Mark

The AMT Chevy vans. I built one a couple of years ago, wired the engine and you can barely see the engine at all when you cut the hood open like the earliest versions. The chassis has an insane number of parts considering the interior has no inner door panel detail. I did add full interior detail, but that was a pain. They got it right with the Ford Econoline later on; that one does have door panel detail (though only for the passenger doors, not the cargo area). The chassis has fewer pieces than the Chevy, but has the same level of detail.

The Pro Street version of the Coronet has been popular too; it has the parts for the experimental overhead cam engine, the tubbed chassis slides under a bunch of other Mopar bodies, and the rear part of the chassis is the right size for a bunch of Fifties cars. More of the Pro Street issues are available right now because that's the one that has been out most recently. For those who don't know it: the tubbed rear half of the Coronet chassis is different from the one used in the '68 Roadrunner and '69 GTX kits. If I remember right, the kick-up over the rear axle is higher.

Great! Just wanted to make sure it didn't get lost in the mail. Every so often, I get mail addressed to someone on the next street over (with the same house number as mine). On those days, I wonder what happens to my mail, as the next street over from me is a main drag, and the numbers are way off...

Have the vendor packets been mailed yet? The website has 2/15 as the mailing date.

If it's the picture I saw, the car wasn't from Revell. It was another company's display, to promote the figures positioned around the car.

That is a reissue trailer, probably taken out of a Fireball 500 kit. Some eBay sellers have packaged those trailers separately to give the impression that they were having them manufactured. The same deal was happening with the little tractor in the MPC Indy turbine car kit.

All Duplicolor products I'm aware of are lacquer-based, to go with their touch-up colors. The "primer sealer" is thin and has no scratch filling or build qualities compared with the other primers. I've applied it as a final primer coat over other primers once the item is ready for paint. If I've got something with bodywork on it (filled sink marks, prepped parting lines) I'll brush scratch filler primer or sandable primer over just those areas, then wet sand smooth. Then the whole body gets primed and smoothed up, and after that it gets a quick blast of the sealer primer. That gets smoothed up with some wet sanding (without breaking through anywhere) then the color goes on. The sealer primer does seem to keep sanding scratches from showing up later. That's my experience with it, yours may differ.

Doesn't look too different from a Monogram or AMT NASCAR engine in parts breakdown, except for the bottom part of the bellhousing molded along with the oil pan. The parts breakdown of the kit overall doesn't look too different from a Monogram kit, though this one appears to have a couple of extra parts in each sub-assembly. With AM's earlier kits having sold at higher-than-average prices (and being worth it), if this kit followed that pricing strategy I wonder how it would have sold compared to the equivalent Monogram kit at a few bucks' difference.

We who frequent message boards and travel to shows like Toledo and NNL East are only a small fraction of the people who buy model kits. There are a lot of people who don't know about toy/model shows, IPMS contests, etc. who buy kits off the shelf at Michael's or Hobby Lobby. The new releases are aimed mainly at them.

1/24 scale is "one half inch equals one foot". Actually, the question should be "how did 1/25 scale get used?" As I understand it, 1/25 was primarily an architectural scale. The most common explanation for 1/25 is that the car manufacturers were already working in 1/10 scale for some of their work, and the model manufacturers reduced that by 2-1/2 to get to 1/25 for the promotional models. One guy in my IPMS chapter (who builds cars among other things) won't buy anything marked 1/25 scale, and has been vocal about it when sufficiently prodded. He's mentioned that everything labeled 1/25 scale that he has checked has never measured out to exactly 1/25; more often it turns out to be slightly smaller. That's true to some extent because so many early kits are based on manufacturers' promotional models. Often those were cheated a bit to fit in a certain size box, or to look right with already existing tires. Recently I bought a Jimmy Flintstone resin Ford Econoline van body. It looks like it's cribbed from an existing diecast van. The intended donor kit (interior floor/chassis) is the IMC/Lindberg Dodge A-100 (Little Red Wagon, etc). I measured the wheelbase and length on the Econoline and found it slightly undersize (1/25.7 or so). I'm wondering how it's going to fit with the Dodge parts because the Dodge is 1/25 scale and both the Ford and the Dodge are on the exact same (90") wheelbase. Measuring the Dodge kit, I found that it too is undersize, almost exactly to the same degree as the resin Econoline body. So it will fit. The A-100 was never a promotional model, so there's no logical explanation for it being undersize. The moral of the story: don't pull out the ruler if you don't have to, otherwise you're going to find that something you think is 1/25 scale really isn't...

It was in the '68 kits, then skipped the next few years and reappeared in the '73 Caprice. It stayed in the big Chevy through '76. Besides the big Chevies, it was used in the Mako Shark (only the original, not any of the derivative versions) and the Carl Casper Turbo Shark (a custom '63-'67 style Corvette that used the Mako Shark chassis).

Are those larger than 15"? Several Monogram kits had wheels similar to the one on the left (mid-Eighties Monte Carlo, for example). A 15" wheel in 1/24 scale could pass for a 16" wheel in 1/25. A couple of Monogram Mopar kits had Magmum 500-style wheels, again those could pass for 16". Monogram's interpretation of that wheel always looked a bit shallow and flat to me, which would work to your advantage here.

Fake, fake, fake. Looks more plausible than many of them, though...

You will have to go through a wholesaler to get kits. You'll pay more, but you will be able to order the items you want, when you want them. Neither of the two shops in my area deal directly with the manufacturers. Some aftermarket items can be bought directly from the companies making them. I believe Model Car Garage has an area on their website where you can apply to purchase their products for resale. Most of the guys doing casting or decals on the side will probably not offer a special deal to hobby shops as most of them can sell everything they can make without doing so.

Jim Keeler used two-part dental resin many years ago to fill the engine block for a contest winning funny car build. Later he built another car, writing step-by-step articles along the way that appeared in the old CAR MODEL Magazine. The short block (constructed with a Revell Parts Pack engine) had a crankshaft that turned, and the pistons went up and down in the cylinders. If I remember right, he used metal tubing for the cylinder bores and used the dental plastic to fill in around them. He built the engine for the article car around a Jo-Han engine block that didn't need the dental plastic, but he also repeated the original build to show how he'd done the contest entry. I messed with dental resin in the early Eighties, trying to cast parts with it. I did get some good parts but the stuff really heated up when the mixture "kicked", and that tore up the molds. Back then I was just trying to figure out how to do it. The railroad and military builders already had a strong aftermarket back then, but the car guys didn't. I probably got the idea to try the dental material from the CAR MODEL article. I was surprised at the time that I was able to buy the stuff without having to be a dentist. Some of the other materials and tools were "restricted", not to mention the meds, but you'd have expected that. I thought all of the materials would have been restricted. The materials described in the video are called "acrylics". The stuff I had back then certainly wasn't. The liquid half of the material was called "styrene monomer", and probably should have had a huge skull-and-crossbones on the package. That stuff smelled nasty, and you didn't want to be shaping it with your fingers in the way this guy was handling the new stuff in the video. I tried the baking soda/CA glue filler a couple of times but found it hard to work with, a lot harder to shape than the surrounding plastic. The dental resin I used was pretty much the same (harder than the surrounding plastic) so I never used it as a filler, but it did work great for bonding pieces together. I'd use something else on top of it to do the finish work. I've got to fix the sound on my computer and watch that video again...I didn't pick up what was going on with the clear parts. That's something I'd be interested in...

They're not under any obligation to provide specific information. For now, the item is not available from them, and that's that. That's all they are going to say about it.

I can't see paying a premium for one just yet. Both the roadster and coupe were, and are, hot items, and you get the impression that the powers that be at Revell know this. They've done well with all of their rod subject matter, both newer tools like the Deuces and reissues like their Model A pickup and sedan. They know what they are doing (except maybe for picking their manufacturing facilities)...they'll cut a replacement tool and crank more of them out. They might have to change their production schedule around, or wait for an opening...but they'll do it.

Nothing real about "reality TV". If I ever ran into the gecko, he'd end up as a green smear on the underside of my shoe...

The roadster body is a '28/'29...very different from the '30/'31. Aren't both kits out of production due to whatever happened?

This is an AMT chassis, not the one used under the MPC funnies such as the Bounty Hunter and Soapy Sales kits. Back when all of these kits were first issued, AMT and MPC were competitors and not owned by the same company as is the case now. Besides the Mustang II, the AMT chassis was used under a '73-'74 Plymouth Satellite, a mid-Seventies Corvette, a Ford Pinto, a Chevy Monza, and a Chevy Vega panel (not the sort-of-stock looking one AMT did from '71 through '77, but another, longer one). The AMT Satellite body was blocky looking as I recall (I never had that kit). MPC did a Shirley Muldowney funny car kit with a '73-'74 Satellite body. Her 1:1 car ran the '71-'72 style body. MPC molded their stock Road Runner kit body with a molded-shut plain hood, and tooled different bumpers for it to make it look more like a one-piece fiberglass body. Nobody ever ran a 1:1 version of that (73-'74 style) body that I can think of, yet two companies made kits with it.

Just do a decent curbside chassis (one that is better than the flat slab included in the original kit), and an interior that is full-depth (unlike the shallow one with no driveline tunnel that the original kit had). It'll sell in decent numbers because of the accurate-looking Jo-Han body and trim. The trick here would be to not spend so much money on the new parts so as to make the kit unprofitable. Keeping things simple would go a long way in that direction.

It was the last Mopar to have a flathead, but AMC offered one in the American as late as 1965.

Lots of "I feel that"s and "could it be"s in there. Sounds like someone constructing a story for when it crosses the auction block.

The Mustang II was first issued as the "Champ", a fictitious car. That issue wasn't around long before the Trojan Horse appeared. Apparently AMT lined up a deal to put Larry Fullerton's name on the kit after the Champ was issued. The "name" funny car and Pro Stock kits seemed to be more popular than the fictitious ones back then. AMT issued the same few kits (Mustang II, Monza, Pinto, and the stretched Vega panel) with the beer decals later on; maybe they were trying to wring more sales out of them by doing that.

It was a '66 Chevy pickup, produced from the original SMP/AMT tool. Someone else produced 500 or so assembled promo models from that tool, but the kit never appeared.