Mark

You'd be ready to throw into the hole, too...

I'd think about reworking the Charger parts. The '74 Plymouth has an old style "bucket" interior, door panel detail is unchanged from '71. On top of that, the issue pictured has the dashboard from the '78 Monaco cop car, totally wrong for the '74...

Another issue with the front bumper is that the areas that wrap around (and are seen from the side) are extremely rough. Either the tooling was rough to start with, or picked up a lot of wear after not too many kits were run. The parting lines on the sides are whoppers too, but the AMT kits had those too. Now that I know about the fit issue, I'll probably strip the plating from one bumper, get it to fit, fix the continuity issue with the grille trim, get rid of the huge parting lines and roughness on the sides, remove the grille detail to fit the MCG photoetch parts I bought for all three cars, then cast the thing...

I guess they didn't care to send the very best...

The Maverick tool inserts probably disappeared. Seville announced a "pro street" issue of the Maverick, but it was never released.

The Testors-boxed AMX and SC/Rambler include photoetch emblems in addition to the metal wheels. A small fret of parts, but still nice to have. Okey Spaulding's Johan company has offered a more elaborate PE set for the AMX kit; reasonably priced too. Quality is comparable to MCG's sets. I bought a couple of them from him at NNL East earlier this year. He mentioned doing some PE for the SC/Rambler kit; I hope he gets it done.

That last reissue was before Round 2 entered the picture. The body in that one is a mixed bag: hood opening was revised back to '74 spec but the grille is still the later one. If I remember right, the gas filler detail is still '75-'78 (gas cap above the styling crease, '74 has it below). Too, the rear wheel openings are rough as a cob.

A little more than that...there are lots of little subtleties that enter the picture. I've got a box full of AMT '25 bucket bodies, and have been looking at this. The touring body is wider at the back than the roadster of course, but the angle of the back panel is different as well. Also, the rear doors appear to be a couple of inches wider than the front ones. There are scale dimensional drawings of the touring bodies out there; I've got one, and intend to get into this...

Yes. This was in the short-lived mid-Seventies "budget series", in the narrow box. There was a stand-alone coupe issue too, the first time the coupe was issued without either the '32 Ford sedan or the pickup version. Round 2 did another stand-alone coupe, as the Three Stooges version.

Wheel/slick are from the Aurora Undertaker dragster. The hood is from an AMT Mustang II, looks like a '74 ('75-'78 hood is different, on both the model and 1:1 car).

AMT Pinto is a bit simpler than MPC...it is promo-based (no '77 promo, but there were ones for the first couple of years). It has an interior bucket and slab chassis with separate axle and exhaust, as opposed to MPC's kits where the interior builds up off of the top of the underbody. The four-cylinder engine in the '77 doesn't have a metal axle passing through it as the early kits did. AMT's kits have an automatic transmission (MPC's kits have a manual). I sold my AMT '77 awhile back, but if I remember right it had the "all-glass hatch" unlike MPC's kits which had the trunk lid.

They're all the same body. '68 annual, '69 annual, '69 Dickie Harrell funny car, then the dirt track car, then the black Camaro with the Pontiac engine, then the convertible. The only new body is the misshapen Fast & Furious hardtop that was done much later.

Last year, a couple of guys in the local IPMS chapter bought a huge collection that included a lot of cars. They offed all of the NASCAR kits for a buck apiece, to cut down on the amount of space needed to store everything during the sell-off period. Most of them moved at one show. I'd guess they counted the value of that stuff as near zero when appraising the collection for purchase. There is a small handful of NASCAR kits that I was/am actually looking for, when they are in that range. At that show last year, I picked up three cars including an early Eighties "box" Thunderbird. I found another kit I was looking for at the Three Rivers show last fall, had to pay $3 for that one but it was sealed. $3 is about the upper limit for me. I did pick up a few AMT 1/25 scale cars and trucks for $1-2 apiece over the years also...the Fords have Cleveland engines, not perfect for Seventies Pro Stock but still a vast improvement over what AMT and MPC were putting in the annuals and Pro Stockers back then.

The V8 engine was added to fill the kit box and provide an alternate building version. It's a not-too-detailed engine with characteristics of small-block Chevy (oil filter location), small-block Mopar (front cover and water pump look like other MPC engines) and Ford (exhaust port spacing). The stock version of these Dodge Daytona kits is actually pretty decent. The earlier the kit you can find, the better: the later hidden-headlamp versions have raised detail on the front fascia that should be recessed (Pentastar emblem, etc) while the earliest ones are very good all around.

Yes. Jo-Han never did a "good" '64-up Cadillac V8 engine.

Hope he got those diecasts cheap, they'll be throwing them in the hole with him...

I don't need another one, especially if it's molded in black. The original AMT company didn't mold it in black, only Lesney and Ertl (later production in this same box).

Is this issue molded in black? The one I looked at says "molded in white" on the box bottom...

The '59 engine isn't correct for a '66. Cadillac brought out a new V8 in '64, the 472/500 series, and it's quite a bit different from the first series engine. The Jo-Han '68 convertible was the most recent kit with a usable chassis, but who wants to break up one of those now? Other than working steering, everything is molded as a unit, and the engine isn't that good. I was sort of waiting on this reissue, but the body and interior molded in the color scheme of the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile kills it for me. I'll look around for the earlier issue if I want another one.

He's still open...I was there last Saturday!

One change you can make that really improves the look of the body, is to trim the windshield opening higher at the top. You'd file the actual opening higher by the thickness of the trim around the windshield at the top, then scribe new trim above that. There are other issues (headlights are too small, for one) but the windshield opening makes a big difference. I fitted the underbody and interior from a Revell '69 Camaro into one of these bodies (at the time I did it, Revell hadn't released the '68 Firebird yet). The underbody needed some minor trimming at the outside edges due to the MPC Firebird body being thicker, but it does fit pretty well. That would suggest that the overall shape of the body is pretty good (though some of the sculpturing isn't as good as it could have been).

You might be able to scrounge something cheaper right now, with Christmas shopping season in full force. I bought a Ingersoll-Rand "pancake" compressor earlier this year at Home Depot, I think I paid $100 for it. Depending on where you live, if the compressor turns out to be noisier than you would like for indoor operation, you can carry it outside and fill the tank. I wouldn't pay more for a particular brand name either; most of these things are probably coming out of the same industrial complex anyway, with the last step in assembly being to slap the brand name sticker on...

I don't remember those pins, but I do have a 50th Anniversary hat. I also had a key fob, those were given to anyone who correctly answered a trivia question in one of the Blueprinter contests. Those were made of a really soft metal though, I put it on my key ring and it broke pretty quickly. I don't remember how I got the hat, I don't think I would have bought it.

I rake leaves to get them off of the lawn before the snow starts falling. If they aren't removed, the snow packs them down against the grass, leaving bare spots the next year. If everything were nice and dry after the last leaves fall, I'd get the mower out and mulch them, but they're always wet by then.

Body is '65 Fairlane, dashboard is from a second-generation Buick Riviera (custom version), chassis is from a midsize GM car ('64-'65 GTO or '64 Olds F-85, possibly '64-'65 El Camino). Not sure about what is left of the interior, it's not the Fairlane unit as it appears to be too wide for the body. I'd be tempted to do something with that, there's a lot of work in smoothing that body off. Just needs the panel lines rescribed. A Modified Stocker Fairlane kit can provide a hood, chassis, and interior bucket that will fit better. I've got an original AMT '62 Impala convertible like that, that I bought because the windshield frame was straight and all the leftover stock parts were included. I bought it to part out, but after looking it over I decided it should be kept as-is.