Snake45

Pretty cool! I have one of those new in the box I bought cheap about 20 years ago. Someday I'm gonna have to get it out and slap it together.

Great color, very clean work!

That's pretty cool! I wish you could do the exact opposite and get to an unchopped coupe, but I guess I'm gonna have to buy somebody's resin body.

Come to think of it, the Cyclone body in the AMT AWB kit (the eventual fate of the original annual body) is more accurate than the one in the "new" kit, except of course for the altered rear wheel openings, which wouldn't be hard to retro-correct. The only problem is the grille--the AWB kit's is missing the center piece, which was separate in the original kit, but all molded as one in the "new" one.

You can do even better with the stock Cyclone kit and the reissued Eliminator Cougar frame. In fact at one point the first Eliminator Cougar was wrecked in a highway accident, and Nicholson procured another body and put it on the frame of the Eliminator II Cyclone, which he still had on hand. I'm planning to build a model of that, i.e., that frame and then both the Cyclone and Cougar bodies for it.

You are WAY overthinking this, in search of an argument. You are also saying things I never said. If YOU are having fun, then YOU are doing things the right way FOR YOU. Nothing wrong with that at all! All I said is, never finishing anything wouldn't work for ME. I'm trying to reach the guy who thinks he HAS to add every brake line and throttle return spring to EVERY build or he's not "doing it right" and the "big boys" won't respect him. That guy is doomed to frustration and will eventually give up the hobby because he thinks he can't "keep up." I know that guy well. Hell, I used to BE that guy and wasted too many years at it. I'll repeat: Any way you're doing this hobby, if you're ENJOYING it and having FUN, you're doing it RIGHT. For YOU. And that's really all that matters.

I've said many times this is a HOBBY and there's no wrong way to enjoy it IF you're having FUN. If "unfinished models that have some exceptionally fine work in them" is FUN for you, then that's great, but it doesn't work for me. But neither does "a cabinet full of completed models that have little or none." There's a lot of FUN to be had somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. The trick is to find the balance that's FUN for each participant in this hobby. Few if any of us have the time in life to build a large collection of models with exceptionally fine craftsmanship. And that's assuming we have the money, the skill, and the patience/attention span to do so, which are all variables over which we have at least some control. We have no (or very, very little) control over that most precious of commodities, time. As the late great Warren Zevon sang, "They say Jesus will find you wherever you go, but when he'll come looking for you, they don't know." Of course, one need not build every model to the same standard, whether very high or fairly low. It's perfectly fine to mix it up. Just make sure you're always having FUN!

If what you want to build is a modern-ish pro street, the Cyclone chassis is a poor choice. About all you could get out of it would be the rear wheel tubs. The rest of the frame is complete fiction, even for 1967. But that series is still fun to build and put on the shelf.

I'm about to give up on HL and order one (along with a couple other things I need) from one of the online retailers.

I recently got the reissued Hasegawa '65 Impala, just because I'd never seen one before. I'm planning comparo pics sometime soon showing the AMT, Revell, and Hasegawa '65 Impala bodies. Spoiler alert: All three bodies are quite nice except for the roofs. Nobody got the roof right! Each is wrong in a different way. AMT tried to correct the problem in the follow-on '66, and it's not perfect, but IMHO it's the best roof of the four, and that roof lives on in the just-reissued dirt tracker.

Some time back I started building a 1/144 fighter of some kind (might have been a Hellcat), intending to do it as a 1/6 scale RC model in the bed of an El Camino. This would probably require some sort of "transport cradle" to be built for the airplane, but that would all be part of the fun. In real life, the RC model would probably be built in two main pieces, wings and fuselage/tail, that would be transported that way and assembled at the flying field.

Different and therefore interesting. Well done and model on!

I bought a couple original AMT '68 Firebirds off eBay a while back, and believe me, that kit will take a LOT of work to make it look even halfway decent. But I hope to try someday just because, challenge! (I am probably going to end up grafting on the entire roof and windshield frame from a Revell '69 Camaro, if the dimensions are even close to matching. Just too much work to make the kit top look right.)

Here's Testor little bottle #3 Red, airbrushed over white primer (nearly the whole bottle of it, too!), on the '72 Chevelle in the background. It's actually a little brighter than it looks in the pic. It's a really RED red.

Wheelbase of the '41 Willys is 104 inches, so the Cyclone frame is too short. Your Mustang and Camaro are both 108 inches so that frame is WAY too short for those. Here's the project I'm working on at the moment: The Cyclone chassis under the '66 Mustang AWB body. I like the front suspension of the Cyclone chassis better. AMT altered the wheelbase of the Mustang body by something like 8 scale inches.

If that's an original AMT '68 Firebird, you did a magnificent job of bringing it back to stock-ish. I'm thinking it might be an MPC or more probably Revell. Either way, nice work!

Thanks! Looks great!

The AMT kit bears no relationship to the real Eliminator II except for a body that looks somewhat like a '67 Cyclone. It is in no way an accurate model. OP seems to know this, as he was asking about a wheelbase around 105 inches.

Tell us how you did the Caprice conversion!

I might have dozens. Here's two I definitely need to get back on. AMT '41 Willys pickup, and '67 Vette sedan delivery.

VERY clean and sharp! Model on!

That's a hella deal! I'm looking for one of those to do Dyno Don's second car.

What bodies are you thinking of using? If I have any of them, I could see if they fit. BTW, here's the Cyclone frame. I had to add two more frame rails to it so I could use it in the Mustang.

C1 and C2 Corvettes might be in the ballpark. IIRC the C1s are 102 inches and the C2s are 98.