ChrisBcritter

NJ, your master for the '76 Illinois plate looks excellent! Only the font needs a bit of work. See if you can use this: I had to modify the R to match the original plate font, and the rest is as close as you can get. Great job on these and I hope I can help!

Le Simca est arrivé: And I'm very happy with it! Nice glossy cream-and-forest green paint job with a well-detailed interior that would benefit from some detail painting. Side trim and emblems are tampo-printed silver and gold. There's a delicately molded roof rack to which you could easily tie down miniature luggage (or in my case, surfboards). Chassis detail is relief-molded, except for the separate tailpipe. No opening features, which I don't mind in this case. If you were very ambitious, you could saw open the hood and hunt down an aftermarket Ford V8-60 flathead for it. All in all a very nice 1/24 diecast for a reasonable price. One odd thing: It's attached to the display base by four little screws with triangular slots . My friend Tom P. just got a 1964 Mitsubishi Debonaire (!) from the same company (Hachette) and he ground down an Allen wrench to fit them.

I'm surprised the Duel Valiant and Peterbilt haven't been done as 1/64 diecasts yet, considering that's how a lot of movie/TV cars are produced nowadays - wonder what Universal would want for a licensing fee?

Sometime around 2001-early '02 when I lived in Baldwin Park, CA, I got a great deal on a nearly-new king-size mattress and box springs, i.e. free. Of course, they were 35 miles away in a hangar at Whiteman Airport in Pacoima, but I had my '77 Chevelle wagon with a roof rack so I figured on a quick freeway run home. So I tied the mattress to the rack and took off. Within a couple miles I had people pointing and hollering, so I pulled off and re-tightened it. Got back on the freeway, which resulted in more pointing and hollering, so I ended up taking surface streets home (at one point encountering a swarm of bees ). Finally got it home and unloaded, then couldn't get the mattress upstairs through the narrow stairs by myself, so I slept on the box springs until my roommate got back two days later... Sure was a comfortable bed after that. Oh. The reason it was free? The PO had died "but not in the bed", his friend assured me.

An elegant cruiser - sweet job, Alan!

Minor update: I just poured the second part of a mold to make the tires. I found an AMT compact promo tire and added an overlay on each side to make it extra meaty. I cut an extra tread in each overlay to blend them in better; the sidewalls read "Firestone Super Sports GP 6.00/10.50 x 13". (Wonder if Modelhaus Tires would be interested? 13" performance skins are tough to find in scale.) I also made molds of the dash to copy the instrument cluster (so I can countersink it into the bezel), the gas and brake pedals so I can make them separate, door panels from the '66 El Camino to copy the door hardware and kick panel vents, and since I had room in the mold, a rare '63 Nova taillight bezel and '59 Olds headlight/turn signal unit. And, finally, drilled and ground out a new rear axle hole to raise its tail a bit.

I just want to change the meaning of that acronym to "Can't Stop Building Models"!

Of course, on rare occasions something very interesting would come along: This was in a gas station at the corner of Lake and Milwaukee in Glenview; dated August 1972. And I offer my profoundest apologies for sitting in the car without the owner's permission. Still pretty good shots of a nicely built T-bucket with some unusual touches.

I may as well toss in this shot of the parking lot of my high school in 1975:

Maybe, maybe not if they get their distribution set up again - however, the '69 body is out of production. Shortly before the shutdown, I asked if they could send me the current '68 body and glass so I could do a roof transplant, and they agreed to it.

Anyone have info on a company called Spinney Head Resins? They make door handles, window cranks and NASCAR in-car cameras. Over to the experts...

Pulled the trigger on this little beauty; probably will take a while to get here from France, but I can be patient: (Images via modelli124.blogspot.com) From Hachette's Collection Auto Vintage, it's a '59 Simca Vedette Marly. I don't really collect many diecasts, but how often do you find a cool station wagon like this in 1/24 scale that hasn't been done many times before? I'm not sure how many made it to the USA, but at least one did: This was taken someplace in Louisiana in the early '60s; the plates may be U.S. Forces from Europe. My plans are for BMF, some surfboards on the roof and CA plates, of course.

Hee hee.

Some guys have the strangest bondage fantasies...

Take a close look at these shirt button extenders: Should be some use there for smaller flexible exhaust or radiator hoses.O/D looks to be 1/16".

Michael's has bags of both wooden and plastic clothespins; nice thing is they come in various sizes down to very small for those delicate clamping jobs.

A Merry Christmas to every one of you from every one of me!

Thanks kindly! I pulled these chassis images off the net from a sold car ad; hope they can be of some help:

And another delightful 404 while adding to it This will be a 1969-or-so era mild street machine. For rolling stock, I'm using the deep 13" chrome reverses from the original issue Deora kit, most likely with AMT compact tires with the overlays from the '69 Corvair. If anyone has better ideas for late-'60s period smaller performance tires, I'm open to suggestions... only other ones I have are BF Goodrich Advantage radials from the Opel GT kit which would be too new, I think?

(Got a big fat 404 error so I have to retype the whole thing.) I'm dipping my toe in the water here; never really did an official in-progress report before, so here we go. I started out with an AMT Rat Packer '65 Nova back around 2000 or so; then picked up an incomplete gluebomb '62 Nova convertible from Wheat's Nostalgia from which I salvaged the rear quarter panels, chassis and engine compartment to drag it back from... drag. Got a hood from the Modelhaus, added the lower rear quarters to fix the wheelbase, then let the project sit for over a decade due to lack of a good interior (the '62 had a mint dash but the instrument cluster and upholstery were wrong for '65, and it was a mess from the PO's having glued fabric on it anyway) until this one turned up on eBay: Had an absolutely delightful time getting this paint off - Testor's ELO and a lot of scrubbing got the last of it, finally. Like so many of those '60s interiors, the bucket seats were molded in and it had convertible side bolsters, so out came the photo etch saws and Evergreen sheet. Here's where I am today: I cut out the back seat and bolsters and filled in the sides, leaving the small tabs as the armrests. Next I cast copies of the upholstery pattern from the door panels and added them to the inner rear quarters. I widened the rear bench - twice - using the center of the '62 rear seat and some .08 Evergreen stock, and added fillers to close the side gaps. The front buckets were sawed off and the bottom front parts were cut out, switched side to side and turned upside down, making them tuck under as they should. The tough part was that the darn things overlapped the console, and it was a real bear separating them! I did recently get an NOS '65 dash, and I'll be going with a rarely-seen Fawn/Tan color scheme with brown carpet. The chassis has had some mods; so far I've opened up the leaf springs and added a second exhaust. The front and rear crossmembers had been hacked up by the PO, so I made a mold from my '63 Nova wagon's chassis and cast replacements in resin. The engine will be a 327 from the '64 Nova kit, with a Powerglide trans I copied from the '63 wagon's 6-cylinder. I like using vintage parts when I can. Here's the body, with an Artesian Turquoise paint job laid down by master modeler Tom Piagari. He also cast the tail and backup lenses in clear red and clear resin. Naturally, I greatly appreciate his help . Here's where I spliced in the lower quarters and the engine compartment. Chassis fit at the rear is not easy without the screw posts, so I added the ones from the '62 body to the chassis with spacers to take up the slack (the Rat Packer bumper doesn't have the tab). Oddly, the stock chassis fits way up inside the rockers/quarters - just another of its quirks. And yes, I'll clean up those mold marks in the headliner. Thanks for looking, and happy holidays!

Promo-style chassis do satisfy my innate urge to whittle; I've carved out a lot of rear springs and control arms plus dressed up lower front A-arms and tie rods just to give a better look to the underside than what AMT or Jo-Han gave us. '65 Nova in progress: '64 Caddy: '61 Comet:

Agreed on the new kit's issues. I picked up bumpers from the original issue '58 for mine; the shape is more correct and I wanted to remove the bumper guards (they can be cut off without leaving holes). I may even get ambitious and make resin copies of the side coves from an original body to get the right shape.

Congrats Gary! It'll be fun to watch the purists' jaws drop when they see you driving it in the snow.

Great minds think alike - I had this one from '83-'86: I soon after got the correct spinner wheel covers for it (which later got stolen ). I think an AMT '64 Cutlass would be a good start for a scratchbuild.

They were originally produced by Doyusha for slot car use and were copied from the Jo-Han, AMT and MPC promos - they don't use the original tooling. The Jo-Han '66 Caddy front bumper/grille doesn't quite fit the Japanese body; I know because I had the Hasegawa kit and bought a Jo-Han hearse to detail it out (this was 30-some years ago when they were cheap). I did some test fitting but ended up selling both together before starting the project.