horsepower

These are the American Torque Thrust 18" fronts and 19" rears that have been optional in quite a few of the Revell/Monogram releases through the years. I believe the first I saw them was either the Alternomad, or the Vett'Agin(?) kits, they were also offered in q '59 Corvette kit and since I have always been a sucker for the Torque Thrust wheels I pick up just about every set I can get, personally I think they are perfect for this build.

Saw a couple of them in half and use them as stands under the tires on one side and over a mirror to show off the under side of your show car. All you need to make it perfect is Southern Comfort or Jack Daniels decals and some cases of bottles to display with it.😁😉

Like the Pinto's with a 1200 cc engine, when they were never offered with one even in its infancy it was the English Ford 1600 cc engine that was in the engine bay. Sadly the best power plant that was offered in '71 - '73 Pinto's the German designed and built 2000 cc four cylinder was never acknowledged on the box advertising.

Beautiful job! I was curious about the Offy because I saw a very nice 1:1 scale '27 track T at a car show a couple of years back and have wanted to do something kinda like it and your build just poked at the coals and got the fire goin' again.

I was thinking about building a '41 Plymouth Panel delivery for a good friend of mine and was thinking about something different for power and was curious about what kits were released with one of those as an option (or only choice). I know there are a couple of trick 3D printed ones out there but I would like to do it with kit choices but would like to know what kits to dig out without having to go through every Mopar kit in my stash, that would truly be a time consuming task especially goin' into 100° temps starting next week. TIA, I know I will get answers.

If not I bet the smaller one from the '57 Ford NASCAR kit will be adaptable, maybe even the entire 312 Y block will work, I am thinking that to keep it vintage appearing that the chrome T-bird engine from the old '34 pickup kit might be a good idea.

Like the injected Lincoln V-12, I remember one of my friends in grade school had an older brother that ran one of engines in a dirt track super modified against the Chevy small blocks, didn't win anything but it sure sounded different and was a great crowd favorite. I'm curious about that lavender Roadster on the turntable, what kind of engine is in that? It almost looks like an Offy, or heaven forbid a Jag.... in a Model A??😉

Nice restoration! But you could sand the glue spot from the roof warning light off and spray just the roof in Tamiya Racing White (it's really close to the old Ford standby Wimbledon White) and it would still look correct. You could even probably do just the top surfaces from the normal two tone break line, but that's too much like work for me to do on a nice truck like this one. You never said if this is a recent Moebius kit or one of the original AMT annuals from my younger years. I remember when I was around 12-13 years old that a cousin I was spending the summer with built one and painted it with the AMT lacquer in a Kandy Apple Red over a Gold base, it was really beautiful for a junior builder.

In all of the deals that Round2 did with Lindberg, Polar Lights etc. I know that they ended up with at least a couple of the Testors/Lindberg kits i.e. the Smoothster and the Vanagon, and didn't they also get the custom Chopped Coupe with the '38 Special style nose? What I was curious about is what happened to the Aluma Coupe, Chezoom, and with all the excitement over the OBS Chevrolet pickup kits also from Round2 where is the Boyds Shop truck that was also the Eddie Van Halen truck? True it's a 1/24th kit but still has some possibilities for a builder what with the 1/24th releases of the square body Chevys there's some engine and running gear parts out there for an industrious builder. And there were full detail AND Quick Builder versions of most of those Boyds kits that would provide some nice parts and pieces the custom fans and that Chezoom Full Detail chassis has some real possibilities for making other earlier model shoebox era cars into some high tech Street Customs or Pro Touring builds. If only they could be drug out of the shadows and dusty storage bins and cut loose. Maybe they would even be of interest to someone like Atlantis if Round2 is kinda iffy on whether or not they would sell.

On our Pro4 mini stock we never seemed to have an overheating problem except a couple of times when we really had it sealed off for qualifying and they took six or eight cars at a time to the center of the figure eight track (Saugus Speedway in Southern California) and it was our first time there and the driver forgot about it being all taped up and sat there letting it idle and by the time he qualified (4th) and rolled back into the pits it was up to around 230° it hadn't over filled our recovery container that I had built with a 18" piece of 2" plated brass sink drain tube with a tight fitting freeze plug that was also brass soldered to the bottom to seal it off and a top for a radiator that we could put a twist on cap on and a fitting from that for the overflow if it ever got totally full enough so the water could be plumbed to the bottom of the windshield so the driver and crew would see it was pumping water out of the overflow, but we had a feed tube that came from the radiator overflow and into the tank and went all the way to 1/4" from the bottom so that it could still let the radiator overflow but it went into the tank and then when it cooled down the radiator would form a vacuum and pull water back from the overflow/recovery tank and into the radiator refilling it to its cool level. When qualifying had finished and he made it back to the pits you could hear water going into the overflow tank and it was boiling in there like a witches cauldron but hadn't started to push any water out so I untaped the grille and sprayed cool water onto the radiator cooling fins and when it stopped boiling let it sit and by the time the dash lined up the temperature was back to just below 180° perfect and we did win the dash and finished 4th in the A surprising a few of the other teams because we had never seen the track before and the water never exceeded 200° the rest of the night and my Mickey Mouse recovery tank was still on the car when it was sold years later.

Back in that time period all asphalt tracks required an overflow for the radiator and it was a loosely worded and enforced rule with them ranging from a metal tube into one of the front header tubes down enough that it couldn't run back into the exhaust port, the idea of this is the hot water would be basically steam and when it hit the much hotter exhaust it would turn to pure steam that theoretically would evaporate before hitting the track surface, but it had a bad effect at some places with a jumpy flagman who when seeing the big cloud for the first time would jump to the conclusion that it was oil from a damaged piston working its way through the exhaust and onto the track and would throw a yellow flag AND the black flag for the presumably offending car. One of the other favorites was to run the overflow hose into a frame rail and put a drain hole in the lower rear of the same rail that would usually allow any steam or hot water to condense and leak slowly out of the frame not being noticed by other racers, but it had a very dangerous side effect of causing the frame tubing to rust on the inside where it couldn't be seen, I have seen one of these cars literally fold up like an accordion when involved in a front collision with a dirt crash barrier. Another one was to put a gallon can in the interior of the car and put an overflow from it onto the floor of the car so it could be seen by the driver, I've also seen two of these fail, one resulting in some serious injuries the first was a gallon paint thinner can when it was built using the screw on lid and a half inch tube soldered into it as the overflow but with little thought as to any kind of an outlet just drilled an 1/8" hole in the top to allow it to vent, what wasn't considered was what would happen if it were to start really overheating filling the metal container faster than it could vent out that tiny little hole, well when the one gallon can grew to around a two gallon can and then decided to make a better vent by popping the top of the can open it really got the drivers attention, luckily it was on the other side of the car behind the driver when it failed. Unfortunately the other instance wasn't quite as lucky when the crew decided that an anti freeze bottle would make a perfect overflow container and would be easy to pour back into the cooling system if needed. But what nobody again thought about was what would happen to a plastic bottle that was filling with extremely hot water and steam, you guessed it exploded and this time it was just inside the firewall right across from the driver and resulted in serious second degree burns to about 40% of his body from the waist up and he was wearing an open face helmet and received some serious burns to his face also, and even the best firesuit has no protection from a hot fluid burn, in fact it can and will hold the hot water into contact longer with the skin. This happened to a driver who has recently retired but at the time was around 17 years old and I bet if you asked him today that Craig Raudman will still remember that night. Also in around 1969 Stock Car Racing Magazine and Dr. Dick Bergman built a project modified using what was considered at the time to be contemporary materials and methods it used a '57 Chevrolet frame from about the firewall back and a late '50 Chrysler product frame using the front suspension and steering complete with the front torsion bars and mounts for the rear with adjusters, it was also built using a Vega body and took a considerable time to get done what with staff changes and budget considerations. 😚

A lot of us short track racers from that era would take 1/4" or in a rough track area (bigger wheel banging) 3/8" steel rod and place it in place to fill the area inside the bead of the wheel and the actual surface of where the bead started to roll and weld into place completely around the bead of the wheel. This would strengthen the beads on the rims and keep them from being easily deflated and would also stop sharp edges from developing that were extremely hard on competitors tires.

Wasn't this released in a (Glidden?) Pinto version also?

I'd love to see a '64 Chevelle, especially if it was a bench seat Malibu. It'd be really cool if the model manufacturers would release more mid range optioned cars and less of the top of the line ones.

I wonder why it wouldn't be possible to pop in the tires and wire wheels from the Revellogram 1/24th scale Deuce Roadster that had its origins in the L'il Deuce copy of the 1/8th scale Big Deuce kit.

Tim! Now that's just plain evil, you definitely know how to keep a few hundred (at the least) rabid model car builder/collectors in suspense. By the time your hints become known items half of us will have imagined about a jillion kits that they're absolutely sure to be the ones that are going to be released. In the meantime you sit there with a cup of coffee watching the lower life forms drive themselves into a total frenzy arguing with each other that each one of them is sure THEY are the ones who are in the know.😆

Maybe those rumored Pro Stock kit rereleases are more fact than fiction!?

Pop off the "pony" tire and stick a jack stand under the axle, then it will really give it a "Hot Rod" look. I like what you did with the extinguisher, you could have given it a light dusting of a transparent orange (that's what they use for gold anodized parts) and given it a polished brass look too.

You could just use one of the roadster frames and graft on the rear crossmember from one of the earlier Model A kits and use the "buggy" rear spring and using the spring mounts and possibly even the rear axle from the '48 Ford kit or maybe the one from the AMT '41 Hot Rod Woodie. Not much different than using a different engine and trans, or changing the interior and I almost guarantee that there will be a lot of that going on.

I would put a Ford 2.3 four cylinder in it with two side draft Weber carbs, these little engines make well into the 300 horsepower range with some of the Esslinger Engineering parts. They even make a plate that bolts to the fuel injection manifold that fit a Holley four barrel carb if you don't want the Weber carbs, oh by the way a Ford produced a manifold for them, and Esslinger has a D port aluminum head that without any work flows better than the best factory OEM manifold worked to the maximum possible and the best thing about it is that it has a Ford part number and is available through a Ford parts department.

If they really wanted to build a rare NASCAR model they should look at the San Jose Super Modifieds, both the earlier asphalt ones or the later dirt supers that raced at the fairgrounds and until they were outlawed by the World Of Outlaws who didn't want Super Modifieds whipping up on their Sprint cars they were the only Super Modifieds sanctioned by NASCAR anywhere in the country and that alone would make a few want them to settle their curiosity and there would be a lot of short track racers who would buy multiples just for parts to build dirt or early asphalt race cars.

I was looking at a new Mustang the other day and two colors really got my heart rate up, one was a pearl yellow tint that is a tri coat requiring a pearl yellow, or even a bright gold base with a transparent. (Kandy) mid coat and a top coat(s) of clear, the other is one that I originally saw on a gen 7 Corvette and it's a red tint tri coat and the colors are even available from Tamiya to make it easier, first use one of the Metallic or Pearl reds (the Red metallic will have a little more glitter, or sparkle however you want to call it, and a pearl or Mica red will have a "glow" to the highlights because the pearls are a lot finer metallic) then use transparent red over it as a mid coat just remember the more you add the more you high the base and the darker the red, I try to just get the color even and stop there but it's purely up to the painter. And again the final coats are clear that's the "Tri" part in a Tri Coat color. Good luck I know you'll find a good color even if you have to look at a House of Kolor chip book for getting that just right repeatable color (you know how nice cars seem to attract parking lot chips and dings and don't even get me started on birds or that one neighbor who thought giving his kid a BB gun for Christmas was a good idea.😂😂😉

Those are beautiful pieces of engineering but with those rods they're definitely not the ones submitted for NASCAR use, also the NASCAR engines didn't have roller cams as they weren't allowed. In fact when Bobby Allison won the race in California in one of the Penske Matadors they were caught running a roller cam and claimed they didn't know that they were not allowed. But somehow I don't see Penske Racing not knowing every little clause in the rule book.

Didn't Pete Jackson make a complete gear drive for these that he ran in a AA/FD?

I'm thinking it looks like two of the inline four barrel carbs that Ford used on the Trans Am Boss 302 engines. I think they are Autolites but were Weber or Delorto copies.