years ago at Hobby Lobby at closeout price. Strangely, they later had it back again at regular price. The Maverick was likely a one-production-run thing. Producing too many means some of them end up at closeout stores or lingering on hobby shop shelves which could hurt the next issue a few years down the road. Better to come up short and leave a few people wanting.

Both Round 2 and Revell tend to announce no more than the kits for the coming quarter. Atlantis seems to go a bit further out, being a smaller operation.

If you take a good look at their later kits ('63 or so onward) the engraving on some of the parts (like bumper/grille units) is not terrible. They were limited by target price and the limitations of the tooling design avoiding slides to produce one-piece bodies. Having to use one chassis and one accessory parts tree for everything didn't help either. When they did get better tooling design and could shoot for a higher target price (PSM) they did get better, though they didn't really have any kit designers. The PSM kits were cribbed from MPC kits (Mustang was a combination of AMT and MPC). But Pyro did do some interesting things even with the limitations of the non-slide tooling design. Had they done their brass era car kits in 1/24 or 1/25 scale, they might have hung in longer. Their Design-A-Car kit was ugly as sin, but they sold a BLAH_BLAH_BLAH_BLAH-ton of them. They would have sold even better in 1/25 instead of the 1/20 or so that it was.

As with later kits, Palmer used some of the same parts trees across all, or nearly all, of their car kits. The "other" engine is on the tree molded in black, which was needed in the Porsche kit for the tires.

A new high, in low!

I've got the MGA kit (bought it cheap, the body looks about 1/25 scale). I think it has that same engine and chassis. I'll have to take a look at it...

Engine is cribbed from one of the Revell 1/32 scale '55 or '55 car kits. They say it has an engine included, didn't say it's anywhere near correct. I don't think it gets any better when it comes to the chassis...

The sedan and phaeton kits are to a large extent based on the Victoria; same chrome tree, chassis, and fenders. AMT tooled the phaeton body in the late Sixties and utilized the existing custom sedan body a few years later. It's strange they didn't do the Victoria based sedan when they instead did the phaeton. It was in the 1968-69 period that the Willys/sedan double kit was converted to a single car (Willys) with the pickup option added. The sedan body would have been sitting unused then, and AMT itself floated the idea of using it on the Victoria kit earlier. They would only have needed an interior, as opposed to a body, interior, and top for the phaeton.

I'm thinking this particular tire is molded from a softer material. Using the same material as other tires may have made the molded tire tough to remove from the mold during production. I don't believe Round 2 has used this tire in any of their kits. That could be due to not having BF Goodrich licensing, but could be for other reasons.

It only stands to reason that, when you have ten gears instead of four or five, and the two transmissions are roughly the same size and weight relative to one another, everything inside the ten-speed's case is going to be smaller, thinner, and weaker.

Another solution would be to use resin wheel halves, inside and outside.

Costly research if you haven't got the magazine, but there's an issue of Rodders' Journal with a center spread of a beautifully chopped '37 Chevy coupe in bare metal (or "baremetal"; RJ always printed that as one word).

Pure luck. Earlier this year, I spotted damage on the wheels of a '72 GTO I had built in the early Eighties using those tires. The kit inner wheels, and the outers ("honeycomb" wheels from a mid-Seventies MPC Chevy Monza) were all painted on their outer surfaces (outers were stripped of plating). Still got the gumball effect. Took it apart, edges of outers and inners were softened. Sanded all of that off, repainted the wheel edges, and reassembled. Tires used this time were AMT hollow Goodyear Polyglas with molded-in lettering, same as I used on a '71 Trans-Am rebuild I did around the same time as the Goat. No problems noted with the Trans-Am.

I'd almost bet it is from the Revell Tommy Ivo "Showboat" four-engine dragster kit.

Bingo. They might have a bunch of paperwork to fill out right now, probably don't want to get involved with that, so the listing was changed. If/when something changes, the listing can be revised again. They probably have the listing repeating every thirty days or so, and don't want to pull it while the tariff thing shakes out.

I believe he's "making a statement". I bought some Tamiya enamel paints from him awhile back; prices and shipping were quite reasonable then. I spotted the same massive shipping increase when I went back thinking I'd get some more. Needless to say, I'm holding off for now. The Tamiya enamels are quite good, hopefully they will be offered here at some point.

If the chassis is attached with metal rivets (screws without slots in the head, for lack of a better description) they are original promos. If the "rivets" are silver plastic pins, they're X-EL repops which are probably worth more than any but the best condition originals (because of the non-warping materials used). The X-EL repro promos were very well done finish-wise. Some of them lack interiors (in spite of X-EL's propaganda saying the originals didn’t have them either), most have the no-detail plastic chassis plate with provisions for a friction "motor" that isn't there, and at least one had some jury-rigged assembly like a taxi sign propping up the interior bucket). But would many of us like the chance to buy another...you bet!

The wheels on the Leal Duster look like they are the ones that came in the kit. MPC used similar wheels in other kits in that time frame: the Switchers T and Deuce, the '67 Streaker 'Vette, to name a couple.

What year(s)? The original Jo-Han promos were all acetate through the 1963 model year. They did reproduce '56, '57, and '58 promos through their X-EL division in the Seventies and Eighties. Those are molded in ABS which does not warp and has a nice shine also.

Not so much different size, but rather different interpretations of the same item decades apart, by different people, using different methods to get from A to B. That happens in the aircraft and armor modeling realms also; you have the Fifties kits designed in a hurry to be the first one on store shelves, scaled from aerial photos with measurements determined according to the size of the concrete slabs around the hangar, versus more modern kits designed with measurements taken from now-obsolete units in museum settings. I used to be bothered by things like that, now it's part of the fascination with the heritage of the hobby. For example it's interesting to see multiple interpretations of the same subject, like AMT, MPC, old and new Revell C2 Corvettes, or all of the different '57 Chevies now out there.

Notice the backwards leaning lettering on the Barracuda. MPC made the lettering for both sides exactly the same, meaning it is wrong for one side. The Missile project involved a few ex-Ramchargers personnel; like their cars, the Missile lettering should lean forward at the top on both sides!

Earlier today, while putting away the lawnmower, I spotted a neighborhood cat taking a squirrel to lunch (not as his guest). The cat seemed to be proudly strutting down the sidewalk carrying his meal. I'd have liked to see him making the actual catch, much as I like watching the neighborhood squirrels.