Glue Bomb Projects--EMPI Imp and '65 Falcon AWB

[Snake45]

Bought this original issue AMT '65 Falcon AWB last year at the local toy show in a big box of other stuff that included a glue bomb original AMT '67 Corvette in its original box, an original AMT '66 Vette roadster box with MANY parts (though no body, chassis, or interior) and some other stuff for a very reasonable price. This one came with its first-issue box and instructions, but no decals, and it's missing the hood. Other than those, everything else seems to be here, and REALLY stuck together.

Notice that the interior tub has been glued about 1/8" too high on the chassis. Worked about an hour of Snake-Fu prying and persuading on the thing the other day but had zero luck wrestling it to the ground, even after Dremeling off a HUGE bead of tube glue over the right rear wheel. A jeweler's saw would do the deed if I owned a jeweler's saw factory as I'm sure I'd break at least 20 of those expensive little blades gittin' er done. Today I attacked it with a coping saw and after about 40 minutes of tedious effort, I"m about halfway around. Might finish it tomorrow.

Have started the paint strip (after the pic was taken), so far after two applications of Easy Off, ALL the red is off and the yellow and blue are about 20% off. It WILL all come off the next time The Lovely Mrs. Snake is out of the house for a couple hours. Oh, forgot to mention, had to Dremel out the glass with a grinder, only the second time I've ever had to do this. (Come to think of it, the first time was on the '67 Corvette that came in the same toy show deal. Hmmmm.) 

Once I get that tub divorced from the chassis, rebuilding should proceed without too much further drama. Haven't decided on a color. Anyone have spare Daddy Warbucks or Georgia Shaker decals? That would decide for me. I can use a hood, too, if someone has one just laying around. 

Here's an EMPI Imp glue bomb I bought at a club meeting/swap meet in the early '90s. I forget whether I paid $1 or $2 or $10 for it, but at the time I thought it was a good deal because it hadn't been reissued and I hadn't seen one in years. Today was the first time I took it out of its baggie and inventoried what I have. It looks 98% or so complete--all I can find missing is a windshield and frame but that's not a big problem to scratch up. Not sure if I can work with the glue-bombed taillights but again, not a I huge problem, I can come up with something or other.  Looks like the worst part of the job will be gluing the fiddly chassis bits back together, but I resurrected my own glue bomb AMT dune buggy chassis a few years ago, which was in similar bad shape if not worse, so it should be do-able.

Having been impressed at an early age by the EMPI IMP in bright metalflake blue on the cover of HOT ROD magazine, the plan has always been to paint this thing "bass boat flake" blue (I have a giant can of a very sparkly Krylon that should be perfect), but I noticed that it's molded in a metallic or pearly red that might be interesting. We'll see what it looks like after the yellow paint has been stripped. While I'm repairing the chassis on this one, I might go ahead and knock together the chassis of an AMT TeeVee dune buggy and squirt both of them in semigloss black at the same time. We'll see what happens....

Edited January 27, 2019 by Snake45

[Ace-Garageguy]

Always a fan of gluebomb saves. I'll be following.  

[MeatMan]

Great pick ups. Good luck!

[geetee66]

Respect for saving those old bombs from the scrapyard!

looking forward to seeing the buggy in a wild flake ?

[Snake45]

Took another 20-30 minutes careful surgery with the coping saw but I finally got the interior and the chassis separated. Was pleased to end up with NO damage to the inside of the interior (although at one point, I did see the dark shadow of the saw blade through the plastic), and only one easily repaired little spot on the chassis right wheel tub, which I actually caused when trying to pry them apart with the screwdriver. The underside of the interior tub and the topsides of the wheel tubs are pretty chewed up (the coping saw is the chain saw of plastic modeling), but those areas won't show in the finished model. 

And now it becomes obvious both HOW and WHY the interior tub was jacked up so high on the chassis: Original Builder had glued the radius rod mounting brackets as far into their chassis slots as he could get them, instead of just flush with the top of the crossmember. Next job will be carefully liberating the left radius rod from the axle and the chassis (the right one fell off by itself), which will probably be another tedious operation. Yeah, I could easily just saw the thing off and make a new mounting bracket in about five minutes, but part of the fun/challenge of these jobs is seeing how many of the original parts I can re-use or repurpose. 

[Snake45]

Some progress on the Falcon. Got all the paint off the body that will come off. There was another shade of blue hiding under the other blue. Easy-Off won't touch it but shouldn't be too much trouble to sand off. Carefully removed the front axle radius rod, and then discovered that the other one wasn't in the box—long gone. Both ends of the front axle were broken off and not in the box, either. I could scratchbuild all this, but at this point I'm just gonna lazy out and “borrow” the whole front suspension from an AMT AWB Mustang.

Removed the wheelie bars with a razor saw. Might add them back on later, but probably not. I filed or scraped all the molding lines I could see and get to off the rear suspension pieces, then drilled out the differential to accept either a wire or plastic rod axle. Here's what it looks like before it all gets painted semigloss black.

 

IIRC these things want to sit nose-high and I'd rather have it sit level or very slightly raked, so I'm filing a taper in the tops of the frame rails where the interior tub hits it, and filing corresponding reliefs the the tub itself. I might be able to get the nose down as much as 1/8” by doing this—we'll see what happens.

Also making progress on the EMPI Imp. Got the body paint stripped, the pearly red plastic is interesting but too many swirls and dark streaks (and too translucent) to polish it, so I'll proceed with Plan A and paint it metalflake blue. Took me two whole afternoons to repair the front and rear suspensions, what a bunch of fiddly, fragile little pieces! The front suspension was in two pieces when I started (left arms broken off), but in working it, the right arms broke off too, as did both shocks, so I ended up having to reassemble five pieces.

The transaxle and rear suspension were in nine pieces, only a couple of them designed as such by Revell (see the "before" pic in the original post). I had to carefully cut away globs of tube glue, figure out what went where (I couldn't find any instructons), then hold tiny pieces in place with tweezers and “weld” them together quickly with "hot" liquid cement. This worked surprisingly well. All these fiddly joints will be reinforced with thin beads of Loctite Superglue Gel. I now feel qualified to reassemble a T-Rex skeleton, and don't think it would be much more difficult.

I've discovered that I'm missing the exhaust system, oh well. Plan A is to see if I can piece something together out of AMT '69 Corvair spare pieces, and Plan B will be to just replace the whole VW engine with an AMT Parts Packs Corvair engine, which I have a couple of. Again, we'll see what happens.

I consider the suspension repair the “hard part,” the most dread-worthy and daunting part of this whole rebuild, and with that out of the way, most everything else SHOULD be fairly smooth sailing. My goal is to get both these chassis completed, painted semigloss black, and sitting on wheels in the next few weeks, and then when some halfway decent weather returns, I can paint the bodies and kick 'em both through the goalposts.

[afx]

Th rear facing traction bars with dampers looks odd but the 1:1 car had them at least during some period of it's evolution

Edited February 10, 2019 by afx

[MeatMan]

Very interesting setup that I've never seen before. They appear to be designed to limit the rear end from rotating causing spring wrap-up.

[Snake45]

3 hours ago, afx said:

Th rear facing traction bars with dampers looks odd but the 1:1 car had them at least during some period during it's evolution

Yah, I thought I remembered seeing something like that somewhere along the line, so I left it. It doesn't look any weirder than the super-long traction bars in the Mustang, anyway. 

I'm not modeling any particular car at this point, so "anything goes," kinda. Thanks for the pic! 

[mod3l Lover]

On 1/27/2019 at 6:05 PM, geetee66 said:

looking forward to seeing the buggy in a wild flake ?

   Yeah, dune buggies and heavy flake look great together!

I have a Manx that needs to get done, maybe when I slap

Mustang together, I will move on to the buggy for the

B.O.Y.D. thread!?! 

[bisc63]

Those "dampers" in the above pictures - they go through holes in the trunk floor, but where do they end up? Are they mounted to the trailing ends of the roll cage? (My guess) A lot of experimentation back then! Many pictures of the Warbucks Falcon also show odd looking (to me!) wheelie "casters", that I can't find any info or detail shots of. I'd love to model them correctly on my build, but references are scarce to say the least.

[afx]

Yes the dampers attached to a bar in the trunk.

I assume you mean these wheelie wheels/casters whatever!

[bisc63]

Yes! Were those a later add-on to the dampers? The location looks about right.

Thanks for the clarification, and thanks Snake for your patience during this thread-jack!

We now return to your WIP...

[Snake45]

And for the first time in who knows how long (probably decades), the Falcon chassis is back up on wheels! Front axle, radius rods, front wheels and tires and rear wheels pirated from the AMT AWB Mustang (rear slicks from AMT Parts Pack) to replace broken or missing original parts. Notice that even with much smaller front tires, the frame only barely sits level, and might even sit a little nose-high.

 

Interior tub in place to show how I've tapered the tops of the frame rails and the tub floor back-to-front to get try to get the nose down a little. When I built the Monogram Badman, I actually pie-cut a section out of the interior tub to get the nosebleed stance down.

 

Body sit/wheelbase check. These AMT AWBs tend to have too-short wheelbases and the front wheels want to crowd the rear of their openings, instead of the front as would be more proper. It looks like it will be possible to finagle the body mounting so the front wheels will at least be centered in the openings. BTW, the body is REALLY thick in the area of the rear wheel openings. I had to scrape and file about 2/3 of the thickness out to get the body to sit over the tires. Notice that because the windows are out, the body is sitting down over the interior tub and the tub is showing through at the windows—in final assembly, the body will sit a little higher than this in the rear. It looks like at least it won't be sitting nose-high, though, and that's good.

 

Three-quarter front shot. Looking fairly good. You can just see the roof damage from the heavy tube glue OB used on the windows (and possibly from my grinding efforts to remove them.) This will all have to be filled and smoothed but not a big deal. I haven't decided on a color yet, but want to do some kind of painless, no-hassle paint job that won't need much if any polishing. I will be polishing the white side trim and masking that off before paint, then foiling the trim edges. At the moment maybe leaning toward Model Master Nassau Blue with a thin clearcoat and light polish, but other suggestions welcome. I also haven't decided yet whether I'm gonna finish it as a period AWB, a late '60s/'70s bracket racer, or a current-day “tribute” street freak.

[Scott8950]

the falcon is coming along nicely..

[bisc63]

Oh yes! Stance is looking good, and those wheels are very attractive under that body. I think your blue will look nice, as well. It's a handsome body style that will favor a lot of colors. Gold with a white top could be sweet for a period piece, ( and less common ) with red/white/black lettering. My 2 pennies!

[bytownshaker]

Looks good Snake

 

[Snake45]

On 2/9/2019 at 1:50 AM, bisc63 said:

Oh yes! Stance is looking good, and those wheels are very attractive under that body. I think your blue will look nice, as well. It's a handsome body style that will favor a lot of colors. Gold with a white top could be sweet for a period piece, ( and less common ) with red/white/black lettering. My 2 pennies!

Thanks for the input. Another possibility at this point (depending on how the bodywork comes out) is to just paint it matte olive drab and call it WARBIRD. "Warbird" today is a common term for an ex-military airplane (such as WWII fighters and bombers, etc.) but it didn't come into wide use as such until the '70s. The first time I ever heard the term was when Revell started using it for their constant-scale (1/72) WWII and WWI model airplanes in the early/mid '60s. I clearly remember the full-page Revell ads in Boy's Life magazine that highlighted the new airplane kits under that banner.  (Lotta classic Ed Roth stuff in those ads, too.) Google-image "Revell warbird" and you can see vintage Revell box art with the WARBIRD logo on them. Might be fun to try to copy that font/logo. 

[cobraman]

Always nice to see a glue bomb come back to life.

[Ron Hamilton]

I like that! I may be trading one of those off.

[Scott8950]

snake i sent you a email..

[bisc63]

That warbird thing got me to thinking about an idea I conjured up while working on a Monogram 69 440 SuperBee; while applying the decal across the quarters and trunk, I was reminded of WW2 invasion stripes on aircraft, and hatched a scheme for a street rod/racer based on that look. I envisioned a bright silver car, OD hood (non-glare), and black and white invasion stripes across the deck and quarters; sort of the "Old Crow" look. Could work here!

[Snake45]

Forgot to mention, I was surprised to discover that the AWB Mustang frame is wider in the front than the Falcon frame. [Robin Leech voice] I don't know why! 

[stavanzer]

Snake. Send me a PM with your addy.

I have some Georgia Shaker Decals if you still want them.

[chris chabre]

I like the stance!! How much did you end up filing off the tub and rails