Richard Bartrop

P M Hobbycraft had a Boxing Day sale, so I picked this up from their website.

And of course, you're all strictly small timers compered to the art conoisseurs who shelled out six figures for this masterpiece https://www.cnn.com/style/article/david-datuna-banana-art-basel-trnd/index.html

Morals are great. They're what keep society from falling into chaos. But we aren't talking about jacking up the price of something like insulin here. Nobody is going to die from the lack of a so-so promo kit of a pretty generic intermediate from the 60s, so go nuts. It's like the fuss about the Uncertain T. People want it because someone said they can't have it.

This flip side is , if I have opportunity to get a kit for next to nothing, you can be sure I'm going to take it, and if it's an auction, the seller can't be faulted if people want to shove fistfuls of money at him. I try to got for sealed kits, but then the ones I go for tend not to go for kits that are valuable enough to warrant that level of skullduggery. I do wonder about the kits that end up being considered too valuable to build, how many times some of those boxes end up changing hands before someone finally notices the scam?

The Chapparal racers would seem to be an obvious choice. and Caroll Shelby was a Texan

Stories like this are why I still prefer to physically enter a real store like some kind of savage. I do like that PM Hobbycraft lets you purchase online, and pick up the items at their store. The best of both worlds, IMO.

Ah yes, the good old days of, "Here's a block of wood. Just remove everything that doesn't look like a Ford Club Coupe." And as horrible as those old Palmers were, the Premiere kits were even worse.

That looks pretty good, and the fact that the spacing isn't super precise makes it even more realistic. If you're really feeling ambitions, you could probably use paint to build up the wrinkles seen on the original.

Plastruct makes some really thin styrene rod, so make your basic duct shape out of plastic, wrap the rod around it and glue it in place, and a coat of paint should take care of the rest.

Though if you drove that up to a biker bars, I suspect there might be a few comments.

Even a large manila envelope will do the job if you want a quick background.

That colour combo really works!

I remember their Porsche 928 kit didn't have any chrome, but the real car didn't have any, so it wasn't a big deal.

Apparently to restore whatever cosmic imbalance that was created by car based pickups, Ford of Brazil created truck based sedans. It might be worth modelling one just to see the fuss over which section it goes in.

I can barely put one colour on a model, so I have the highest respect for anyone who tackles a Watson style paint job.

Animated French short about the 1955 Le Mans race.

They're probably better known in model airplane circles, and they never sold their kits in US under the Frog name. They are noteworthy for basically inventing the plastic model kit. I had the AMT version of the Gullwing way back when it was released as part of their "Special interest" line. It's a nicely detailed kit with a fairly accurate shape. It is a '60s vintage kit, so some finessing will be required, though not as much as on the MPC classics. Lots of chassis detail that will never see the light of day once everything is buttoned up.

Very nice. I'd say you nailed the look.

According to Kustomrama, it was but over a three year period, and appeared on the Jan 1964 issue of Rod & Custom, so early '60s. It also shared an AMBR win with the Invader in 1968.

I'm going to start off by saying that you should build whatever makes you happy, and don't worry about the opinions of some faceless mob on the internet. It would be sad if people thought they had to run a focus group every time they start a project. That said, there are two things that bug me. The first is setups that obviously won't work in real life. Show cars get a pass because they were seldom designed to be functional in the first place, but something like a blown hemi driving stock Model T wheels? Yeah, that won't be pretty. The other is when someone says they're making something from a certain era, and it's a mishmash of styles from five decades that I know is like nothing that was actually built then. You want to mashup different styles, that's great, but if you're trying to replicate a particular style, know what it is you're replicating.

There are plenty of exciting cars being built today. The Charger and Challenger are just two of them. All those plain vanilla car kits back in the day had more to do with the marketing strategies of the Big 3 than the demands of the kit market. That the kit market is geared towards people who are mad that it's not the 20th century anymore probably doesn't help either.

Same here. I'd love to see them do this one, in any scale.

Oh, Exner loved his retro. Here's the Imperial for '61 : And of course he was responsible for the Revivals not long after he left Chrysler.

"Here we have a look that combines the style of the Continental spare with modern practicality. Jet age styling that still evokes the classic cars of a more elegant time." Retro styling is nothing new, and just like now, your results may vary.

I don't think it's a T-Bird because there's too much sheet metal surrounding that tail light. If you look closer, what looks like a fin at first is actually part of the background, and whatever that spot on the bumper is, it defintiely doesn't match the shape of the T-Bird exhaust. It's definitely some variation on an early Falcom. Looking at the taillight bezel, I think the closest match for US Falcon models might be a '61 model.