Mark

Lucked out! The AMT '66 is a totally different kit, so it probably won't be of much help for replacement parts. The missing tie rod/suspension piece is probably in the MPC/Model King LA Dart kit. Even though the design of that car is way different from the Hemi Under Glass, MPC reused the chassis and interior from the Hemi Under Glass to make the Dart kit. The Dart won't have the headers you need though. Maybe the AMT '66 Hemi Under Glass parts could be made to fit.

In all but a handful of cases back then, one basic body tool was used to produce all of the variations (promo model bodies, kit bodies, and funny car bodies) of each car. They'd have individual sections that would be swapped into the tool to produce a convertible as opposed to a hardtop, or a closed-hood promo model as opposed to a separate-hood kit. Body tooling is more expensive than that used for other parts of the kit, so every effort was made to use the body tooling as often as possible. That's why there were '68-'70 Coronet (and '70-'71 Cyclone) funny car kits when nobody ever ran those bodies on 1:1 cars, also why the funny car kit bodies usually had windshield wipers, door handles, and other stock trim. Back then, MPC had a habit of dropping various kit/promo bodies onto one of several funny car chassis they had. As time went on, the chassis sometimes got shortened (or had redundant mounting points added) to change the wheelbase to fit another body that didn't exist when that chassis was first used.

MPC Ford Pinto annual kits (coupe '74-'78, wagon '77-'79, '79 is currently available) all include a small-block Ford V8 as an option. The valve covers have the larger stylized "Ford" lettering which is centered on the covers (as opposed to being biased to the right on the 1:1 items pictured). They do NOT have the smaller "Power By" above/to the left of the "Ford" lettering. I believe these are the closest thing available in 1/25 scale to what is pictured. The Jo-Han '70 Maverick and '71 Comet annual kits each include one six-cylinder valve cover with the full "Power By Ford" logo, with fantastic engraving as only Jo-Han seemed to do it. Only those two kits came with the straight six engine. Someone with determination, skill, and a lot of time could graft that section into a good small-block V8 valve cover, and use it as a master to make resin castings. I don't remember if the left and right pieces for the V8 are the same except for maybe the filler cap/breather on the drivers' side. If there are other differences, mastering left and right covers might be necessary. MPC's 1/20 scale Econoline van kits have valve covers with the complete "Power By Ford" logo, but again the whole thing is centered left-to-right on each piece.

The new issue is unchanged, windshield trimming is still needed.

The body and interior are MPC annual kit, the hood is new tooling, the chassis and engine are late Eighties ERTL (shared with the '68 Roadrunner/'69 GTX kits).

The Monogram and Revell choppers are different tools. Each was created while Monogram and Revell were competing companies under different ownership.

The Sunny "427" kit is mostly a crib of the AMT roadster.

JF is at the lower end of the price range in most cases. The lower the price, the more cleanup you should expect to do, particularly if the mold is towards the end of its useful life.

MPC went back and forth between the stock and flip-front versions many times. In fact, the second issue (after the '75 annual, which was first) was a flip-front drag version. There are two different cabs, a couple of beds (stock and step-side), and many other parts that have appeared in almost every possible combination at one time or another.

The Nineties seats are still in there based on the box-bottom parts layout. The original Sixties show car bucket seats appear to be retooled, they are on a tree by themselves except for the custom rear pan.

Nothing wrong with building a kit, that's why they were made in the first place! In some cases, it's better to just start with a mint kit than to scrounge parts and clean up someone else's substandard work. On the other hand, some kits aren't easy to find or particularly affordable for most people, and then there are others (drag cars, show rods) that were never very accurate in the first place. Why drop three figures on an original Pro Stock or funny car kit only to set aside the decal sheet and half of the parts? In those cases the mint kit is best left on the shelf.

The Edsel wagon taillight bezels were eliminated (along with the other Stylizing parts) around 1971, for the original Flashback issue. The fuel injection tubes occupy the section of parts tree where the taillight bezels used to be. At the time, those Stylizing parts were thought to be outdated, so these alterations weren't usually done with the thought that the old parts would eventually be put back in the kit. The '57 Chevy was also altered around that time and lost its Stylizing parts too. The Pepper Shaker issue Chevy with the bright green/black roof car on the box has those parts, the turquoise Pepper Shaker does not. That said, the new issue has a bunch of parts that have not been seen in many years. The new tooling looks like the custom seats, rear pan, and the small plated tree with the side pipes and custom hubcaps.

Same parts as always (that kit was never messed with to any great extent). It won't have printed whitewalls or slicks, and who knows what decals are included, but all of the optional parts are in there. I'm pretty certain that the only parts alteration over the years was with the 12-spoke front wheels. The first issue had a small pair of front tires for the drag version, later they were taken out and the drag version used the stock tires. So the wheels were probably tweaked a bit. Other than that, everything should be there.

The Mini Exotics one that I have (that came with the kit) isn't up to the standards of the rest of the kit. It's molded in three pieces (individual grilles, and bumper) but the pieces don't fit together well, there seems to be gaps between the grilles and bumper. I'll probably convert a standard kit piece to get one. I'm not aware of anyone else offering a GT-E kit or conversion parts.

The wagon interior consisted of the front seat, plus the floorboard forward of that. No rear seat or load floor. I've got a Fleetline interior to cut apart for the rear seat, will have to scratch the load area.

If (big if) one of the kit manufacturers were to take a gamble on anything AMC, my money would be on either the first-generation Javelin, two-seater AMX, or (most likely) both sharing as many parts as possible. That said, if you still want anything Jo-Han, better get going and try to get it if you can afford to do so. People seem to be coming to a consensus that they're not coming back. I've recently seen kits that were in production at the very end (S/C Rambler, drag version '69 AMX) selling in the mid-thirties. For a long time these were pretty easy to get...I don't think that's going to be the case anymore.

The SC/Rambler is still basically a detrimmed '66, with the V8 engine (annual kits had a straight six). Grille, taillights, instrument panel, and upholstery patterns are all unchanged from the '66 (the last annual kits). Rear suspension looks to be a copy of the setup in the Sox & Martin Barracuda (the Rambler did not come with a Dana "60" rear axle!). Hank Borger kitbashed an original '66 hardtop into an S/C in the old CAR MODEL Magazine. Apparently he had John Haenle's ear over at Jo-Han, and talked him into updating the kit in the early Seventies. He should have talked Jo-Han into issuing their Hornet kit as an SC/360 instead of doing those funny cars every year. Nobody ever ran a Hornet body on a funny that I know of, even though the '73 hatchback would have made a slick looking one...

You can cut out the center portion, or leave it in and use the axle boss if the wheels you want to use will fit...

What have you got against Moebius, to wish them out of business?

The engine originated with the '66 Impala. AMT probably didn't want to tool an engine for the kit, so they went through existing tools and found one that fit. Other Modified Stocker kits probably would have been looked at back then, most likely the Ford kits first. The axle holes in the Ford engines would put them too far forward to fit the Ranchero. So they used a Chevy, which in 1:1 doesn't come close to fitting. My older brother put a 302 into a '62 sedan delivery around that time, and it wasn't a bolt-together deal. Ford made a lot of changes to put a V8 into the '63 Falcons.

I ordered a new car with a stick in 1979, not knowing how to drive one. The woman at the dealer offered to show me how to drive it, but when I went back to order the car she'd gone on vacation. I learned it about two weeks before the car came in, using my older brother's '64 Chevy II with floors that provided a great view of the road below. The day I picked up the car, I drove it about 200 miles, mostly in rural areas. I put something like 900 miles on it the first week.

When I take my truck to the dealer, I try to sit somewhere in the waiting room where I can see it. More often than not, the first person that walks out to pull it into the service area opens the door, looks in, then shuts the door and walks back to the service desk. Then someone else walks out, gets in, and drives it in.

That's an MPC kit called the Magnum GT II. MPC created it from the '66 Monaco, and this is why the Monaco cannot be produced again.

You have to make the deal, at whatever is agreeable to the parties involved. I did a '62-'63 Ranchero body for Modelhaus years ago. It was a simple deal ('62 front end on a '61 body, not hard to do) but I cut a mint unused '62 body to get part of the front clip, and those were never really easy to find. And this was a few years before Ertl reissued the '61 Ranchero in 1997. The V8 engine issue Ranchero hadn't been available since '78 or so, so that kit wasn't exactly common when I did this. I swapped the finished body only (which had the hood molded as part of it) for two complete kits, one '62 and one '63. The only difference between the two was the bumpers. Modelhaus sold them as complete kits at first, with straight copies of '61 kit parts for the rest of the kit except the bumpers. They included my name in the price list when it was first available, but not when it was put back in the line after being dropped for a few years. Having my name on it in the first place wasn't something I'd asked for, so when it wasn't included the second time around it didn't matter to me. When I was doing castings, I'd have people offering me stuff to do but I turned nearly all of them down. I remember looking at a shortened wide-box Dodge pickup bed that had a huge gap between the front wall and the bed floor where it had been shortened, and I didn't think the wall was in there straight. Sometimes people think that stuff can be fixed in the mold-making process. Too, they'll load the primer on and wet sand the part to a decent level of smoothness, but the primer is then hiding a lot of sandpaper scratches and such. The mold material will shrink the primer down and reveal all of the flaws, which will then be reproduced in every casting. When I did the Ranchero body, it never had any primer applied to it anywhere other than where I'd joined the pieces together. I'd cut the Ranchero body so as to leave the lower half of the front fenders alone (with the "Ranchero" script intact), and spliced the '62 clip at the narrowest point, the center of the front wheel opening. The rest of the splice was along the top of the body side recess, and very close to the door line. I never even sprayed primer on it, just dabbed it with a brush along the cut lines. 90% of that got sanded off. Another guy sent me a Ford pickup wheel that had five angled slots in it; I don't think any two were the same width or at the same angle. I'd wanted to do that wheel myself prior to that, so I agreed to have that one sent to me in return for three or four sets of castings. Doing the castings for that guy wore out one mold, and I didn't feel like trying to fix the piece he'd sent me. So I made another wheel myself and never used the other one to make a mold again. All of the Ford pickup wheels I sold were off of my own original part.

Something selling for several hundred dollars on eBay doesn't necessarily translate to thousands of sales as a reissue. It only means that a handful of people (as few as two) were willing to beat each others' brains in to get the one that was available at that moment. If another Big Drag turns up in the next couple of days, it'll probably sell for less than the first one, because the pool of potential buyers is down by one for now...