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'32 Ford roadster - personal replica


Quiet Eric

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This is one of the hot rods I have built over the years. The body itself it a steel Brookville reproduction, but the frame, grill shell/insert and hood are real '32. I did everything on it myself including building the chassis. It's a pretty basic hot rod, has a Pontiac 350 and Muncie 4-speed, 9" Ford rear end. Buick brake drums and '40 Ford brakes (up front at least), 15x6 vintage American Racing wheels, an early Corvette steering column and wheel. Before I got the car to the point of being painted and upholstered, I sold it to its current owner in Sweden. So with the model build, it will be a replica of this car but it will be as I intended to finish the 1:1 with paint and interior, and maybe an slight engine upgrade.

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I figured starting with the Revell kit was best despite its shortcomings. The interior provided is a design like what I would have gone with so I decided to use and improve upon it. If its assembled per the instructions, you have to install the whole interior before you glue the rear wheel wells in. I'm not a fan of that as the wheelwells should be one with the quarter panel. The wheelwells have been glued to the body and will get some filler and bodywork to look one piece. That means the interior needs to be installed from the top which I actually like better.

To make this possible I cut the back wall section off of the main floor piece of the interior. It'll go in the trash. Real '32s don't have anything like that, just some support pieces and then the seat itself. On this model, the rear wheelwells to a fine job of locating the body on the chassis so that rear wall area is kinda redundant. The side panels of the interior and the tops of the doors/quarters together out of the box are way too thick. I thinned out the tops of the interior panels quite a bit, then beveled the top edges of both the body and the interior panels so the panels set almost flush. I also separated them into individual pieces for ease of assembly, and more realism. Finally, the kit seat is a little too street roddy for this build, or for what I would have done in the real car. I took the seat from a 3-window kit and sectioned out the top area where the button tufts were to lower the seat back. I want it just visible from the side profile. Had to cut the sides of the seat off too but just enough to fit between the interior panels. This will make for a pretty nice looking interior I think.

Out of the box (back panel cut off)

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Thinned out:

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Seat fit...a bunch of filler/sanding work to come on the seat back.

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The picture is kinda washed out, but you get the idea

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I don't care for the kit supplied dash either. I have started to fit the dash from a 3-window kit too, but it with still require removal of the glove box doors and a/c vents.

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Thats where I am so far. I thinks I've got the wheels and tires to use figure out. I have a number of other kits to supply appropriate front suspension goodies. Using the 421 from an AMT '62 Pontiac as a start for the engine/trans. The '32 kit has pretty correct ladder bar rear suspension and a 9" ford rear but I'll be converting it to a transverse spring. Pretty excited to make progress on this but also planning to take my time to get it just right. The color will be 1956/7 Corvette Aztec Copper.

Edited by Quiet Eric
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Thanks a lot guys!

3 hours ago, tim boyd said:

Eric....congrats on building the real car and I really like the tweaks you've already done to the interior.  Will be watching with great interest....Cheers....TIM

PS - excellent color plan, too! 

Special thanks to you Tim! Its an honor to have you following along.

The color has kind of a story. At my last place of employment, we built a pretty high end '32 roadster to compete for a pretty high end award. I had suggested that color and everyone involved liked it so that is what I was expecting. Well, by the time the car's owner and the painter were done tweaking the color, it was nothing short of burnt orange mixed with tangerine. So I decided to keep the Aztec Copper plan for myself, but unfortunately never got around to it. I am thinking of an off white/bone color for the interior.

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Edited by Quiet Eric
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Heck Yeah!

I really dug your full size Roadster. It reminded me a bunch of Monogram's Big Deuce. You're off to a great start with the model version. I had never given any thought to the interior side panels in this kit but the thinned down versions look 100x better and more accurate. The cut down 3-Window seat looks cool too, especially the way the top bolster fills all that space around the back.

Great color choice! I like it a lot more than the color that ended up on that Roadster you mentioned. 

Keep it coming, can't wait to see more!

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Nice 1:1. The Revell roadster kit should be an ideal way to replicate it. An easy way to modify the dash is to cut the entire dash face out of the Revell roadster, glue in a plain blank sheet of styrene and then modify it to what you want. This is the method I've used countless times and it's simple and effective. The Revell roadster kits dash has a groove that is a ready guide for the back of a #11 blade to cut the face out.

Here are some examples, all done using this method:

Revell roadster kit instrument cluster cut out, glued in place and foiled.

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Photoetch gauge panel included with Model Car Garage '32 Ford p/e grill set:

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8-guage p/e panel from Replicas and Miniatures Co. of Maryland:

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Edited by Bernard Kron
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26 minutes ago, Quiet Eric said:

Thanks for the tips Bernard! I’m still contemplating what to do on the dash. But also thanks for the source on that gauge panel as it is exactly what I need.

Your welcome! Which gauge panel is that? If it's the 8-guage panel from Replicas and Miniatures Norm still has them but without the formerly included replacement resin dashboard (that's why I made my own) and also, very importantly, without the gauge art. I made my own gauge art, so if you go that route drop me a pm and I'll mail you a copy.

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6 hours ago, Bernard Kron said:

Your welcome! Which gauge panel is that? If it's the 8-guage panel from Replicas and Miniatures Norm still has them but without the formerly included replacement resin dashboard (that's why I made my own) and also, very importantly, without the gauge art. I made my own gauge art, so if you go that route drop me a pm and I'll mail you a copy.

Actually I was confused originally thinking R&M but looks like its actually Model Car Garage. The 6-gauge Stewart Warner Ensign panel. Though I can't seem to find it on their website except in the Big Deuce set.

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Cool stuff happening here already--like Dennis, I never bothered to observe the actual thickness of a '32 roadster's door panels. Now that I've seen how good they look thinned, it will be hard to leave 'em alone!

I'm a huge fan of that Aztec Copper color.  I've tried Tamiya PS-14, but it's more of a tangerine-copper.  What brand of paint do you intend to use?

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13 minutes ago, Spex84 said:

Cool stuff happening here already--like Dennis, I never bothered to observe the actual thickness of a '32 roadster's door panels. Now that I've seen how good they look thinned, it will be hard to leave 'em alone!

I'm a huge fan of that Aztec Copper color.  I've tried Tamiya PS-14, but it's more of a tangerine-copper.  What brand of paint do you intend to use?

Got mine from Scale Finishes, they're for airbrush use. I bought an airbrush just so I could use their color selection and so far so good.

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Making progress. The real car has a Chassis Engineering X-member kit in the frame. I didn't want to build that from scratch, so the closest thing came from a Revell '40 Ford. After cutting out the tabs and other molded in pieces of the frame crossmember, I trimmed the legs of the '40 pieces so they fit right and glued them in. Before glue though, I put some scotch tape on the floorboards in between. You'll see why in a minute!

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I had already cut the gas tank away from the frame and assembled the top piece to it so the tank would go in as a separate piece. Then I cut the rear floor and coil-over crossmember out of the frame. I took the rear crossmember from the same '40 and flattened it slightly with a couple pie cuts towards the center. I glued it into the frame "backwards" from what it would have been in the '40 because my car used an original '32 rear crossmember which had a curve towards the back of the car and this is about as close as I could get.

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Then I added the plate along the bottom of the X-member pieces. It will get some more shaping later, but I needed to tie them together now for strength. All these joints were glued with solvent type glue, then reinforced with some CA.

The reason for that tape was to keep the X-member legs from sticking to the floor. The floor was left in place from the beginning to keep the frame pieces in the right spot. Now that the X-member was in, I was able to scribe that floor off of the rails. The floor would have worked fine but in the end is inaccurate, so I will be building a new one from scratch.

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I am trying to get this frame to be as accurate as possible. To me, it is one of the most iconic parts of a '32 Ford. It is hard to tell from the pictures but I have significantly shaved down the sides of the rails around the reveal line. This kit has that line very exaggerated and on the real deal, the line tapers to almost nothing at the top of the rails, and is more of a flair at the bottom of the rails than the hard ridge out of the box. One of the other issues with this frame are the frame horns. Both front and rear they should be a C-channel. The odd notch in the top of the front horns is very odd too. I have done this once before on a project that was abandoned, but wanted to try it again. The horns were thinned out on the inside surface with a file, then slightly thinned top and bottom. I added an .020 strip of styrene to the top and bottom, then after it was cured filed them to a more appropriate shape and thickness. I have started on the rear too but haven't finished.
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Something I really never do or have the patience for is opening panels or doors. This project is pretty special though so I thought it was deserving of at least a functional decklid. The doors will remain shut because well, it's a roadster and what would be the point?

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Finally for today, here are the wheels and tires I've settled on. The wheels come from the AMT '69 Cutlass and look to be a pretty faithful replica of early American Racing 5-spokes. These might be a touch too wide (wheels on the real car were all 15x6) but they looks pretty close. I do not know where the rear tires came from, I stole them off of another never-going-to-be-finished hot rod project...they were originally whitewalls with a plastic insert, with that insert on the inside and painted black. Front tires supposedly came from a Revell Ford Thunderbolt kit according to the eBay auction I bought them from. The tread on them is almost non-existent which is frustrating, and they're still a little too tall...but close enough unless I find something better.
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Edited by Quiet Eric
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Excellent update, Eric! You're frame back-dating looks fantastic. I'm a huge fan of using those Revell '40 Ford frame "X" pieces and rear cross members. Although I always use the kit center tie plate for the "X", it never occurred to me to ditch it and make my own plate. I'll definitely be swiping that idea for future use! I also really like the look of those American wheels. I'm not much into 60's cars like the Cutlass you say they came from so i never would have known about them on my own. I'll need to keep my eyes peeled for a set on eBay.

The front tires do look like they're from the Thunderbolt. The rear tires very possibly could be from Monogram. There's a first-gen 'Vette kit and T-Bird kit (forget the years, maybe both 58's?) that use what look like bigger Firestone's with separate whitewall inserts. Being 1:24 they look good on the back of 1:25 hot rods.

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