John Goschke

Agreed.

Absolutely love this model! Great work! I like your detail-painted chassis and I'll add one more vote in support of leaving the screws bright and shiny! All my models that had them still do!

Nice work so far, Darin! May I suggest reducing significantly the height of your beltline molding and especially the lower windshield molding? On the real car these pieces are much closer to being flush with the surrounding sheet metal.

Seems to me this pretty much was their intention all along by buying up these alternative brands to lessen and eventually eliminate competition within the market. Within months after their purchase of Floquil they had changed the formula for "Old Silver" (which dried fast and hard) to something much more akin to the troublesome Testors silver enamels. PollyS for a long time now has been a shadow of what the range was formerly.

From a recent ebay auction. Early issue Revell kit with original box. From Gowland & Gowland molds. "Highway Pioneers: U.S. Classics Series." 1/32nd scale.

Yeah, that's pretty awful all right! Shame of it is that kit actually has a lot of potential in spite of its age. Looks way more like a Cord than does the 1/24 Pyro kit.

You've captured well the look of more than a few of the cars we would've seen cruising the Parkway in Levittown, PA in the mid-late '70s!

Almost without exception the 70s, particularly '72-'76, were really bad times for the US car industry. Bloated full-size cars, overweight intermediates, absurdly proportioned "personal luxury coupes" (Monte Carlo, GP, T-birds, Mark IV & V, etc. ad nauseum) cheap compacts with even more indifferent build quality than usual were the norm for the Big Three. Ridiculous styling cliches such as standup hood ornaments, opera windows and miniature carriage lights, half vinyl carriage roofs, cheap-looking fake woodgrain, cheap velour upholstery, cheap plastic trim, cheap vinyl stripe trim options and screaming chicken hood decals made every new model year a more depressing event than the one before. Coupled with the ridiculous gas mileage these vehicles typically achieved, the lack of long range durability they suffered, the outdated and unimaginative engineering and cynical product development they displayed, American cars of the period offered the fan of American cars virtually nothing to be proud of at the time. GM, Chrysler, and Ford have spent over 30 years living down the reputation they made for themselves with the junk they built then and rightly so. But who knows, maybe there is a market for a Revell 1/25 full detail kit of a Continental Mark V Bill Blass Edition or a Chrysler Cordoba with rich Corinthian Leather and fake wire wheel covers. Or maybe a '73 Buick Lesabre sedan molded in avocado green. Sad years indeed.

Nicely done!

A little late but here's part of my haul from NNL East. This sorry-looking '62 Ford promo was on a vendor table with a $10.00 price tag. Saw a couple guys look at it and shake their heads before putting it back down. Being crazy, I decided to give it a home. Went across the vendor room and picked up a ragtop windshield frame along with an uptop and boot from Modelhaus to transform it into a convertible. Unfortunately they didn't have a front bumper in stock. The '60 Ford windshield glass (which fits) and '62 Ford convertible top well are from my stash. The body on this thing is very clean! Also picked up a '56 Mercury hardtop, two sets of Buick Skylark wires and WWs from Modelhaus.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions, guys! I guess I didn't mention it but this is really meant to be a 1940s style custom, so it is not nearly as low as we might expect a custom from the '50s or later decades to be. While I might lower the front a tiny bit the stance you see here is pretty much where it's intended to be. Possibly the best reference on the web for how custom in the late '30s and '40s really looked, check out this thread on the HAMB... "1940's period correct customs" http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=425454

Here she is with first hit of primer on the body, fenders, and skirts. Stuck on the grey plastic original issue hood, etc. to see what it'll look like in one color. Top is in white primer after some more details were added and additional refinement of the fit. Thinking of this car as more of a stocker with refinements to bring out the Lincoln Zephyr DNA in its design. So cleaned up stock grill is a definite feature. Probably smoothed '40 Ford bumpers. Not sure about the spare at this point (see last pic)... while it's mounted closer than stock here, I'm wondering what it'd look like sunk partially into the deck? Of course the smooth license-plate-recessed-behind-glass treatment is also a possibility.

It's been a long time (30 years+!) but I built the Revell/AMT 1/32 Mercury Montclair Phaeton (4 door hardtop). Had to change the order of assembly significantly to paint the entire body as would be done with the typical "modern" one-piece body kit. Also had to scratch a windshield and rear window since none of the Revell/AMT 32nd '55-'56 cars had "glass" in spite of the fact that wrap-around windshelds and compound curved rear windows were such a prominent feature of those cars. The whole series were otherwise nicely detailed for their time. Fortunately, 32nd scale and multi-piece bodies were soon an evolutionary dead end in the main stream of the hobby. I also built Revell's 1/25th '59 Skyliner. Another where one has to rethink the assembly sequence to paint the body in one piece. But at least it had a windshield and was the proper scale! An additional thought... After Revell abandoned the multi-piece body engineering they released among others, their tri-five Chevy series with opening everything, plus "steerable" wheels, separate chrome moldings, etc, etc. Though those kits had one piece bodies (except for doors and deck lids) they weren't much easier to build than their predecessors!

Beautiful build!

Best of the best! That interior is simply surreally realistic (if that makes any sense at all.) Don't think I'm going too far out on a limb saying this is the definitive chopped scale Merc. Looked forward to seeing the finished product and am really happy we get to see photos of the interior before it goes inside the body!

Great project! Love this car and I love this old kit. A perfect replacement for your rear bumper can be found in the Revell '59 Ford Skyliner retractable convertible kit. That kit is a great source of other parts for the AMT kit, including the front bumper, which fits the AMT kit perfectly, and the rear wheel well/quarter panel trim (the perfect way to fix fender skirt damage.) Here's a rechromed Revell rear bumper fitted to the one I've been working on.

An admirable effort! I'll be watching to see how this turns out. The thing about acetate is that the warpage is actually a symptom of the real problem: shrinkage. Because the plastic varies in thickness the acetate shrinks at different rates and in different directions depending on the varying stiffness of curved, angled, and flat sections, causing the unfortunate warping. In my experience having had Monogram 1/20 '55 Cadillac kits molded in acetate and the styrene-molded '56, based on the same tooling, I've noted that the typical '55 is as much as 1/4" - 3/8" shorter than the '56. Another early kit, Hawk's 1/48 scale Gee Bee racing plane was molded in acetate and styrene. The unwarped one piece wing in the acetate kit is approximately 1/4" shorter tip to tip than the styrene wing from the same mold. It will be interesting to see if your Caddy retains its corrected shape when you're done. I sure hope so, as the body on this model is darn nice, and really captures well the character of the original. If only the original molds could be found and reshot with styrene!

That was built from an original 1959 3-in-1 Customizing Kit. However, the chassis is from a 1958 kit, probably a Buick as well.

Looks like the whole roof is too far back. The 1/1 Belvedere/GTX series cars and Furys used different roof stampings and don't interchange, but you could probably make this work if you shift the roof forward and reproportion things more.

Wow. That is pretty horrendous. However, perhaps Revell could something like the attached as a suh-weet custom option for their forthcoming '57 BelAir ragtop! Yes, it is [was?] a '57 BelAir 4dht...

Looking good so far, Greg! I really like your wheel/tire choice. FWIW, the wheels with the protruding center hub should go on the front, and the ones with the recessed center go on the back. This is a great old kit that you can have a lot of fun with.

Some good stuff, but sadly no corrected body for the '58 Plymouth.

That Ahrens-Fox Pumper would've been really cool! The first "Ghost Kit" I remember is shown on all (I think) of the AMT annual kit instruction sheets from 1960... 1927 Ford T Roadster! Still waiting for the release on that one!

Nicely styled '60s era custom! Really like that rear end treatment. I'm assuming this is based on the AMT kit... correct?

Strongly prefer 1/25th over 1/24th or any other scale.