Mark

The wheels should be the only difference. The Sox & Martin version differs pretty much in wheels and tires only, as well as not including the stock air cleaner setup nor the NASCAR parts. The Keystone wheels are different from those in the Sox & Martin Barracuda kit. The Superbird wheels are the same for front and rear, while having different inner wheels.

Jo-Han only brought back the Sox & Martin version just to say they had something "new". After the USA Oldies series petered out (probably due to lack of usable tooling), Jo-Han reissued two items at a time for most of the Eighties. One year it was the Rebel Machine and (I think) '68 Chrysler 300, another year the AMX and maybe the '70 Eldorado, and so on. The '63 Plymouth was somewhere in there too, along with the Superbird. Some items got reissued as X-EL promos only. The '68 Cadillac was only issued as a convertible in kit form, but a hardtop promo did appear.

I don't trust that UV resin yet. Certainly not for filling something like this.

First issues are way better. One-piece hollow tires and slicks, wire axles, smaller corresponding holes in engine block halves, sharper detail, way less flashing on parts.

Sports card store.

I used to be big on the "goo", but have since switched to epoxy putty. The goo takes forever to fully evaporate and "shrink out". Why wait? Two-part spot putty or epoxy putty cures chemically instead of through evaporation, way faster.

I did this Dodge Coronet body with two-part spot putty and not epoxy putty, which would probably be my first choice were I to do this again. I might just do this again with a convertible. This is a Polar Lights '65 body, which has some proportion issues. It's not tall enough below the belt line, and the wheel openings are too big which accentuates the "not tall enough" problem. All that, and I moved the wheel openings and reworked the beltline too. This was done long before the Moebius altered wheelbase Dodge was a reality.

Milliput white (not the dark green sold at Hobby Lobby, that's the "coarse" variety), Magic Sculpt, there are others. These sand and work about the same as the surrounding styrene. Too, the routed out areas aren't too big a job for two-part spot putty.

Yes. That one first appeared in 1971 (alongside the original Shirley Shahan '69 AMX). The reissues of both were in the early/mid Eighties.

Grind away detail, rout out the area, fill with epoxy putty. Done.

I haven't found them yet, but for stock appearing fenders for the Fiat body I'd start looking at 1/32 scale kits. The Fiat is small compared to virtually every other car out there. I thought the Revell Anglia front fenders would be a good starting point, but even they are too big.

Flea market yesterday...got these from a guy I occasionally deal with. These were in his sale pile; he didn't hold on to them for me, they were all available to anyone who walked up. Tony Nancy double kits: if you are into early Sixties drag racing, you know this kit is a gold mine of parts. I'm pretty sure one is complete, the other is missing all of the tires, front wheels, and some chassis parts. All of those choice engines are all there. AMT '34 Ford coupe: I'm pretty sure it's all there except the bumper brackets are busted off of the frame, and I'm not sure they are still in the box. I was looking for a cheap one of these to cut up and make into a sedan, using either a '32 sedan or maybe the poorly executed AMT '34 sedan for the back half of the body. Monogram Slingster: I'm pretty certain everything is there, though all of these kits were marked as "parts" kits. I wanted another American Bantam coupe body, to combine with a second one to make one with an unchopped top. Too, with Revell under German management now, they might not do anything with this kit as it might not fit with the kinds of things they seem to be doing. It's not the greatest kit, but it has a bunch of good parts in it and it's a neat copy of the original Sizzler kit. Switchers '32 Ford: this is a parts kit, it's missing a lot of parts. But it has nearly all of the plated parts, all of the wheels, the whole engine (not the greatest small-block Chevy, but not the worst by a long shot), and the phaeton body. I'll probably cut that to get the pieces to fill the sides of the Bantam coupe body. All of 'em for thirty bucks. He had a few more good parts kits, but I don't need to own everything...at least this month.

Too, 1964 was back before any emissions regulations other than a PCV. A performance-oriented Mercury dealer could have obtained the parts and installed them prior to (or just after) delivery, same as a Ford dealer could have done with a Falcon.

If it's Boeing, I ain't going...

Items like that, not available to the general public, should be good in the future. Another similar item, done prior to the 1960 AMC piece, was a larger scale Hudson body. Those are grails among the Hudson crowd, and always have been.

Jo-Han made one along those lines for AMC. It was the structure of a 1960 Rambler, which was a unit body car when few cars manufactured here were at the time. But for '60 there were more: Chrysler reworked all of their platforms except the Imperial, and GM and Ford's new compacts were unit body. But Nash was first before becoming part of AMC.

The other day, I finished cutting up some quality cast iron. Parts from a roughly 80 year old gravity feed furnace that finally gave up the ghost in December. No parts or upgrades available, so it had to go. The heating company doesn't remove the old stuff, so I was on my own. After a few different approaches (Sawzall, then drilling holes close together and wailing on it with a sledgehammer-messing my shoulder up for a while in the process) I finally hit on the solution. 4-1/2" name brand angle grinder (no Harbor Freight stuff, thank you), diamond edge cutting blade...done. I had to cut the bigger pieces up as they were too big, odd-shaped, and unbalanced (extremely heavy on one side) to maneuver up the basement stairs. Once outside, some pieces were cut up some more, to ease lifting them into a pickup bed for hauling to scrap. I really hated cutting some of those up, they were neat looking castings. But well-done, they lasted that long and probably could have done another hundred years had other parts been available. I wonder how long it would take for that diamond blade to zip through that axle.

That twisted axle would be neat for a T-bucket, where it would be right out in the open.

Someone had the brainstorm to cast axles in the Eighties. Every couple of years, you could read in a magazine, or online, articles about the failure of a cast axle. "Fixing" something that wasn't broken. You rarely heard of a forged axle failure, even on ones that were dropped and sometimes welded at the ends. If anything, the more traditional rods that are popular now seem to be going closer to the original Ford chassis design. I remember seeing articles on fat fender Fords going to four-bar front radius rods. Then someone realized the four-bar limited turning radius (especially with wider front tires) and then most builders went back to the original style wishbone, splitting it only enough to clear the longer modern transmission being used.

Ford was often shortsighted in the matter of eventual V8 installations/options. After the Falcon deal, they did the same thing again with the Maverick, the Mustang II, and the late Eighties Thunderbird. Talk about banging your head against the wall.

The pre-1963 six cylinder Falcons and Comets won't take a 289/302 V8 as a bolt-in deal. Ford re-engineered the Falcon to take the V8: different suspension bits, heavier gauge metal for front "frame rails", torque boxes, etc. One of my brothers put a 302 into a '62 sedan delivery in the Seventies. The transmission tunnel even needed a bit of "persuasion" with a small sledgehammer to fit a C4 transmission and bell housing. He split the difference and spaced the transmission crossmember down a bit, as he had a really solid Arizona car and didn't want to hack on it. I don't know if it's true, but I have heard rumors of V8 converted early Falcons having issues with front frame rails and shock towers spreading further apart under the strain of the conversion. A Mustang II front suspension or tube axle might be the way to go with those cars now.

Moebius probably had some of the same designers that Ertl had. At some point RC2 (not Round 2) cut back and let everyone go, after that they were probably freelancing. Lindberg's '61 Impala chassis and engine look an awful lot like AMT's '62 Chevy kit pieces as well.

If you put the Moebius Comet and AMT Fairlane parts side by side, they'll look awfully similar. Same goes for Moebius versus AMT Ford pickup chassis, and Moebius '61 versus AMT '62 Pontiacs.

If the item you want is a typical eBay auction (as opposed to a fixed price "Buy it Now"), remember, you only need to be high bidder for one second. The last one. Don't get into a whizzing match with anyone three days before the thing ends, just watch, wait, and pounce at the end.

It seems to have gone extinct. That tape, and most of the dry transfer (rub-on) letters and numbers, were used mainly by architects and draftsmen, all of which have moved on to other means of doing their work.