Mark

After the Charger name was applied to a detrimmed Cordoba, and later to an Omni 024, putting it in a four-door wasn't so much of a problem...

With older cars, the four-doors aren't as popular or desirable. They are an alternative however. With some of the more popular collector cars like tri-Five Chevies, guys are picking up solid four-door cars and converting them with donor panels from lesser condition two-doors. The wheelbase is the same, sedan roofs are the same, but still it's a bunch of work. Station wagons are a different matter, those picked up in popularity a while back.

That one is a reissue from the late Nineties (some of the lettering on the box sticks out as being different from the original Seventies issue). Fifteen bucks is pretty good if you are looking for one.

Okey only bought tooling and already molded parts, maybe already printed decal sheets, boxes, and so on. He didn't buy the company or the name. As I understand (I may be wrong) SeVille kept the old Jo-Han company but changed its name, and used that company to continue in whatever business it had in mind, other than making model kits. The name of a company can be trademarked in a given area. In New York, when I had a business, by setting up a corporation I had my chosen business name locked up for the entire state. Someone could have started a business with the same name in any of the other 49 states however, provided there wasn't one in that state already. Had it not been a corporation, I'd have secured it only for the county in which I live. So, there can be a Johan in Kentucky (Okey) and a Jo-Han in Michigan (or wherever the Atomic City one is). When the two collide, they'll end up hashing it out in court, most likely. These laws likely differ from one state to another, creating some nice busy work for attorneys.

This might be why the kit never got built. I could see buying additional parts and packing them along with the kit. But, I'd never remove or dispose of anything that came with the kit until it was finished...

The constant tinkering and "improvements" are messing up everything. I'm waiting for some IT geek to explain how needing to be online in order to open a file is an "improvement". All improvements are changes, but not all changes are improvements. In fact, few of them are. I'd like to choke someone at eBay over being constantly hounded about the availability of their app. I've seen the pop-up hundreds of times. If I wanted your app, I'd have it by now.

I've only seen a couple of original kits; both were white. Based on just that, though, I wouldn't rule out the existence of one being molded in orange. All but the slowest selling kits got multiple production runs back then, and there were sometimes differences between early and later kits.

For a lot of guys, looks beat everything including driving comfort and practicality. Some of those design things seem to be fads that came and went. There was a period where some guys built them with the body raised up on the frame at the back, to make the car look as though it were bent in the middle. Then there's the "no front brakes" thing (which was apparently legal in a lot of places; a stock T actually had only one brake, on the transmission). As for the vertical steering column, I remember seeing one in a Rod & Custom feature car in the early Sixties. The guy shoved a Buick engine into an early Fifties Plymouth, apparently that was his way of making it all fit.

Annual kits are the car and truck kits issued each year, when the subject was brand new. Most, but not all, were based on the promotional models that were made for the auto manufacturers and their dealers. AMT, MPC, and Jo-Han made the vast majority of them over the years. There are dual carb flathead intakes in the AMT '50 Ford convertible and '29 Ford woody/roadster pickup kits. One could be made also, by removing the single carb from a stock intake and adding mounting pads for the dual carbs.

Definitely MPC. They used the same pattern for a bunch of kits: Monte Carlo, Monza, Corvette, and Chevy/GMC pickup. There's even an issue of the Model A roadster pickup with that engine.

I'd have been even madder in the Fifties or Sixties to find some monkey drilling holes in the trunk lid to attach one of those diecast insignia. Those things were made from the cheapest junk pot metal, and started pitting pretty much from day one. The last three vehicles I bought only had license plate frames put on them. I was thinking about taking them off of my last car when someone rammed into it and totaled it. The new car will probably keep them, as the frames are on a lot of cars sold around here which makes them kind of anonymous.

Which one?

Revell is now a German company; only a few employees on this side of the ocean. Atlantis and Salvino each probably employ more people here than any of the bigger companies.

Use the floor piece to help align the chassis during assembly. The floor will eventually be attached to it, why not use it to make sure everything lines up?

My decal sheet is dated 7-72 on the back...it would seem to be from one of the MPC '73 annual kits (coupe or convertible).

Round 2 parts pack, also in a number of kits. Looks like a clean recent build of an original kit.

The '72 kit had decals that match the illustration on that box. That's not to say that some of them didn't come with the Stroker sheet, but that would be an exception and not what usually came in the '72 kit.

The air intake is for a small transmission cooler. The cooler wasn’t part of the radiator like it was later on.

Didn't Academy announce it awhile back?

I have that decal sheet, it is 1/25 scale. The built model pictured is 1/25 also. The 1/20 scale MPC Corvette kits had Hurst Mag wheels, the 1/25 scale kits had the ones pictured. Original decal sheets from that era (AMT and MPC) will have a date code on the back. A mid/late 1969 code (7-69 or similar) would indicate a 1970 annual kit. Many of those hit the stores in September or thereabouts.

I believe it is the 1/25 scale 1970 MPC annual kit.

They did it once, they'll do it again. Moebius didn't tool that kit to sell only 6,000 of them.

I'd say yes, but not right away. Different decals will freshen the kit when a reissue is needed.

My car is a Fairlane (unit body) so it's VIN is stamped into the drivers' side inner fender. Presumably, if that car were wrecked badly enough to damage the number where it is, it would have been a total. The full size (body on frame) cars probably have the VIN somewhere on the firewall. But that would only be that number, with no other info.

Where was that plate located? I don’t think it's a VIN tag, but rather a patent plate. It looks different from the examples shown in a Ford parts book that I have, that covers 1960 through 1964 passenger cars. You might need to get a look at a shop manual for Canadian Ford products to decode that one. US market Fords have a date code on the patent plate. This Canadian one does not have one.