Spex84

Haha, just take a trip over the border into Mexico around Christmas. It's like there's a war on when the kids get their holiday firecrackers. Living in Canada, I had never experienced M-80s until a visit to Baja. It's a wonder the kids have any fingers left! //Love the hobby shop photos. Ever feel nostalgic for a time you never actually experienced? I have a bit of that going on right now...

Sick. You're going above and beyond, putting all that effort into making the underbody details screen-accurate. I love the steering wheel and that tiny skull shifter. Witness this thread, brothers!!

Beautiful work! Very smooth paint, clean assembly, and the modified wheels are fantastic. They must have required many hours of work, but the result is well worth the effort. You have made an old kit look really good, congratulations!

Lookin' good! For optimal proportions, try moving the front wheels back by about 1cm or a half inch. It's looking very long in front right now. All of those wheel-tire choices look good; I'm fond of the first one. The chrome-reverse/painted wheel in the second photo is very cool, but with the double white/red stripe slicks it's a little busy looking.

Looks like some good parts so far...I love "A" coupes. I'm fond of the center steering wheel, the tri-spoke design with the bullet center. I guess it depends on the overall style goal.

Innovative and creative build (thanks for sharing all the steps) and a fantastic result. The subject is a bit crazy for my taste, but the execution is so awesome that I'm immediately drawn in. The stencil-cut frame grabbed me at first, but once you got to the scratchbuilt luggage-rack gas tank, my mind was properly blown. Oh, then the dashboard. And the foiled body...and the wood interior bracing... I'm almost sad to see this one finished, because I enjoyed watching the build process so much. Oh, and the other two are sweet builds too. All hits, nary a miss in the bunch!

Stunning! I love the paint treatment, exhaust, and big wheels combined with the hopped-up inline engine. Very, very classy Nice work on the interior too. Sometimes those older kit interiors fall behind when a builder lavishes attention on the body, but this one is pulling its own weight. Killer ride.

Perfect! Great paintjob, it really has the Larry Watson look. I'll remember the trick with the Chezoom hood--I love the Cliff Inman Chrysler too, but in the past I've looked at the kit hood and felt it would be too much work to try and modify it to the Windsor style. It looks so good, I might have to reconsider!

Incredible work. The rust on the body near the front bumper looks 100% real, complete with flaking and bubbling. How did you do that? Great scratchbuilding and detailing..the wipers, tool box, floor mats...and I love the fire extinguisher poking out under the seat; it looks real too!

hmm, broken link and the "edit" feature doesn't work. Since you have the new-tool nose sitting on your bench in the WIP shots, I won't bother posting another shot of it.

Very cool! The new-tool Ala kart has some great parts. Aside from some parts that seem very under-scale (engine, exhaust pipe diameter), the other thing that bothers the heck out of me is the nose piece--I like the original 1:1 car, and the 60s AMT kit nose looks OK, but the new tool nose just looks like a urinal to me. Something is off in the way it curves/projects/tapers... http://www.esnarf.com/5705.jpg

Dude. Wow. Love the dashboard even more, now. The gauges look fantastic. Clever using the googly eye lenses--I've used them as headlight lenses before, but never for gauges. The body looks great too, with the careful foil job (impressive, that), and the wood strips. I'd love to find some veneer like that locally, but no luck. Might have to go online.

I'm enjoying this build immensely. I loved the cars built for the film...and especially loved that the Gigahorse featured two functional supercharged engines, funded by the production design lead. So awesome. For the dashboard emblems, you might be able to add some color to those logos, print them, and then emboss the paper from behind with a pencil tip to give them some 3D depth. It would be slow, but faster than individually casting emblems! Then they could be weathered or dry-brushed to add dust and aging.

What a beaut! I like the changes you've made to the base formula...the heavy rubber rake and lowered suspension helps to keep the nose down where it belongs, and the chopped windshield frame makes a huge difference, proportionally. I'll keep this combo in mind; the Miss Deal wheel/tire package is awesome. I'd probably go with bronze or orange paint and a black interior for that 1965-68 era look.

Thanks again for the kind words, everyone. Dennis--glad you like it! Your builds have been very inspirational, both in content and execution. Love the WIP pictorials. I'm going to try and improve the lighting on my bench so my WIP shots can be more like yours. Now I just need a genie to breathe on it or something and turn it into a 1:1 in my driveway

Since we're on the topic of "things Purple dissolves"...I dropped a supercharger with some bad paint into the Purple bath a few weeks ago. I had attached a short piece of aluminum tubing to serve as the blower drive shaft. After 5+ days in Purple (I forgot about it), the aluminum was heavily corroded, like it had been in salt water for months.

http://www.velocetoday.com/images/august07/Fiat-124-5.jpg "So Ford ripped off Aston for their front end design and Fiat is ripping off Ford now?" The new fiat 124's grille opening is nearly the exact same shape as the original 1960s/70s Fiat 124. Not only is it different from Aston's grilles from the 70s to today, it obviously pre-dates the Ford Fusion by several decades. I want to love this new Fiat, but I love the original so much that the new one just looks like a fat, plastic-y bland pretender in comparison I imagine it will be fun to drive, though, and that's all that really counts.

I've been unable to post links OR photos by URL ever since I joined about a year ago. I've been uploading the few images that I want to post to MCM instead of just linking from my Photobucket. I'll have to try the IMG tag trick instead. Whenever I try to link a URL, it kicks my out of the "reply" box and back to the page I was on. The other thing that doesn't work for me is the "edit post" option. Not only is there no field to type text into, if I hit "enter", it kicks me out of the "edit" box and back to top of the forum page.

Colani's designs were all so wild! Even if I'm not a fan of the particular shapes he might have used, I appreciate them for their sheer dramatic inventiveness. And yeah, a car shaped like a shoe from 1970 is NOT gonna go over very well on the HAMB, haha. There's a place and a time for everything...

Whooooa, I just googled "whitewall rims" and somebody finally created them! A company called GI performance.

Great patina! There's a panel truck similar to this in my home town, albeit with stock wheels and tires. Also has great patina with a clearcoat on top. "paint the sleeves white to look like whitewall tires"... In 2002, I started to wonder why no-one had created a billet wheel with a wide rim that could be painted black/white, so that a low-profile tire mounted on the wheels would just look like a vintage bias-ply but offer modern performance and handling. I've never heard of anyone doing such a thing in 1:1, but painting deep sleeves white is getting pretty close!

This is a cool build! Just wanted to suggest you'll need a magnet or something to open that gas cap, otherwise after the model is painted you'll be digging at it, trying to lift it open, which could damage the paint.

Wow...that Testors body had some unacceptably wrong and odd shapes going on! Now it's beautiful. Thanks for the description of how much work it took to get to that point. Excellent work as usual!

That's nuts Looks like something from the video game "Fallout". It has that over-the-top "atomic age" feel. Thanks for sharing this old build...I enjoy seeing models built in the 60s...lots of highly original but eccentric creations.

Very cool! I enjoy this one, even if a full-size Chevy as a gasser doesn't make much sense. The details and engineering sell it...stance, the fenderwell headers, straight axle, moon tank, headlight delete, etc all help to give it "the look". But the detail that really hooked me, oddly enough, was the perfect shade of Hurst yellow-white on the shift knob The foilwork and badges are convincing too. Great work.