Mark

Okey at Johan has offered a photoetch set for AMX kits. I can't locate mine now, but I am pretty sure it has some '70 items on it.

The Stude panel body is quite good, especially for the price. As others have said, removal of the mold release agent is top priority. Do that first thing, especially before any sanding or grinding. One other thing: often the lower body sides are further apart than the donor body. They are likely pulled from the mold core before they are fully cured, and "take a set" in that shape. If that is the case, after cleaning the body, smooth up the inside and lower edge of the rocker panels and fit the body to the donor kit chassis. The rocker panels can be pulled in and temporarily hot glued to the kit chassis to pull them to the correct formation. Leave the hot glued assembly for a week or two until the body stays in the right shape. The hot glue can be peeled and washed off. Rubber bands can be used too, provided you don't create collateral damage by pulling the roof or fenders out of shape. Correcting the lower body "spread" will usually fix other problems like poor hood fit. This is especially true with the '51 Chevy bodies like the sedan delivery.

Avoid pre-Round 2 reissues; they don't have stock decals or wheels, and most will have an incorrect instrument panel and single-exhaust chassis.

Yes, a 392. The street version has additional pulleys (alternator), carburetors, and a Torqueflite transmission while the Gasser version is a strictly drag setup with injectors and a Hydra-Matic.

That's what the kit was first time around. It was an easy way to get a fourth Kit Car into the series.

Correct: in MPC's universe, Hemi Challengers and Barracudas were made through '74, and big-block Corvettes were made as late as '77.

My '72 has the Challenger script on the quarter panels. The Landy kit (issued after the '73 annual but before the '74) has the Challenger script on the grille.

Yes, once the body issues (fender flare shape) are dealt with. For those building stock versions, the AMT parts pack Polyglas tires have (incorrect for this car) size designations on one side, and no size designations on the other. Not perfect, but close. Maybe Revell's decal sheet has tire lettering in the correct sizes?

Yes, pretty much everything about the design of sprint cars (even tire sizes on each side) is all about putting as much weight as possible to the left side of the car.

Being a former AMC owner myself, I hate to admit that the sales numbers for new AMC kits just wouldn't be there. The main reason we got them when the cars were new, was that AMC wanted promotional models and shouldered the bulk of the tooling costs. This was true even with the 1/20 scale AMX kit which was first offered as a mail-order deal and through AMC dealers before hitting store shelves. Jo-Han did a bunch of AMC promotional models that they never offered as kits. They had to have known that they weren't saleable at the time. On the flip side though, they did do a couple of kits ('69 and '70 Rebels) that were not made as promos. I'm not positive, but the '73 Javelin AMX may not have been a promotional either. So Jo-Han did eat the costs of those conversions themselves, but the bulk of those kits existed as previous versions.

In between the '64 annual with working headlamps and the bug-eyed Street Shaker and later issues, there was the late Sixties Super Street issue. That one had protruding headlamp detail also, but still had the "1964" license plate area detail. The lens detail is "clocked" (not aligned properly) on every bumper from that issue that I have seen. The headlamp detail may have been engraved on ejector pins that rotated out of alignment during production. That seems to have been corrected in the Street Shaker and later issues.

The Buick engine will likely be included, it has been in every issue of the delivery to date. Round 2's two prior delivery issues did have different optional parts however. The Gene Winfield large box issue was restored to original (Keystone mags, tubular nerf bar bumpers) while the Three Stooges issue had the flipper caps and ripple bumpers that Ertl put in the coupe and delivery kits in the Nineties.

The Jo-Han Mickey Thompson chassis is a one-off. There was no 1:1 Mustang; there is a HOT ROD "phantom" cover shot of a "see-through" Mustang funny car, but it is on the Pinto's chassis. The M/T Pinto chassis was indeed made of titanium tubing. It took much longer to build, and wasn't much lighter than a steel tube chassis, so the second one never got built. That one chassis was used quite a bit, as Thompson only had one Pinto funny car. The later Revell kit is actually the same car that Jo-Han made their kit of, just a later version. The Jo-Han Gene Snow Challenger chassis isn't necessarily a one-off, but it isn't a typical design either.

Use the entire chassis, and adapt it to the '66 floor. The Foose unit is an up-to-date aftermarket frame, with a modern crate engine.

Display base, not case.

Should work...I'm doing something similar, only with an AMT '63 that has been converted to a short wheelbase (but still a Unibody wide bed).

Do a search, look for Jim Keeler's "Unraveling the Snakepit" series of articles in the old CAR MODEL magazine from the late Sixties. Those articles break down routing of brake lines, fuel lines, coolant lines, and throttle linkage. Between those articles and any of the Revell 1/16 scale kit instruction sheets, you should be good to go. For information on a particular car, the best source will usually be a feature article from a period magazine. When that can't be had, the websites and books referenced earlier should be fine.

AMT may have made that up, just for the sake of adding something to the kit in order to justify the price.

Good as any, though this is a bucket seat SS as opposed to the lightweight, bench seat regular Impala.

The old engine was never lost...it's in the '64 kit.

There was a later issue, 5-Vette set that also included the MPC '57. It was out around the time the new-tool AMT '57 first appeared. I'm thinking RC/Ertl also issued a two-car ('57/'97) Vette kit set, but for some reason the two-car set included the newer AMT '57.

Not 100% certain, but I recall reading somewhere that the Futurista (the VW engine three-wheeled car, that Monogram made a kit of) was wrecked in a transport accident, and Starbird recycled parts of its body to build this car.

Didn't Academy announce a reissue of the Corvette kits not long ago?

The '23 roadster kit came out in the mid-Seventies. It has no parts in common with the '25 kit. It does share some stock parts with the '23 panel delivery and Depot Hack kits, and shares its optional parts with the terrible, short-lived AMT '34 Ford three-window coupe kit.

Shaking the can thoroughly is more important than ever. The paint companies (all of them, not picking on Duplicolor here) are probably changing, or being forced to change, everything about the product. They seem to be putting less "solids" and more "carrier" (solvent) into the can (likely to make the product cheaper to manufacture), and have probably been forced to change propellant at some point. So, where the old product was more tolerant to settling and less-than-thorough shaking in the past, the new, "improved" product isn't so tolerant of the same treatment.