Snake45

I've never heard that. I like John Kay's voice but this new(ish) live album doesn't showcase it very well. Nice to have a live version of Rock Me, though, after all these years. I actually saw Steppenwolf live, as a kid in 1968. I don't remember too much about it except for Kay did several mini-monologs ripping on the Pope. Apparently he wasn't a fan of the Pope for some reason. (Steppenwolf had one whole song on that theme, and worked a line on it into at least one other song,)

Are you ruling out the AMT kit for some particular reason? Not currently in production but they cranked 'em out for 20 or 30 years so there are still plenty of them around.

Thanks. Took me a while to round up a satisfactory selection. To my eye they're all too big by at least 25%, but they're what I had to work with. The /MP and 714 number are hand-painted. I found the trick to this is to slop some white paint on in the general area, then trim away everything that doesn't look like a letter or number with the tip of a toothpick. Works great on bare plastic or "chrome," on painted plastic, prolly not so much.

I have no idea how the body got narrower, but it is.

Agree with you completely. I softened that crease on mine (as seen above) as much as I could without wiping out the Nova emblem on the front fender. If I'd realized that emblem was also on the decal sheet, I'd have removed it and softened that line even more. Can't fix it now, it's already painted. Ah shucks oh well. Do you have any pics of the rear-end fix you detailed above? Would love to see it.

Two of my very favorite live albums from back in the day are Humble Pie Rockin' the Filmore and Steppenwolf Live. I went looking for the latter on CD a few years ago and bought something that turned out to be recorded in the 2000s. Worst recorded/mixed live album I've ever heard. You hear WAY too much of John Kay and too little of anything else. Worse yet, he can't quite sing all the lead lines anymore and is often heard dropping down and singing harmony. They might have been able to get away with this if it had been mixed different/better. Still some pretty cool stuff on there but WAY too many annoying moments for full enjoyment. As for Frampton Comes Alive, I got thoroughly burned out on that when it was new. When one of those tunes comes on the "classic rock" stations now, I grab the remote and see what else is on. ("What classic rock songs are you burned out on?" might make a good thread here sometime.)

I'll have to take a look at your rear-end fix. Sounds simpler than mine, if it works. As to the wheel openings, I was planning to graft in the AMT '72 pieces, too. Then I took a real good look at both sets of wheel openings. The Revell openings are obviously too straight and squared off, but to my eye the AMT openings are a bit TOO rounded. I decided to just raise the Revell openings in the center a little, creating a little more rounded shape. I didn't get it perfect but I think it sure looks better. See what you think. Both openings OOB compared: Revell body after my attempted fix:

I've found a nearly foolproof way to get reference photos. Take your best guess and build it that way. The first person you show it to--certainly, no later than the third person you show it to--will produce detailed photos, usually in full color, showing you did it wrong. Works almost every time!

Correct, of course!

You're hard, sweet and sticky....

That's looking fabulous!

Oh my, does THAT ever NOT work!

The comments on my GSX didn't sound like they were "out of courtesy" to me. That thing got more comments than several nice plastic models I've posted up there, and people seemed to really like the thing. OTOH, my Chevelle, into which I had to put a LOT of work, got exactly ONE comment down here. Have you seen the two models I'm talking about? Not hard to find, they're both still right here on the "front page" of this section (the GSX was eventually moved by a mod). I'm pretty sure you weren't the ONE guy who commented on my Chevelle.

My experience with posting my '68 Chevelle and '70 GSX leads me to believe that this section and the plastic sections above have two completely different audiences, with little crossover between the two. I think most of the plastic modelers never bother to look down here, because a great deal of the diecast subject matter (lotta classics, antiques, and so forth) and even scales (1/18, 1/64, etc.) are of no interest to them.

Hey, to a REAL modeler, anything can be made to fit anything!

Yeah, I know. I have a mint-ish unbuilt '65 complete kit. I think I'm gonna use that '65 body and piece together a '65 and leave the unbuilt kit unbuilt. For a '66 body, about 20 years ago I bought a builtup original '67 that needed only slight repairs to the body. BUT the original builder had used those fender-exit exhausts, and the glue from those ruined the side vents, so I spliced in the '67 vents from a common MPC reissue. I seem to recall that model had a drag chute on it which messed up the '67 backup light, too, so that body would be perfect to convert back to a '66. The rear deck emblem is the same, that's the main thing. As far as interior parts, Modelhaus has a lot of stuff available, so what I don't have when I do these 10 models, I'll get from them. Frankly, I'm not gonna get too anal about the interiors, especially on the coupes. Depending on what I can get together, some of my coupes might end up with largely '63 reissue guts. I will try my best to get correct interiors on the roadsters. One of my eBay purchases was a nice built but unpainted '64 roadster. It's so nice I would just polish out the virgin white plastic EXCEPT the original builder glued the windshield in with about half a tube of glue and there's severe body damage in that whole area. Will have to graft in the Modelhaus patch part for that, sigh. Oh well, I bought that one as part of a lot that included a JoHan '68 Javelin promo and three other models, and the whole lot only cost me $35 plus shipping. And last year I swapped off one of the "other" models for a brand new Revell '66 Impala, so that was a pretty good buy. I also picked up along the way an original '63 roadster body. Someone had hogged out all four wheel openings, dirt-track style or something, but it still had the movable headlight piece in it. I spent an evening carefully cutting the headlights out and I'm pretty sure I can save that, which makes the rest of the body worth restoring via sili-cloning. I have just about a complete set of the original '66 roadster optional custom and race parts. I'm gonna build a '66 roadster custom and a '66 road racer using these, though I will probably convert common '63 bodies instead of using original '66s. I agree with you about the factory wheel covers for the different years. That's the way I'm going to go on the stock builds. Here's a '67 I bought with the optional van top. I was gonna restore it as the van, but when I disassembled it and got the top off, the body's in good enough shape to restore, including the rear deck emblem. Much too good to chop up to make a van. So that van top is also going on a common '63 reissue body, and the '67 body and interior will get restored to stock.

Very interesting. I wonder if that color would have been available to Jeffries when he built the car in mid-1966. And then there's that interview I have with Jeffries in a 1966 magazine, where he said it was 25 (I think) hand-rubbed coats of "candy Wine Burgundy." The color photo on the cover of that magazine shows a slight pinkish tint, what I'd call "strawberry" red. And it's not that the magazine is old and faded. It's looked that way since I bought it off the newsstand in 1966.

Wow, I really like that one! The sit and the whole look are just perfect! I gotta build one of those!

I agree, it does look 1000% better now, and your fine work deserved to have that part look right. Good for you, and model on!

The one body I don't have is a '66 Coupe. I bought one off ebay, a fairly "complete kit" in the box with instructions, but when it came, the body wais actually a '65 for some reason (unless AMT didn't change the bodies between '65 and '66, which I doubt). The rest of the parts in the box seem to be '66. Not a huge deal, I managed to collect more than one '67 Coupe body and I can convert one of those to a '66 by sili-cloning the front fender vents from another '65 or '66 body and grafting them in.

MVW, I love your Sting Ray collection! I'm trying to put together a full set of '63 to '67s myself, coupes and roadsters both. I especially like your '66. Great color, and the wheel covers that year were beautiful. Can hardly wait to build mine, but I've got some other things on my plate to get to first.

If you're talking about some kind of liquid masking product, I've tried many of them over the years. All were unsatisfactory in one way or another. I found I can liquid mask at home, for pennies, that works better than anything on the market. If you're not talking about a liquid mask, never mind.

Judging from the roof (which is often a giveaway on these kinds of things), I'd say at some point it was a 4G Corvette. Looks like maybe they were going for styling cues from other generations of Corvette, or other iconic Chevies of various sorts. Got any other pictures of it?

Thanks for the kind comments, everyone! This stupid model was about 20 years in the making (counting a loooooong sentence on the Shelf of Doom). It wasn't easy to polish, and it wasn't easy to photograph.

THAT'S what I'm talkin' about! That's why I started this thread! You get it!