Mark

Round 2 never actually announced a Demon kit prior to now. Someone spread their wish list around, and a couple of eBay sellers took pre-orders based on that.

I'd assume you would get them as pictured. The black background is there because he's printing on white decal paper. I wouldn't buy those anyway because of that alone. Any seller that can't answer a question also gets into my "bad books" and won't sell me anything...

All of the MPC Jeepster kits have the early Buick/Olds V6. A couple of versions of the MPC Jeep CJ kits had it too, but those particular ones haven't been available for many years.

Chassis are the same; in fact, the '69 and '70 kits use the chassis from the '66 Wildcat kit. The engine from the '69 would of course fit a '70, but try finding one. The 1970 restyle was a pretty extensive one. I'd bet that the '69 kit didn't set the world on fire sales-wise, so the 1970 promo update was done with no consideration given to doing a (then) $2 kit with engine detail. One may have been on the initial listing of AMT 1970 kits, though. I don't have that list in front of me, but it did include several items that never appeared.

Model King commissioned a reissue of this kit during the time they were having kits manufactured by RC2 (prior to 2008). So this isn't the first time since 1970 that this kit has been available. The 1969 Wildcat annual kit did have an engine and separate hood (and optional parts), but the 1970 was never available that way.

The assembled models at the Atlantis table at NNL East looked pretty good. I built one a few years ago, it came out pretty good. Make sure you start with unwarped parts, and resist the temptation to try to re-engineer the thing. It is what it is. But do look at the hinge parts during assembly, and do what you can to keep the doors from sagging when opened.

For the upgrade kits, check eBay. The Mattel unit did have a following, if that is still true you should be able to find the upgrade items as well as predicted plastic sheets. But I wouldn't throw too much money at it...for a little bit more you can step up to a real machine with greater capabilities.

I'd like to try it in the spray can...as soon as I find it...

The split oil pan used to be a bit of a bother for me, but no more. There are two ways to attack it. First step is to assemble the block halves with liquid cement. Make sure they are aligned; trim off the attachment pins if necessary. You can then wipe out the seam by either sanding and "painting over" with liquid styrene cement, or routing out the seam and filling with epoxy putty or two-part spot putty.

Might depend on which stock Chevelle kit you prefer. Both have offbeat/dated wheels: Revell has one-off modular wheels with slots shaped like Chevy "bowties", AMT has odd four-spoke modular wheels. Revell kit has a custom taillight panel (stock part is not included, though one from the stock kit will fit). The taillight panel could tip the scale towards AMT for some people. If you want a "parts kit", to swap the chassis under another midsize GM car, the AMT might be easier to work with as Revell's kit has the engine compartment molded as part of the body.

I don't know why license plates can't be made of plastic, with silk-screening replacing paint or the coating some states use now. NY plates still have raised letters/numbers but some personalized plates do not, so why are the raised characters needed. The aluminum plates are coated in some way, after a few years the stuff shrivels up and peels off leaving an unreadable bare aluminum plate. With what we're paying for registration fees, we should be getting new ones every couple of years anyway...

Nope, too much other stuff going on! I've still got a couple of those old window molds (stupidly threw a few others away). I'll probably just do some tests, starting with them highly polished and progressively going to slightly less polished with each additional test.

Figure out which cam covers you want before getting started, as Ford made a bunch of different ones considering how few engines they actually made. I spotted three different styles in the George Montgomery book, and I know there are other ones besides those.

I'd suspect that neither of the pro stock Pinto kits can be reissued without a lot of work, as they used the stock annual kit body which was later updated to the 1977-78 spec front end. There were a few 1:1 '77 Pinto pro stockers (Gapp & Roush, for one) but most of the Ford guys were running Mustang II bodies by then. As an aside, the two MPC kits did differ a bit. The '74 Don Nicholson kit body had a rear hatch while the '75 G&R version had a trunk lid. The G&R kit had Motor Wheel Fly front wheels which were never used in any other MPC kit, and to my knowledge nobody else ever included them in any kit.

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.