1968 Shelby Green Hornet-----Update! 8/4/18

[MrObsessive]

I had a bit of posting trouble with these pics here, but all's well now.

All done now with the lateral struts in place as well as the control arms which are in place where the car's original leaf springs would have been.

Note the brake and fuel lines have now been put in............

Of course, there are some things I had to "fudge". Some of the pics I have of certain parts were taken at odd angles, and I don't have a shop manual for this setup.

Interesting enough, I see no emergency brake cable of any sort on the chassis in the many 1:1 pics I have of this car. More than likely since this was basically a test bed sort of car, Ford didn't worry about that since the car wasn't necessarily street driven or registered to be on the road for that matter.

So in that case, I'm leaving it off of this one!

Now I get to move on to the front suspension which won't be near as difficult as it'll build up pretty much like I did my '67 Mustang. Then it's on to semi fabricating the exhaust, painting and putting back in the gas tank, and finally I get to move on to the interior which will be a bit of a challenge there.

Thanks for tuning in and the encouragement along the way!

Edited November 24, 2017 by MrObsessive

[bobthehobbyguy]

Coming along nicely. Impressive work.

[doggie427]

Absolutely beautiful work there Bill.

[br67]

Bill, All I can say is WOW!

[blunc]

great progress, thanks for all the pix.

[Curt]

Really nice work on that independent rear suspension, Bill.  I'm enjoying following this build.

[FabbricaP]

Wow incredible work Bill! Keep the updates coming! 

[gtx6970]

Wow.

 

 

[Codi]

Always been a fan of your work Bill.  Nicely done.  cheers, tim

[skid896]

Really looking forward to following this build, fantastic car.

[Modelbuilder Mark]

Very cool stuff you are doing here....as always.

[Nonlocality]

Any updates on this fantastic build, Bill?

[MrObsessive]

I did recently manage to get the chassis done, and now I'm working on the interior. Sorry I've been a bit AWOL on this build, but I'm in another modeling slump due to work, and soon I'll be switching shifts from daylight to overnights. One thing that switching will eliminate is there will be no more 10 hour days except if I want to work Saturday mornings for instance for OT.

The interior of the Shelby is turning into a bit of a challenge as I have to pretty much redo the seats from the ground up. The froont seats in the AMT '68 Shelby kits IMO are trash, and I'm redoing the seat patterns from a Revell '68 Mustang interior set. I got these off eBay thinking they had the correct vertical patterns, but much to my chagrin-----no, they're the horizontal ones so I'm pretty much cutting everything apart and making new seat patterns.

The rear seat will have to be built from scratch too as the fastback rear one is quite different and not the same at all as the rear seat in the two door hardtop coupes. I pretty much did the same thing over 20 years ago with the old Shelby build...........I just can't remember now how I did it. No digicam or internet back in those days! After the interior is done and it fits without much drama in the bodyshell, it'll be on the downside of this project as it's just getting the other body bits and pieces to go on, and then it's painting time!

I've not much time during this week, and with the Mid Atlantic NNL coming up on Saturday, I hope to have some new pics to post up for you folks possibly Sunday.

 

[mustang1989]

As a past owner of three '67 notchbacks I can not only appreciate the amount of work that you're going through to achieve correctness in this build , I can also respect the hell out of it. Bill............this is one amazing build buddy. Very much looking forward to the rest of this one!

[Oldcarfan27]

On 10/10/2017 at 3:46 AM, MrObsessive said:

Mike, while working on those half shafts, I think I see the reason that they might have changed them from the original..............

Looks as though the shaft might have had some interference with the lower control arm------particularly under hard acceleration perhaps? I can see where the shaft may have been scraping against the crossover support that ties the control arms together.

By going to this type of setup shown here, the extending section into the rear hub is smaller in diameter, and not as likely to be binding/scraping against that crossover support.

Just a guess on my part, but it's made me change the original way I had the half shafts as I've run into the same problem!

The story I read about the IRS in the restored car goes like this.

This car was a test mule for different engineering ideas they were experimenting with and when they were done, either Ford or Shelby kept the rear suspension and installed a standard leaf spring rear end in it and sold the car. The first owner bought the car, which turned out to be a real handful for him or his wife and sold it to someone else soon after. If I'm correct, I think the story said it was Bill Cosby, but I'm not sure of that now.

Fast forward 30 years later, car comes up for sale and turns out to be the original Shelby prototype with the wrong rear end, so the new owner has to have the whole IRS completely remade from scratch. Problem was, being an experimental project, there was no blueprints or references for this suspension. So he just had to guesstimate what it was to look like based on photographs taken of the car from that time period.

So if parts differ in the photos from 1968 and now, that's probably because it's not exactly the same rear end assembly. 

[MrObsessive]

Fellas, I just spent one whole hour + trying to give a detailed update of what I've done to the car, only for the board to take a total dump.

That's it.

I'll no longer post updates here but just give a link to Fotki. If you'd like, you can check it out here. I'm through with spending time going through the trouble, only for it to be a wasted effort.

[mk11]

Fantastic, inspiring work, Bill 

 

mike

[shaunmza]

Just wow. The level of detail you put into your work never ceases to amaze me.

 

Thanks for sharing!

[afx]

Saw this in person at NNL Mid-Atlantic.  Great work as always Bill.

[MrObsessive]

I'm wondering if there's a glitch particularly with this thread and the text box? This is no lie.............just now right before I wanted to type here, this text box STILL HAD the text from when I tried to post a couple weeks ago! Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if it would now post-------no dice, I still got the 404 Error.

I hope I didn't come off as being a bit terse with my previous post. I can't tell you though how ultimately frustrating it was to compose that post for an hour or longer (a lot of it was posting just for Fotki), only to have the page give me the 404 Error message.

It was really a copy and paste job from Fotki, and there were no more than 10 pics that were in that particular post, so I don't think it was a matter of exceeding the picture limit. Just the same, I think from here on out, I may only post one or two pics, and then give an embedded link for you folks to see the rest. Fotki is sort of an online diary for me, so you'll get all the descriptions with most pics that are put up.

JC, Shaun, and Mike............thanks so much for the nice words! JC, it was good to run into you at the NNL East. Not sure I'll be making it next year as that's around the time when the GSLMCC is happening. I'll need to keep an eye on the funds as GSL may be a road trip for me as there's someone in Illinois that may be riding along.

HOPEFULLY she'll be all done by then!

[66belair]

This is such an amazing build!

[ChrisBcritter]

Bill, let me try a little experiment:

I'm finally at the point where I can paint the chassis, and do the slight overspray of the Green Hornets color. Rustoleum Red Oxide Primer was used, and while it's not exactly like the 1:1, I used this as more than likely, this is how the original California Special (which this car was originally) would have rolled off the line back in '68.

The color I'll be using will end up being a custom mix of green, black, and some gold pearl powder that I've had for quite some time. In this case, I used Testor enamels airbrushed to do this overspray.

When it comes time to paint the body, I'm going to hunt down a can of Krylon Hunter Green with the gold powder mixed in. For the topcoat, I'll be using a sort of green dye mixed in clear to give the metallic some depth, so you're not seeing gold flakes sitting on top of paint.

A little experimentation will go a long way, so I'll be trying this concoction out on a junk body. I don't want ANY surprises when I get to this point!

* * * * * * * *

Seems to work?

Maybe to be on the safe side, try writing your captions as a Word doc, and then copy-and-paste as plain text here so you don't lose the work if the forum barfs up again.

[MrObsessive]

Chris, I've done that in the past................the frustration was trying to get it to post after many tries.

There is an auto save function on the board, but as I found out the other day, even that doesn't always work. When the board took a dump, it didn't save what I had when things came back up, however when I tried posting from my desktop when I was responding to another post, there was my OLD post I tried to put up days ago still there.

Go figure.......

I'll try that again in the future, but if I keep getting the 404 Error, EX145 Error or whatever........I'm just gonna call it a day and move on.

Edited May 30, 2018 by MrObsessive

[MrObsessive]

It's been a while since I've posted an update on this! Summertime is a bit tough to get any model time in------what with outside stuff to do, nice weather and of course working full time, modeling time can be at a real premium. Just the same, I've been whacking away at the interior, and I did have some of these pics posted on Fotki for a bit. Some of you that have the link for that may have seen these. For those that haven't I'll post them here, and hope there's no drama with the site's servers where I don't have to do this all in vain.

Ok.........the interior proved to be a bit of a challenge, particularly the rear seat as it's very different from the Fastback. As you'll see, I very heavily modified the seat from the Fastback and all but scratchbuilt the seatback. One memory I have of this car (actually a '65 Fastback) as a kid is the Fastback's seat sat VERY low to the floor, where as the coupe sat up 'higher' and of course was not as cramped.

Most of what's seen here came from the Revell '68 Mustang. I had bought interior parts off the 'Bay as I thought that this particular kit had the correct seat pattern. Much to my surprise however, that wasn't the case which gave me no choice but to replicate the pattern that's in the Green Hornet.

Here's what we got.............

To give the seats more of a realistic look and not appear so one piece, I essentially cut them in half and decided to hinge them.

As you can see here, I cut not only the seat pattern away, but also the seat itself from the seat bottom and back. It will look more realistic when put back together, and makes it much easier to cut away the pattern. Hmmm.........the seat bottom kinda looks like a toilet seat huh?? 

The vertical pattern will be replaced using Evergreen's plastic stock with the .020" thickness, and .050 spacing in the grooves. Looks like it's in scale for what i need, so I went with it.

OK, after some fussing and redoing things a couple times, this is the end result, I used some .015 piping to go around the patterns, and on the seat backs, I used .010 piping to simulate somewhat the seams as seen on the 1:1.

OK.......I couldn't resist! The seats will fold forward and back!

Stay tuned for more!

[MrObsessive]

I just learned something new today about the board. When I tried to make my last post, I got the dreaded 404 Error page and was about to break the laptop! I got a hunch that perhaps the couple emoticons were not playing nice with the pics that I have linked from Fotki. I got rid of the emoticons, hit the submit button again, and everything posted. Thank goodness this board now autosaves! So, no more Emoticons for me when it comes to posting multiple pics, or when there's an issue with the 404 or 503 Error codes. I'm not sure that's the sole problem, but it's interesting that the issue did go away once I deleted them.

Now on to the rest of the update............

As you Mustang guys know and as I mentioned in my post earlier, the rear seat in the two door hardtop is VERY different than the one in the fastback. The seat bottom of the fastback is lower, and more of a "bucket" type than the bench type that's in the hardtop.

I originally was going to raid a kit for just its back seat with some mods, but I figured, it's six of one or half dozen of the other, so why not modify the seat out of the fastback just the same?

So that's what you see going on here. Lots of cutting up, and replacing of the seat patterns just as the front seats.

This is where I am so far, trying to get the seat back in order, then I'll work on getting the seat bottom widened out, and suited up to fit in the interior floor.

Got the seatback pretty much as basically shaped as best I could, and made provisions to insert the new seat patterns.

Here's the completed rear seat......I'll have to figure a way to 'anchor' or 'brace' the seat into the body once it's all painted and such.

Just mocked up for now to see how it'll go into the chassis floor.

Now things can get painted. It was hard to pin down the exact shade of gold that was used in the interior. I went with Tamiya's Titanium Gold for the lighter color, and regular Gold for the darker. Perhaps not the correct shade, but it'll do for what I need.

I hit the submit button a couple times prematurely, but this is where I am for the moment. Finishing up the door panels, and then it's on to the dash which the gauge decals came in the mail today. I didn't take a pic of it yet, but I did very slightly change the rear seat pattern as it seemed too 'deep' to me. It probably won't be noticed much since this is a closed car, but it's just for my satisfaction.

Thanks for tuning in and I don't know when the next update will be, but slowly and surely it's coming along.

Edited August 4, 2018 by MrObsessive