Mark

Engine is from the AMT '62 Buick.

Bench. The MPC kit is based on their Switchers series kit. Some new parts were created to make the Milner car, but only enough to get the kit into the ballpark.

The '55 Chevy is probably the "easiest" of the Revell tri-five Chevy kits to work with. Atlantis will have to tool another set of tires for it, as the '55 didn't get converted over to the (wider than original) two-piece hollow tires by Revell. Those won't fit, as the inner wheel houses on the chassis are quite narrow. One side is narrower than the other, something to watch for if you are working on one. The Revell Hot Rod magazine issue had wider tires and really wasn't buildable out of the box due to this. If Atlantis gets to the '56, they had better tool some new clear parts as the original front and rear glass falls through the openings in any issue past the mid-Seventies. I'm surprised they didn't at least tool a new rear glass for the '57 hardtop.

The paint section is virtually zero. No Duplicolor to be seen. I was kind of expecting to see something after the Pep Boys locations here got away from selling auto parts.

I picked up a '60 Ford pickup yesterday. The store I stopped at also had one Demon kit on the shelf.

She had both a Satellite and a Mustang at different times. The Satellite was a '71-'72 style though. Both AMT and MPC made funny car kits with the '73-'74 body, but I don't know of any 1:1 funny cars with that style body. She also had a short-lived Barracuda, an ex-Don Schumacher car with an extremely crude paint/lettering job that was thrown together in a hurry after a crash.

I wonder which AMC cars used this transmission. I thought they used Borg-Warner automatics through '71, then used 727 Torqueflites built under license from Chrysler from '72 on. Too, I'm pretty sure the AMC cars bigger than the American used a torque tube rear axle setup through '66 or so, which would mean the AMC version of this transmission would be somewhat different from the ones used by GM.

Pretty sure Olds had the starter on the left (driver's) side in the Hydra-Matic days. To install an Olds engine into an early Ford, the transmission adapter moved the starter to the other side. So that transmission is for a Cadillac engine. Pontiacs used Hydra-Matics in the Fifties also, but I don't know of any kit that includes a Poncho mill with a Hydro.

Looks like a Hydra-Matic; if not from an Olds, it's from a Cadillac.

This has been a thing for a bunch of years. My first three daily drivers (one car, two pickups) were manuals. The first (1979 AMC Spirit GT) once got taken to the dealer, or for tires, I can’t remember which. This would have been in the Eighties. None of the men working there that day knew how to drive a stick, but the (female) service writer did...

The new-old-stock front fenders on my '62 Fairlane are in red oxide primer, as is a NOS front bumper splash pan I have. I think I have a spare NOS fuel filler door also, again in red oxide. The used hood I unbolted from a junkyard car about fifteen years ago also has red oxide primer on the topside. Most of the metallic blue paint on it was burned away, apparently by the Arizona sun. (Though the car was in New York, it had Arizona plates on it.) The part number was stenciled on the underside of the hood, most of which is also red oxide primer. I suspect the hood was not original to the car I removed it from, as it was minimally painted on the underside unlike the original hood on my car (which was swapped out due to some rust at the front). The replacement was probably NOS prior to its being installed on the Arizona car.

Those wheels aren't from the Revell '55 Chevy.

That Comet wagon would have to be a 90% new kit, as the wagons were pretty much Falcon wagons with Comet front sheet metal. Comet wagons share the Falcon wheelbase, shorter than that of the Comet and Cyclone hardtops and sedans...

What it is depends on who just bought it, who had it restored, or who just put it into an auction...

Why not get the altered wheelbase hardtop and move the wheel openings?

The engine and chassis from the MPC Coronet got recycled into their '66-'67 Charger. The body tooling probably got scrapped, had Ertl found it they'd probably have utilized it at some point, as they did with the '70 body.

That's three times as many kits as I saw at one store the other day...

Do you have pictures and dimensions for these tires? Someone might recognize them from (possibly) some other application, or someone with a lathe might be able to make another set.

Is the bottom one 100% stock, or is it along the lines of the stock-looking '65 Belvedere? I'll be getting all three nonetheless, but would like to know...

Kalmbach sold off all of their assets except a couple, to Firecrown Media. They already have a couple of railroad magazines but supposedly plan to keep everything going and hire all of the Kalmbach staff that want to stay. I'm guessing that they'll let things keep going for awhile before axing any magazines. The article I saw (many are hidden by paywalls) said that, after the remaining assets are sold, Kalmbach will be dissolved.

Kalmbach just sold all of their remaining titles to another publisher; one known mainly for model railroad magazines. If you thought the automotive content took a dive when SA was shut down, it's probably headed straight off the cliff now...

I have all of the kits in that series (none of them from any of the other 1/32 scale series). A couple of them are in that style box. There were a few different decal sheets. The hot rod kits (Texan, Rebel, etc) had the markings shown on the box while other kits had a more generic sheet. I'm thinking the decal sheet was eliminated from most (if not all) kits that had them, to keep the costs down. I don't think any of my kits that are in that style box have a decal sheet.

SMP waffled on the "separate roof for hardtops" thing. The '59 Impala annual also used a separate roof for the hardtop, as did the '61 Corvair (which lacked door frames/pillars as it should have been a coupe). I can't recall any AMT annual kit of that period having a separate hardtop roof.

'61 Imperials were SMP. SMP was a separate company (albeit with investment by AMT) though they were joined at the hip marketing-wise. I believe they had at least some separate engineering staff, as there are differences in design. SMP kit bodies tend to not be as thick as AMT in panel thickness, and most also seem to be roughly finished on the inside compared to AMT. SMP was bought out by AMT in August 1961. A handful of '62 Imperial convertible kits came in SMP branded boxes (identical to AMT but for the similar logo). About half of the Styline '62 Valiant kits are in SMP boxes, with the rest AMT. If you have a '62 Impala annual kit (either hardtop or convertible), check the little custom license plate on the plated tree...it still has "SMP" on it.

AMT/SMP did some goofy stuff back then. Since the 1959 kit has been reissued, it would seem that the '60 was an entirely new tool which was then altered to produce '61, '62, and so on. I do believe the '61 has a separate roof for the hardtop. It's amazing that Chrysler actually ordered Imperial convertible promos in those years, because they sold so few 1:1 convertibles. Then again, Ford ordered '60 Edsel promos when they knew they were pulling the plug on the car even before the '59 came out.