robdebie

I'm building the NASCAR speedway version. I've narrowed the fenders considerably to make it a lot less wider than the original Monogram model, that is often critisized for its 'balloon' fenders. The car starts to look like the road car, I agree with you! Here's a photo of the real car at Daytona in 1985. I'm pretty sure the team used a stock headlight part: you can even see the elongated screw hole on the grill side, that's also visible in the first photo that I posted. They added blanking plates at the rear. Rob

I'm building and correcting a Monogram 1983-1986 NASCAR T-Bird, and one of the corrections involves the headlights. The headlights of the Monogram 1983-1986 NASCAR T-Bird are often critized. It was only when I found this picture of the real headlight buckets that I saw how the kit parts should like like: I started work on the kit parts by removing the vertical faces, and extending the 'tunnels' rearwards with two 1 x 0.4 mm strips. Now I need to decide where to place the vertical divider, and how deep the two headlight buckets are. Is there maybe someone around with access to the real thing, who can do some measurements? Here's a photo of the model so far. I've lengthened and dropped the nose (3 mm and 1.5 mm respectively), moved the front and rear wheel openings forward, and I'm about halfway now :-) Rob

This looks like a job for an Alps printer, like Pete J. wrote. These Alps decals will probably be nicer than the original Gooche decals. If you want to go this route, I have a long list of custom Alps printers here: https://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/decals.htm#custom Be aware that a good quality decal sheet requires two steps: drawing the (vector) art work, and then the printing itself. The former is a lot more work than the latter, and not all custom printers want to do the art work. A very rough guess is that the art work will require 'only' 4-5 hours of work because you have a decal sheet to start with. I've done full decal artwork for some 20 cars working from photos, and on average those took 12 hours. Rob

Randy, I would really love to hear your judgement on the shape of the MPC and AMT models. I'm slooooowly working on an MPC 1973 model, but I also obtained an AMT 1972 model. They differ in details of course, and recently I laboriously photographed both bodies in exactly the same position from various angles. By flipping the two photos in a viewer, you see the differences much more clearly. I put these photos on my MPC-Ertl 1/25 1971 Mustang webpage, but it works better if you download them and view them in a JPG viewer, alternating quicky between them. I noted the differences that I see in each set of photos, and so far the MPC kit seems to have the edge on the AMT model. However, the grille/headlight area seems to let it down, being too tall, which destroys the 'face' of the model. Also, the NACA inlets are positioned quite different on the models, and I don't know yet who got it right. It's the first time I compared models like this, but I already like what I found. Any comments are very welcome! Rob