Mark

Verify your age...yeah, that's right...NOBODY has ever lied about their age,,,

No Glidden Pinto kit. MPC only did two pro stock Pintos: Dyno Don ('74) and Gapp & Roush ('75).

I saw (never bought) a few issues of Cracked, it didn't measure up to Mad IMHO. Neither did National Lampoon. I bought one of the Best Of compilations, to get the send-up on the AMT '57 Ford kit. Even in a Best Of deal, I only found a couple of other items even remotely funny. The handful of regular issues of NL I checked out seemed to be just upper-class college frat-boy prejudice masquerading as cutting-edge "humor".

My mom occasionally bought a copy of MAD for me, knowing their style(s) of humor were what I appreciated. She'd thumb through it every so often, and said it was well-written. She even bought me the infamous "finger cover" issue, which I discovered much later that a lot of outlets refused to stock.

Roof supports are what I'm thinking. The pillars at the rear (on either side of the rear glass) are paper thin on all of the Nomad bodies that I have seen. The ex-Revell Nomad body lacks the section below the tailgate (it's a separate piece) so the quarter panels are flapping in the breeze when the body is pulled out of the tool after being molded. Other manufacturers add bracing "after the fact", so Atlantis can do that in this case.

'63-'65 can use a '63 grille/front bumpers unit, '66-'67 grille has vertical bars but the earlier part will still fit. Rear bumpers and taillight parts should be the same for all. Interior upholstery pattern and door panel details differ for each year. If you don't have the correct interior, go with a black interior so as not to draw attention to it.

To narrow down between '63 and '64, '63 should have grilles in the hood indentations. To narrow between '65 and '66, '65 should have Fuel Injection emblems on the front fenders. '66 no longer had FI so one of those would not have them.

Local IPMS meet yesterday...one vendor apparently had difficulty selling kits in the recent past so he split them into parts like so many eBay sellers are doing. I found a number of items that a lot of people used to buy complete kits for: Moebius Ford pickup "big six" engine, Revell '70 Roadrunner "cop car" optional wheels, a couple of sets of Revell Dodge Charger front suspension parts that will "fill the empty space" on a couple of MPC Coronets, couple of sets of Revell tires made before they scrubbed the lettering off everything. Also found a built Jo-Han early Hornet funny car, and a couple of other kits that will go on the NNL East sale pile...

The minor alterations have a by-product of making it tougher for some less-than-reputable sellers to pass the reissues off as originals. I can't say that the changes are ever done with that in mind, though.

The tri-carb setup was the only choice in the original kit. The dual exhaust isn't stock either, I don't know when Ford first made a pickup with duals but it was long after 1960. I'm surprised that made it into the promos.

There's a reason that the muffler areas on old annual kit chassis are hollowed out on top. Without that, the muffler areas on the chassis would be filled with molten hot plastic in the molding process, and those areas would take forever to cool. They'd also shrink more than the surrounding areas leaving the mufflers looking like they were caved in. Those pickup kit chassis are pretty flat on the top side. Not too tough to cut out the muffler areas and fill with scrap plastic, or, better yet, cut the whole flat area out and replace with sheet plastic to get rid of the pipe detail too.

Pro Shop brand was originally supposed to be a premium thing, for hobby shops and mail-order only. For example, AMT/Ertl made a 1/6 scale small-block Chevy engine kit. A "regular" version was available to the unwashed masses, while one molded in clear plastic was offered as a Pro Shop deal. After a while, they started blurring the lines, then it was "everything goes".

Looks like AMT to me, probably from the '27 Ford touring car (or fire truck version).

Don't worry, one day we stop getting older!

The builtup of the new kit has black tires, I will assume they are vinyl. If they were plastic, they'd probably have left them white just to let everyone know. Some of the old plastic slicks are unique (not available in vinyl). The news with this kit will be the front tires done in vinyl.

1999 if I remember correctly. Mexico was 1995 (first new kit I recall was the new-tool '57 Corvette), China was 1999 (first kits I saw were the Phantom Vickie and '58 Edsel).

Consider getting several, and have dedicated pin vises for drill gauges that you use often. For instance, if you like to attach small parts with pins, have one just for the drill you use for pinning parts. Another for drilling holes for ignition wires, and so on. You can use cheaper/low quality pin vises for those, as long as they are concentric. If you have only one size bit in there and don't change it, the cheap ones will work.

My older brother once told me he spoke with a guy who owned one of the companies that sold fiberglass "kit car" bodies. Supposedly that guy told him the completion rate on bodies other than dune buggies was about three percent. As in, out of every hundred sold, only three ever hit the streets as a finished car. I'd guess the various Cobra replicas and things like Auburn speedsters had a much higher completion rate, as those were more complete and more finished than other 'glass bodies like the Kellison items for example. And a lot of the completed cars seem to not get a lot of use. Insurance for one thing, another might be things like poor ventilation or rough ride that might kill the initial buzz pretty quickly. After buying my house in 1989, for the first few years there was a car covered with a tarp sitting in one of the driveways up the street. The tarp eventually came off revealing one of those Kellison GT40 bodies, the car looked like it may have been completed at some point. Not long after that, it disappeared never to be seen there again.

Atlantis isn't going to change the shape of the Nomad body, as that would necessitate tooling a new one. They're just not going to do that, as their niche is bringing back older kits with minor improvements. I'm betting they are working on minor alterations to the body tooling, to strengthen certain areas like the rear roof pillars, so the kit can be packed without anything breaking. Many of the Revell opening-doors Nomad kits I have run across over the years, even just-opened kits, have had broken rear roof pillars and warped bodies.

The corrugated ones can be found at stores that sell sports cards. Different lengths, depending on how many cards each box is intended to hold. I bought them locally once, the store here would sell individually, by 50, or by 100.

Some people want complicated kits, sometimes a manufacturer will put one out there to show what they are capable of. Complicated = more workbench time per kit. The guys building military subjects seem to be gravitating towards that, and away from the simpler stuff. A lot of the car guys being cheapskates, yeah, they want it too providing they can get it with a 40% off coupon...

Probably a similar percentage to other resin kits, or multi-media kits like Gunze Sangyo High-Tech. People buy them, look them over, and often decide their own skill level isn't up to the task yet. So the kit sits until they decide they can build it, or until they (or a family member, after they pass) sells it to someone else, starting the cycle anew...

Depends on the kit. Racing Champions used the Pro Shop label on pretty much everything, from prepaints to low-volume reissues of relatively low-detail older kits.

Strange, around here they didn't jump off of the shelves as has happened previously, especially with Round 2 stuff. I was in the one store I can access on my way home from work a couple of weeks ago, and they still had plenty of everything.

Revell bought Renwal in the mid-Seventies and has reissued a small number of their items. The Revival kits were duds when released, one person long-gone from here once claimed that one of the hobby wholesalers cleared out the last of their leftover Revival kits in the mid-Eighties. Seeing as how Revell never did anything with them, if the tools still exist then they were never moved anywhere. Atlantis may have gotten them, again if they still exist. I'd guess that Renwal probably scrapped them given how poorly they were received when new.