Robberbaron

Gorgeous! GM really was at the top of their game in the '60s as far as styling, IMHO.

Sure looks like the real thing, and that's the point, isn't it? Stellar job on the preservation, too. Would never guess that's a 25 year old build!

Super clean, traditional looking build. Awesome tip on the toothpaste caps, as well!

Awesome work on that raw metal finish. Not many people could pull that off convincingly, which it is...

Nice build - amazing how much of an improvement you get just by chopping that windshield. I'm surprised more builders don't do it.

Incredible work, as usual! Blown away by the work you put into the suspension/chassis...

Awesome on every level!

Great build - don't see the '74s built very often anymore. And I agree - that green looks quite correct for the color GM offered on 1:1s around that time.

Nice build as usual Adam! Always enjoy seeing your builds of these forgotten 70s and 80s kits. I think the dual headlight front ends may been 1982 only? Never saw very many compared to the quad headlight model years. The Buick version was a Skyhawk. One of my friends got one as a hand me down from his folks - was motivation for him to get a job so he could buy a Z28 and actually drive something cool. It's true that the Cavaliers and their derivatives were EVERYWHERE in the 80s and 90s! Had many friends with Cavaliers or their derivatives. My wife's first car was a Sunbird with a stick. I never owned one myself, but drove several for my first job in high school. The 1984(?) coupe we had actually handled pretty decent, and would at least get out of its own way, unlike some of the other vehicles in our fleet. When I had a choice, that was my preferred vehicle for deliveries, until we got about a 1990(?) cavalier wagon with a 3.1 V6. Wouldn't know looking at it, but that thing could roast the front tires all day long. I would never admit it at the time, but I loved driving that car (even though a blue Cavalier station wagon was about the lamest-looking thing you could drive at that time). Also, everyone has their own experiences, but all the Cavaliers and other J-bodies that I was familiar with never needed any major repairs, despite some of my associates deliberately trying to kill them off.

Don't tell me that's supposed to be Astro-Turf in the bed? What are you, Bill Clinton? ?

Gotta admit I never realized there were proportional issues with these kits until seeing all the discussions on this forum for the last couple years. Even with the discussions, I never saw decent comparison pics to illustrate the point, so I admit I dismissed a lot of the commentary. With the comparisons to the Johan '69 and the 1:1 pics, I now FINALLY see what everyone has been talking about! Great job as usual, Bill. Harry's posting of the red 1:1 also clearly shows that the AMT's side marker lights are about 2-3 scale inches too far forward

The AMT 75/76/77 Nova kits (pro stock/factory stock/street machine) are a mess, too, especially the roofline and quarter window shape. That body would have been tooled up right about the same time as the Monza, so that makes sense. Never knew that about the AMT Monzas, now I know to not bother getting one if I stumble across them. I still have an MPC Monza promo that I got as a kid. I agree, the body has always seemed spot-on with those.

First problem that comes to mind is that the Arii is listed as 1/24th while the Johan is 1/25 at the largest. The old Johans were sometimes "scaled to the box", and I wouldn't be surprised if the '58 4-door is even a little smaller than 1/25. Think there would be enough of a difference to cause lots of headaches...

Great everything: color choice, detailing, super clean build, and awesome photos...

Catching up on checking out some of these Under Glass builds. Really like this one, especially the under hood. Careful use of color instead of chrome reminds me of Pure Vision (Steve Strope). In fact, the syle of.the car altogether reminds me of that. Not sure if that was an actual influence on you, but please take it as a compliment!

Personally, I have to admit I didn't thoroughly look into the differences between the 2 versions. I thought the differences were limited to the plastic color, the extra tinted glass, and the different box with the artwork print included inside. If I'd realized the Blue Streak slicks and sponsor decals were only included in the Original Art version, I would have ponied up the extra $2.00 my LHS was asking. As for the body and steering wheel, I entertained the idea, but as I said I'm confident I can easily straighten things out. If any plastic had been snapped off, there wouldn't even be any debate about requesting replacements. This is the first purchase of a Round2 kit where I've personally seen any problems, so in my experience this was a bit of a fluke, and hopefully a one-off experience. Mentioning the Tri-power setup reminds me of something else I noticed: the Tri-power air cleaners are on a regular, non-plated parts tree. I thought Pontiac Tri-power setups always had chrome air cleaners, or was that maybe just on GTOs?

Last set of pics. Curiosity got the best of me, and I had a Revell '66 Impala handy (think the chassis should be identical to the '65 Impala that '70 Grande was asking about). First pic shows how similar the 2 frames are to each other. The Revell Impala is a little bit wider than the AMT GP, but not by much, mainly comes into play behind the rear axle. Side-by-side with the front wheel wells lined up, it looks like there is a wheelbase difference, with the Impala being shorter (which would go along with the 1:1 cars, as Mark described). Also note the very different gas tank shapes. Yet, putting the bodies together, distance between the wheel arches is basically equal. Final pic is the money shot with the Revell Impala chassis in the AMT GP body. Slips in pretty easy, no trimming necessary along the rockers. Will need to trim down the chassis along the rear quarters,behind the wheel wells, and probably also lop some length off the back so you can get the GP's bumper on. Main snag is that the Impala rear wheel wells are a little too far forward, so you'd need to do some surgery there. Hard to tell definitively where the wheels would end up without actually assembling the Revell chassis, but man-oh-man can you get in the ballpark going this route...

Some close-ups of the chrome trees. Cragars have decent center cap detail (though I still think the '65 Chevelle wagon and El Camino have the best available) FYI: my first reaction to the 8-lug wheels is that the center caps looked quite different from the Moebius '61 Ventura center caps. A quick Google image search showed that the 1:1 caps in '65 were a different design than in '61, and IMO these look pretty accurate. The instructions describe the 3rd set of wheels as Corvette wheels, not sure about those center caps... In the last pic I tried to get a better shot of the blower parts and the Weber side-draft carbs.

Some more of the standard issue: 1st pic shows some details of the reel-to-reel recorder in the briefcase, and the road cones Bottom right in the 2nd pic you can see the stock 2-spoke steering wheel that was also nearly snapped off the steering column. Once again, no breakage, and it feels like I can straighten it out OK, but that's the second time in the same kit. 2 sets of white stripe tires, plus the tire for the 5th wheel. No slicks, as stated before. Note the only clear is the windshield/vent windows/rear window assembly. No other lenses or covers, at least in this version. (and no green tinted glass,as stated before) Last pic shows the "standard" decals. Note that this decal sheet only has a portion of what's included in the Original Art version. This one does not have any of the sponsorship decals or "road test" decals.

OK, decided to get some pics of my "standard" issue GP kit, to give a better idea of what the plastic looks like, and to show some more of the differences. Seems like mine got slapped around a little bit before getting put in the box. First thing I saw taking the body out of the bag was that the plastic in the "A" pillars turned white where the roof got seriously tweaked. Looks like it came thisclose to snapping them. Pillars are still skewed JUST a bit to the drivers side, but feels like it will straighten out when the glass goes in, or if nothing else some warm water. My box was in perfect shape, so this wasn't shipping damage. 4th pic hopefully better shows some of the swirls in the passenger side of the body. From some angles you don't see it, but when the light hits the pearl just right, it looks pretty funky.

This kit includes a bunch of accessories associated with vehicle road testing, such as Road & Track would have used back in the day. Includes a "5th wheel", set of road cones, some kind of reel-to-reel tape recorder inside a briefcase, and probably some other widgets. You can see a bunch of this stuff in GTX6970's pics above. For the 5th wheel testing, whenever I've seen pictures/videos, they've looked pretty much like a normal spoked bicycle-type wheel and tire. You can see that the 2-piece chromed wheel in the kit doesn't really look like normal bicycles spokes, but then again it wouldn't be possible to really mold those accurately anyway. Not sure if any 1:1 testing ever used a 5th wheel that actually looked like this. Same for the tire that goes on the 5th wheel: the one in the kit reminds me of the ones in the stock version of the '34 Ford 5-window, but maybe that's the closest they had to a bicycle-type tire. Overall, still some pretty cool widgets included with the kit...

Original art version (in the big flat box) is molded in white. The "regular" box version is molded in a pearl teal color. That's the version I got, and yes, there are swirls in the metallic plastic, just like every metallic molded kit that I've ever bought.

Yeah, I was one of those people that kept planning to eventually order from Modelhaus, and was never getting around to it. Figured it was pretty much now or never, so placed my order. Mostly parts to repair some promos and also some repops of original issue parts for stuff like the AMT '65 GTO, '69 Chevelle, and the MPC '67 GTO.

That seems to be the consensus from everyone who works in retail. Gives me a chuckle, thinking back to all the threads through the years discussing the need for an '80s Cutlass kit, so many of the self-proclaimed industry insiders and "experts" insisted "there's no interest in those cars", "those will never sell", "retailers won't even stock them", etc. Just a good reminder to take all those "insider's" proclamations with a big heaping spoonful of salt...