Spex84

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.

Aw yeah! Love it so far, especially the section job and molded skirts/shaved gravel guard.

Picked up one of these kits a while back--tons of great parts inside. The custom taillight/bumper unit looks awesome blended into the back of a sectioned '49 Ford, for anyone so inclined. I found the bucket seats in my kit have a rib pattern that is totally butchered, full of blemishes. Other than that, the parts look very usable.

Hey packrat, I appreciate the work you did to try and make that old pile of parts as appealing as possible under the circumstances, like detail-painting the blower to try and make it look more 'period', and the patina paint job. After being so harshly dismissive of this kit, I've found myself thinking that maybe there should be a community build where everyone tries to do something cool with it..silk purse out of a sow's ear and all that. In the interests of being constructive rather than negative, here's a sketch of what I would do with mine:

Thanks for the comments guys Tim--thanks a bunch. Your builds and articles have been inspiring me since about 1997 or so. To put things in perspective, I was in elementary school then. JC--Thanks for your interest. I have a build thread over on "the other" model car site, but I may import it over to MCM soon. Rob--I have an airbrush, but was too lazy to use it! Also, I've brush-painted smaller parts with this paint before, and after collecting lots of reference photos, I found that the bare-metal finishes I liked best had a slightly mottled appearance...so an airbrushed finish would be excessively smooth and consistent. Too clean. So I just used a regular hobby brush, like the ones Testors sells with the white handle and black bristles, and smudged the paint on. Emphasis on smudged--I wasn't "brushing" so much as smushing the bristles into the body. Exactly what 'they' tell you NOT to do with a brush, as it wrecks the bristles. Oh well...it's good to have a dedicated dry-brushing brush anyway. It looks terrible at first...but I think the paint is lacquer-based, because it dries very quickly. As it was drying, I continued to stipple with the brush, essentially taking the paint that I'd applied and distributing it over as wide an area as possible. This action starts to even out the finish and remove any areas of paint buildup. The end result of the dry-brushing/stippling is a fairly uniform semi-gloss finish. Even after the body was dry, some paint would come off when touched. That's where the buffing comes in...I used a piece of blue heavy paper towel and buffed the surface to a shine, removing any paint that wasn't attached (not much, really). At this point, I decided the finish was nice and shiny, but too dark. That's when I applied a very small amount of aluminum paint to the cloth, and buffed it onto the body, taking care to mostly hit the high spots (trim, hinges, tips of the louvers) and to NOT cover the entire body...so the darker Steel layer would still show through. In order to figure out the approach, I did a test body with several combos. I tried: -Mr Hobby Steel over grey primer -Mr Hobby Steel over black primer (the mottled look is more pronounced and the overall final product is a tad darker) -2 coats Mr Hobby Steel over black (the black disappears and it ends up looking like the first test over grey) -Mr Hobby Steel over grey, with a layer of graphite rubbed on top (too dark) -Mr Hobby Steel over grey, with Aluminum buffed into it afterwards. Bingo!

Much appreciated everyone. Rob--I feel like I got lucky with the Mr Hobby paint. It's definitely worth tracking some down and giving it a shot!

Thanks folks! I enjoyed every step of building this thing, even when it got tedious. It's my dream car...one of 'em anyway. Ben--the paint is Mr Hobby "Mr Metal Color" stainless steel metalizer (from Japan), dry-brushed over grey Plasticote primer. This created a mottled finish, which I then buffed with a cloth. Then some Mr Hobby Aluminum was rubbed onto the high spots using a cloth with just a skiff of paint on it, and a little copper Rub-n-Buff near the bottoms of the doors to create the impression of light oxidization. The Rub-n-buff has wax in it (I think?) so I'd advise against trying to paint or apply decals over it.