Mark

IMC's tires were definitely better. If they are one-piece, and have sidewall lettering, they are indeed IMC. For the relatively few kits that company made during its brief existence, they made a bunch of different tires, most of them very well done.

Shouldn't be tough to find another hood, to stretch it. Both the '49 and '50 kits included two hoods.

The '49 Ford coupe kit has a Cadillac engine as an option, it should drop right into the '50.

A classic car dealer ran an ad for a few issues many years ago, to sell a '49 or '50 Ford convertible with a Cad engine. They didn't claim that it was a Frick conversion, but the ad seemed to try to lead you to that conclusion. That car wasn't lengthened, but it was made into a two-seater with the driving position shifted to the rear a couple of feet. Hood was lengthened to make up the difference. I always thought the Fordillac (and later Studellac) conversions were all built around the overhead valve V8. A Studellac is mentioned in the first James Bond novel.

Should have grabbed some losing tickets and taped them to the stuff you bought....

Just the thing for a frustrated golfer after a bad day at the links... The "seat up/seat down" thing could be useful, if the app can detect who is walking in to use the facilities... Too many tangents to go off on, better stop now...

Dog dishes on muscle cars are way overdone, especially on convertibles. Usually collectors striving for the "only one built on a Tuesday with a green interior, four-speed, and dog dishes" thing.

Those are the original one-piece tires from the two AMT Indy car kits. I'm not positive, but they look like the smaller tire. I don't have the Ford pickup kit with those tires, I sold mine many years ago. Comparing them to the two-piece units would verify which ones they are. Around the same time, AMT was using those tires in other kits. I believe the original issue Fireball 500 had the smaller ones. My Mach I concept kit has them also. The two toy-like tractor-trailer kits had the large ones, as did at least some of the "sand dragster" kits AMT was doing at that time.

The original version of the two-piece AMT tires were molded in something between plastic and nylon. Few glues would stick, tough to sand and fill seams. Some of the pre-Round 2 Stevens International kits (like the show rods) had the two-piece slicks molded in black styrene. Not quite as good as a vinyl slick, but much better than the "neither plastic nor vinyl" stuff from first time around.

Car manufacturers would make a killing if they came up with wheels painted the same color as the dust that comes off of the brake pads, or brake pads that gave off dust the same color as the wheels...

The market got flooded with those new-tool Chevy kits. There were four versions out at the same time (basic stock version, Coca-Cola, Pro Shop, and street machine. Toys R Us laid in quite a supply of all of them, then decided to get rid of the model kit shelves in their stores. They blew all of those out for $3.33 apiece. I bought all of the Pro Shop and street machine kits I saw, and resold all but a couple of them later. In some stores, they didn't have any other car kits, those were the ones they had at the end.

When Scale Auto "issued the call" for a new '57 Chevy kit, I thought Lindberg would have stepped up, not Ertl. It would have been interesting to see Lindberg's take on a '57, and to find out which body style and trim level they would have done. When I found out it was AMT, I figured they wouldn't have strayed as far from their original one as they did. More parts, platform interior, things like that. But I thought the body would be closer to the original, with the side trim reworked and maybe the Bel Air "washboards" molded as part of the body like other '57 kits. Strange that the Revell snap '57 hardtop has a lot of the feel of the original AMT kit, while the newer AMT hardtop resembles the old Revell kit.

Still can't warm up to that new-tool '57. That separate (but not hinged) trunk lid that doesn't sit flush when closed bothers me. The separate door handles don't look right also. I've done the alterations needed to hinge the trunk lid and get it flush with the body when closed, but haven't gotten much further with it. I should get back to it.

Can you jiggle the handle via the app? And, let's not get started on possible names for the app..

Don't tell me the toilet will need an app...

Those chassis were probably designed that way so that the parts could be interchanged between cars by builders. Use the front section from the Mustang or Falcon chassis if you are trying to replicate a Chevelle or Nova that had a cross spring setup. Cut the chassis and lengthen it with pieces of parts trees if you want the wheelbase closer to stock, to match a particular 1:1 car. The interiors are simple too, they can be altered if you "un-shorten" the wheelbase on any of them. Swap the blower from the Chevelle onto the Nova if you want a different setup. I haven't tried it, but I'd bet that, for example, the Barracuda body might drop onto the Mustang's interior and chassis if you don't want a mid-engine 'Cuda. (You'd have to move the rear wheel openings on the body, or mess with the chassis.) If not a perfect fit, a piece of sheet plastic here and there might make the interior look like it belongs.

Same basic kit, but flares were added to the rear wheel openings. The Bed Bug issue also had the stock bumpers as an option, the later issues don't include them at all. California Roller has no plated parts. There is an Advent boxed version also, called simply VW Van. Box art for the Advent issue shows the Bed Bug, but the Rubber Duck version is what's in that box.

What they have/don't have is known to some extent by the "hanger shots" that Ertl ran on some of the tooling. It seems that, when time and budget permitted, they'd dust off dormant tools, unblock whatever they could, and shoot plastic through them. Whatever came out would be evaluated, then sandwiched between a couple of sheets of clear vinyl with a coat hanger at the top. That was done with tools in current production too, those were used for QC purposes. I have a couple of those that I bought at the old Toledo Toy Fair shows around 1990. We were once set up next to the Ertl display, one guy gave those a look and went looking for the guy who was selling them. Even Ertl, long as they owned all of the AMT stuff (1982 purchase), never got around to evaluating everything.

Bed Bug was the "regular" version. Deal's Wheels version was called "Van". That one had "1/25 scale" on the box, and both versions had two surfboards and a roof rack.

As an aside, did the 1980 RR have that horn, and did it have the sticker on it? I've got the 1980 Volare brochure, it makes no mention of Warner Brothers, and the cartoon bird does not appear anywhere on the 1980 Road Runner. WB of course holds the copyright to the bird but not the Road Runner name itself.

MPC wouldn't get licensing to do these as actual cars, but they later got licensing for several NASCAR cars and put the decals into those awful kits they did, with the cut-down generic chassis from their Seventies kits and different front clips on a Buick Regal body. All of the sponsors were various brands of tobacco, too, before people got their undies in a bunch over things like that. Just in time to run smack into (or get run over by) the first group of Monogram NASCAR kits...

It's "you're", not "your"...

The horn used in Road Runners mimicked the "meep" sound the animated RR made. The horn used was a forklift item, it sounded like that because of the wire used in making it.

How it works, is you latch onto the latest fad, modify an existing item to take advantage of it, and sell a few of them and make some money. If you examine enough annual kits, you'll see drag versions that don't resemble anything you'd see on a drag strip. Not much different from this, really...

That book was later updated and divided into two volumes. The revised book included a section on aftermarket items, then still in their infancy compared to military and railroad subject matter.