Mark

What about them?

What are those paints for? I'm thinking they are for chassis or engine compartment parts...you never see auto exterior colors described as "red" or "gray".

Looks good...one thing I would do is make sure the cage is as close as possible to the roof, at least in the area around the front seat area. If it is too low, it will look as though the body had been adapted to an unrelated chassis.

Any male of the species who doesn't know what make of car he owns/leases needs to tear up his Man Card, immediately and on the spot.

Use the engine too of course, the Fairlane kit has both automatic and stick transmissions. You will have to change a few things up top though. The intake manifold is too early even for '66, as it has an oil filler tube (that was moved to the valve cover by then).

The '59 El Camino chassis also has the correct fuel tank configuration while the Revell kits are correct for a passenger car.

Same car underneath it all. The AMT '68-'69 Torino kits' chassis and engine originated with their '66-'67 Fairlane annual kits.

I don't think that air cleaner is from the Nova...looks like a '49 Ford custom item.

You have to watch, sometimes employees take the guards off of tools because they "get in the way" or are "too much trouble to bother with". When I worked for a construction company in the Eighties, we used to joke that you could tell the carpenters from the laborers by counting their fingers. But it wasn't funny...most of the carpenters were minus at least part of one finger.

Believe it or not, on occasion you can find USA made items at Harbor Freight (a guy I knew used to call HF "Snap-On East"). A while back, they had Mag-Lite flashlights there. My older brother wheeled and dealed in used tools, he gave me a Mag-Lite out of a bunch of stuff he bought. Best flashlight I ever had, and you can get parts for them. I should have snagged another one when HF had them.

'64 Chevelle wagon and El Camino kits also have sixes. These are similar to each other (but not exactly the same) but are different (more parts, more detail) from the Nova engine.

Harbor Freight is good for disposable stuff, but in most cases you cannot get replacement parts from them for tools. The tools drift in and out of availability, they probably switch manufacturing facilities often and when they do the "new" facility redesigns the item. I wouldn't buy anything there that rotates at high speed, or supports a lot of weight.

No, sedan and 5W coupe use the same chassis (different fenders). 3W coupe is all by itself.

Probably not, the 3W is misshapen and shares nothing with the later, better 5W.

I bought the Charger and Camaro at "regular" price at a local store, but found an Impala convertible at a K-B Toy outlet store for, I think, four bucks. Later the local store got more and sold them at around half price. One guy I know bought one of each.

Pretty sure only the eight were offered. Off the top of my head, besides the B-M Camaro, there was a '71 Charger in green, a white '62 Impala convertible, a silver '66 Riviera, a red '62 Catalina, a light blue '60 Galaxie, a '57 Chrysler, and the Edsel. I believe there was a high reject rate on larger parts like bodies, and anything else with a lot of masking and multiple colors. That in my opinion killed the prepainted and preassembled models. There are a bunch of uncatalogued prepainted kits though.

The stock valve cover has the carburetor molded on alongside it, and the air cleaner is a separate part.

'62 Nova hardtop and convertible kits, and '63 wagon kits have the six. The axle hole is on the large side. '62 engines have the intake and exhaust manifolds molded as part of the block, '63 has them as separate parts. The little Ford sixes have no axle hole, they were not meant to be put into the Falcon or Comet.

It's SMP. SMP made the Chevrolet, Imperial, and Valiant kits, AMT handled everything else that Jo-Han wasn't doing in 1960. Though all of the AMT and SMP kits were marketed together, they were separate companies until July 1961. A handful of '62 kits appeared in SMP logo boxes, mostly Styline Valiants but the occasional Imperial convertible turns up.

I think I might still have one of the Polar Lights funny cars, with the clear red body (only a fraction of them were clear red). Trouble is, the interior tin was clear red too, so by the time you got that in you aren't really able to see through all of it.

The deck lids on BMWs of a few years ago reminded me of the lid on a toilet tank. Especially when the car was white.

The "paint them on the inside" deal didn't work due to things like radiator bulkheads and body mounting posts being in the way and showing through. Had the bodies been purpose designed, with uniform thickness and no mounting bosses on the inside, it might have worked. Same goes for the clear bodies MPC did. Most were converted from molded in color bodies...they still had separate windows that had to be glued in leaving marks! Had the windows been molded as part of the body (Gunze Sangyo did that with a few kits) the "molded in clear" bodies could have worked.

The engine block in the Jo-Han kit is a Boss 429, carried over from the original annual kit with the funny car version included. Jo-Han tooled the OHC cam covers and other parts for the DD version, but kept the 429 block. They did that kind of thing for other engines too: the AMC V8 is another example. That engine was 100% accurate for only one kit, the Marlin.

I wonder if one could get the profile of the pillar, and file it into a piece of metal in order to pass a styrene strip under it. Then use the "tool" to scrape a strip of styrene to create a long strip of repair material...

After seeing some of the krap that my Mom put up with dealing with GM dealers with three cars (all bought new), I made up my mind that I wasn't going to own a GM product unless they made miraculous improvements. After 40 years, in which I have owned six vehicles (four of them bought new), I haven't owned one. I did look at several of their products over the years, so it's not like I slammed the door on them entirely. Of the ones I did have, I can't go back to AMC, and after two trucks I have given up on Chrysler. There are still a number of automakers that I'd have to burn through before thinking about GM again, and I don't anticipate buying or leasing too many more vehicles in the coming years.