Mark

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.

'62/'63 were not available with a V8 engine (though you could walk over to the parts counter and get everything needed to bolt one in). The '63 hardtop and convertible annual kits were incorrect in that the stock versions had 327 engines, but that was probably done on purpose to get more sales on those. As I remember, the engine blocks in those kits looked a lot like the '57 Chevy block.

Probably to show how it goes together straight out of the box. Most people who buy the kit will look at that and think "mine will look even better".

Most of Jo-Han, and a good deal of AMT and MPC, got scrapped over the years. Not many people in the industry back then thought anything about any of this stuff existing fifty or sixty years into the future.

The convertible rear seat is narrower than the coupe's, due to the bulges at the back of the interior for (on the 1:1 car) the folded top.

The original one has been in Canada for about thirty years, repainted candy red but with the door jambs and inner panels still gold. Photos of it appeared in Rodder's Journal some time back.

CarFax is NOT what it is cracked up to be, it is certainly not infallible. If accidents are not promptly reported, they may or may not appear on CarFax report. My nephew manages a dealership, prior to that he was a salesman (and a good one at that). He has told me of clean CarFax reports on cars he has known to have been in accidents. One of his own cars (which he sold to a lot boy, who knew all about the car) had a clean report. My nephew bought it as a theft recovered car (my brother fixed the damage from that), it was hit hard on one corner before he had it, and was hit hard once while he owned it. None of that appeared on the CarFax report. All that said, I don't buy a pair of shoes without looking at them and trying them on, let alone a car. I've bought new cars though, as I keep them longer and the cost difference over ten years or more is negligable as far as I'm concerned.

'64 Cutlass.