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I received these gorgeous 1971 Plymouth 'W11' Wheel Covers last night (see link) , and they look perfect ! My plan is use them on the MPC 1971 Road Runner eventually ( though these 'covers aren't listed as being available for the Road Runner nor the GTX , I'm going to use them anyhow ---- they're my favourite wheel covers ! ) Highly recommended parts ! : 1/25 1971 Plymouth Valiant Hubcaps (4) (C4U55V3BR) by macstian (shapeways.com)

Those who know me are aware that I collect early custom survivors. In fact several of you have aided and abetted me in the pursuit! Dave Darby has a survivor board on Facebook called “Scale Survivors”. I pulled these photos out to share there so I figured I’d give you guys a peek too. The below two cars are as found, no restoration or mods needed. Just as the original builder created them in the 1962 era. They came from different sources, years apart, so they are not from the same builder. I consider these the folk art of our youth! Oh, if these babies could talk! An original AMT Styleline kit from 1962. It uses the kit’s front and rear treatments. What’s unusual is how well they were molded in by original builder. Monkey was one of several mascots AMT included in kits. Wires were found in several different kits. The thing that makes this car unique is the Kaiser peak on the rear window. Expertly done and still manages to use the kit glass. Builder didn’t do much in the interior other than using the kit supplied interior pattern stickers which have stayed in place better than most. Kit contains the reel to reel tape player and those awful plastic seat belts we all love to hate. The Revell 1962 Lancer done in a unique manner. Custom grille and the dual hood scoops! I believe this is the custom roof from the 1957 Thunderbird kit. It creates a prehistoric Barracuda look, as if Chrysler created that car one generation early! It really works here! Side view paint scheme does make car look longer. What’s spooky to me is how much like my old 1:1 1965 Barracuda this resembles! I had the Mopar 340 dual hood scoops on mine! Hope you guys enjoyed these. A lot of folks don’t get the survivor thing, especially early on when I started collecting these over 20 years ago. There were times I would pull one out of a junk box at a show and the dealer would say something like, “too far gone to restore to stock! Music to my ears!

I don't remember if I ever had a build thread on the board for this one... but this year's Christmas Amnesty Build is completed! So here we go Under Glass.... Here's where we started. Back when I got into models some 30 years ago, Scale Auto gave you a free classified ad when you subscribed. I used mine for a want ad "Valiants, Valiants Anywhere?" and I bought some kits and built ups. And some stuff just showed up! This one was in a package donated to me by a guy in Colorado who sent two such broken bodies. It sat in my Valiant junk box for years just like you see it. Most notable is that some kid's mother wrote his name on his toy so he wouldn't lose it. I remember mothers doing that when I was a kid! About 12 years ago (according to my Fotki album date!), I started this project. The Valiant body was trashed with play wear. The wheel wells were broken and it had little dents in the plastic all over it. Never mind the roof mishap. Somehow, somebody saved it anyway. The AMT Modified Stockers came out and I thought it would be neat to have a Valiant stocker. The original idea was to take the Falcon Stocker and just transplant it all into the Valiant shell. Simple enough? You know I never get off that easy. Once I had found the Falcon chassis didn't fit, and it was missing so much detail it didn't pass muster. I grabbed a chassis from a junker AMT '71 Duster and figured out how to shorten it. You just slice 5 scale inches out right in front of the rear spring mount, and it pins right together. It's right where there is no detail on the chassis so if you cut clean there is literally no putty work! The Valiant progressed. I cut out the hood and glued in the engine room from the Duster kit. There are small changes that occurred from 1963 to 1971 but nothing that would bother me with this model. And I was so pleased with my progress that I sacrificed a fairly clean 1964 Valiant body for a new roof. The other Valiant is in progress to be a convertible so it won't be wasted. I found that the interior from the Fireball 500 would fit the bill. After all it was the stock piece from this kit modified into the 2 seater. Yes, I know stock cars don't have two seats, but I decided to build more of an exhibition car that I'd want to own today. And just like the Stock Car Racing Experience cars you can ride in and drive at Pocono Raceway, this one is gonna have a passenger seat! The roll cage and wheels are the only thing that actually made it from the Falcon Stocker onto my model. I ruined THREE of the roll cages to get my final result. This was cut into MANY parts and all joined together with bits of straight pin. So for you guys who think we build by magic, nope! We just didn't give up. I'll also mention that the chassis under it is the second one too. There were mistakes made with the first one from a junker, and the second one came from an unbuilt donor car. Now we know how to do this for future builds. And just for illustrative purposes, here's the construction of the roll cage. As frustrating as it was! Working with pins is fairly easy, I use a cheap pair of wire cutters. As this car came into shape, I didn't want to use any of my precious 1963-65 Valiant / Barracuda bumpers since Modelhaus is gone. And they are light little bumpers on the real cars anyway. So I modified a set of '57 Chevy bumpers to fit the Valiant. They are cut in three pieces each to narrow them down and leave in the center detail. I left some of the welds visible. The front over rider is a bit bent up too. They are mounted on straight pins. Here we are ready for our two toning. There is plenty of Duplicolor primer gray under the Duplicolor white. Note the Tamiya tape is used for the critical edges, but the rest of the roof was then covered with cheaper 3M painters blue tape. And here's our first shot of the two tone with Duplicolor Flame Red. There was some minor clean up needed, which I did with light sand paper. I was pleased with the results. The paint job isn't supposed to be perfect. It's a cheap garage paint job on a local car. And that brings us to today! The Court Jester is a restaurant local to my home in New Jersey. There were a couple of them, and now there are just two in Aberdeen and Freehold, New Jersey. I always liked their mascot, he peeks out from different places in their menu, so I always wanted to use the theme on a model. So here it is. I made the decals on my inkjet printer. The "30"s are from the NNL East decal sheet. Note that the paint scheme was planned out to use decals on the white sections. The trunk decal was done on white decal paper as an experiment to see how well they covered. And the NNL East decals were professionally produced, so they don't have the short comings of ink jet decals. The "Thanks Mom!" on the back is a tribute to Martin Terry's mother for making sure he didn't lose this Valiant, and for saving it! Engine is the 340 from that same '71 Duster kit with just basic wiring. Air cleaner fit under the hood, I wasn't looking forward to cutting that ancient hood! The screen is cheap plastic window screen. I had a pack and wouldn't use it on my house, but it's perfect for model cars! Sharp eyes will note that our driver is none other than Martin Terry, the original owner of this model! Chuck Rehberger and I have this running joke about Martin and what would happen if he saw the finished model someday. As mentioned, chassis is a shortened version of the AMT '71 Duster unit. I made the exhaust from different exhaust system pieces found in my parts box. The gas tank was removed and replaced with Evergreen corrugated siding. This is my Christmas Amnesty Build for 2018, finished up last night. It really feels good to get this 12 year project into the display case! And I'll bet Chuck is pleased! And the Jester gives it a big Thumbs Up!

Wow! I've been doing this a long time (since 2000), and there are people who have joined in with me. The premise is that over the years I've had the week between Christmas and New Years off from work. And that's been the same for several companies. The president grants Thanksgiving Amnesty to a turkey every year. So I got the idea of granting Christmas Amnesty to a model car. I realized that I really didn't have enough time in a week to build a full project, but how about some half built model that's been languishing for years? So we began back in the year 2000 with a Dodge Ramcharger that I had completed the chassis and walked away. And we went on from there... and I've fallen off the past two years... not finishing in 2015 and I don't think I actually did a project at all in 2016. But here we are! So this year's project (Chuck are you with us so far?) is.... The Martin Terry 1963 Valiant. Many years ago someone gave me this body. It's an old promo that no doubt was given to young Martin as a toy. It has much play wear on it, and to keep him from losing his toys, it appears Mommy would write his name on them. Anyway, this poor old body came to me many years ago and went into the Valiant hoard I have, thinking maybe someday it would give up wheel wells or something towards another build. When the Modified Stocker series came out, my first thought was to take the Falcon and put the guts under a Valiant body. Then I discovered the chassis was a bit too simple so I employed the chassis from an AMT 1971 Duster old built up with this experiment. Here's the modified chassis, taking 5 scale inches out of it where you see the pins. The project got serious enough that I took the roof off a decent 1964 Valiant body! And I chose better tires. Then the project stalled! Here we go! The rule to Christmas Amnesty is that the model has to be done before going back to work on January 2nd. If a build gets more complicated, it can be built to completion later than Jan 2nd, as long as the work is continuous. That kicked in on the '34 Ford. There was so much good work I wanted to do on this, so it didn't get finished until late January. But I never quit, which is the spirit of this build. So who is gonna watch and cheer me on? And more important, who is gonna dig out an old project and go for it?! The link below is an album of all the Model Car Amnesty builds over the years. http://public.fotki.com/ModelCitizen/model_cars/my_model_cars/my-finished-models/the-model-car-amnes/

I also started this a while ago: I will also be making the truck eventually and put them both in a diorama. I will post a few pics of it at various stages so you all get the idea of how i did it. i cut and rotated the rear pillars to get the basic sedan shape.