BBossman1

Brings back memories for me... In high school my buddy had a 62 Super Sport and I had a 63 Super Sport, before I switched to the winning team... MOPAR!

Everything I've seen suggests the Hemi Darts were delivered with black wrinkle finish valve covers. But I welcome any and all input, thanks guys.

Thanks guys... Finished up the Hemi motor today. The only changes I made from the kit were to strip the chrome from the valve covers, carbs and velocity stacks and paint them in more representative colors. I also removed the vacuum advance can from the distributor since the Race Hemi uses mechanical only and I swapped the kit's four blade Hemi fan for the kit's seven blade 440 fan. I looked at a lot of pictures of the 1:1 cars and promotional pictures of the engine; I found the four blade in the engine pictures, but the cars using the seven blade viscus clutch fans. I may fab a clutch for the fan before all is said and done. Anyway, heres the motor...

Love seeing another MOPAR go together!

Sweet! I will follow along as i build my dart.

Nice!

I set this aside for a few days to get some real life work done. Got back on it this week and finished my trans tunnel mod and painted the floor... I also got most of the Hemi motor done, just need to mount the headers and test fit them in the chassis. i'll be back...

When I first mocked up my master cylinder, I used the "Hemi" firewall from the kit and came up with this... As I thought about it a little more I relaized that the "Hemi" firewall positioned the master cylinder higher so that the master cylinder/brake booster would clear the Hemi motor, therefore my mock up wouldn't look quite right compared to the 1:1 car... I decided to use the kit supplied "GTS" firewall and perform the same modifications. I think this looks more correct for the Hemi Dart...

Jeebus thats nice!

Sweet... Love the color!

Turned out about as I hoped, should look okay once the interior tub gets painted.

Next up is to mod the trans tunnel to better represent a 4-speed dart...

Nice, but I can't see the timing marks... I keed, I keed... Love me some MOPAR action.

Nice, there's nothing like vintage MOPAR muscle!

Thanks guys... Al, I've seen that picture and it, combined with other info I found helped me finalize my wheel openings. I've been jumping around mocking up various sub-assemblies as I come up with the overall appearance I'm looking for. Yesterday I started mocking up the firewall, adding the master cylinder relocation plate, trimming up the master cylinder and fan motor block-off...

This being my first attempt at modeling in over 30 years, I decided I was not going to shoot for the sky and build a super detailed model, but instead create a reasonably accurate depiction of the original car using what is in the kit. Upon receiving the kit and examining the box art, instructions and the actual body, I was less than thrilled with the shape of the rear wheel openings used for the Hemi version. The scribe lines on the body are a good starting point, but having seen these cars in person it is just not very accurate. I was particularly concerned with the fore and aft dimensions as well as the shape of the forward part of the wheel opening. I began doing research which led me to an interesting dedicated racing site which contained a thread over 250 pages long where the folks involved where attempting to document the lineage of all the 68 Hemi Darts and Hemi Barracudas. The thread had hundreds of photos from when these cars were first campaigned in NHRA Super Stock. I discovered that due to class rules, racers where not permitted to alter frame rails or add wheel tubs to gain clearance for the class legal maximum tire size. The only choice was to open up wheel arches of the body. Hurst accomplished this by opening the wheel arch to almost the maximum interior dimension of the outer wheel house. Hurst used as reciprocating saw, BFH, body hammer, dolly and braising torches to accomplish this. It was actually pretty crude in appearance, most had variations in shape from car to car and even side to side, depending on who did the work. There were even gaps in the sheet metal after the work was performed. Armed with this information, I decided to mock things up to see what I had to work with. I temporarily assembled the interior tub, firewall and core support. I then inserted the chassis into the body to see where I was at. I began by tracing the shape of the inner wheel well onto the body. At this point I'll also offer the ubiquitous apology for poor cell phone pics. Once I had the tracing I pulled it all apart and began roughing in the shape of the wheel opening. The new opening and my original tracing can be seen here… My research also revealed that the new shape also required alteration of the inner rocker panel, as it now protruded into the wheel opening. Here is a picture courtesy of Mosher's Motors from a restoration which shows the modifications done to the wheel opening and rocker… After ruffing in the opening, I mocked everything up again to see where I was at. I immediately knew I was on the right track. You can see in this picture that the front of the opening exposes the front of the wheel house and inner rocker… I trimmed away the inner rocker and used a little heat to reform the wheel well… I’ll be back when I've cleaned everything up and made more progress.

I've been out of the scale auto modeling hobby for over 30 years. I've got some time on my hands so I decided to give it a try again. I'm primarily a MOPAR fan, having owned a 1:1 '69 Road Runner and a '73 340 Duster in my 20's. I'm jumping back in with a Revell 1/25 '69 Dodge Dart Hemi kit. My plan is to go for an "as delivered from Hurst" version. I'll be posting my progress in the "On The Workbench" sub-forum. Wish me luck!