Steamboat

Nicely done. The color looks right.

Nicely done. It looks beautiful.

The Mighty 354 hemi nearing completion: The magneto is made from bits of sprue and styrene tubing. The spark plug wires needed to be run between the intake tubes before the manifold was installed on the engine. I did not research the firing order for the mag - purists please forgive me! The intake was first painted flat black, then silver for the flanges and metal parts. The hose clamps are Molotow pen. I could have made the hose clamps better by wrapping bits of tinsel around the tubes as I would normally do for a radiator clamp, but I decided that 16 of them would just be too much work. The plenum is wrapped with aluminum sheet. It's not really necessary, but hides some imperfections in the 3d print and gives a nice finish. The supports for the plenum are Evergreen .060" styrene angle, painted with metallizer. You can see that they still need to be added on the Captain side and paint touched up. I'm still fine tuning the 3d print for the carbuerator scoop. I'll post a photo of the finished engine when I can.

Ditto on the paint scheme. I like it!

Nice build. Did the original have a Chevrolet engine? It's heresy to a Mopar guy!

Looks great to me. I wish I could build one that clean!

Nice job! The early 2nd generation cars are my favorite too.

We didn't go to the Freedom 500 on Friday, we went to the Cleetus and Cars burnout contest on Saturday. We got to see some burnout cars up close and see what makes them go. The formula is pretty obvious: gobs of blown, methanol injected horsepower in a light car with about a 80:20 front to rear weight ratio! Pickup trucks rule. The scoring rules were that to score maximum, they needed to pop both tires within 2 minutes. Only a handful of cars did it. There was a beautiful metallic blue '71 or '72 Chevelle in the contest that nearly made me cry, he rear ended the wall and turned a $40,000 car into a $500 junker in the blink of an eye! Here's Independence as it looks now.

Beautiful. It looks like you could jump in and drive it!

I made a scoop out of sheet styrene (10 years ago), but I think it's a bit too large for the carbs I'm using. The carbs will be closer together when installed on the manifold. I'll try my hand at 3d printing a scoop. If it doesn't work out, I can make another from sheet stock.

Love it! I need to get one too. My wife had a white one just like it when we met. I remember we had to make a fan belt out of nylons to get it home once!

Yes, thanks for letting me know. I wasn't aware that he would use the videos but I'm thrilled! Derek even autographed the model for me.

OK, a hint. A lot of aluminum gets trucked into St. Louis.

Wow! Nice work.

I'm doing some work on the interior sheet metal, using real aluminum when I can: 1) for ease of shaping and 2) my supply of Testor's aluminum metallizer is running out. I recently saw that one bottle was priced at $30 on everyone's favorite auction site! Can anyone tell what the source of the aluminum was? Soda cans will also work just as well but they are not as much fun!

I finally finished this one a few months ago. There's a thread in the WIP section showing some of the major mods. Trying to make a presentable model from a Revell kit originally issued in the '60's is like putting lipstick on a pig. Fit and finish were pretty lacking, but I'm happy to call it done. Major mods included reworking front and rear wheel openings, narrowing the kit tires, scratch building the drinker side interior door panel. 3d printed hub caps, front turn signal lenses and head light lenses. The windshield was one of the most challenging things I have attempted to date. The windshield frame is made from styrene sheet, cut and bent and then finished with Alclad. Paint is Alclad black base coat with Tamiya rattle can clear. Little known fact: the Porsche factory used giant cats for security in the '50's and 60's, hence the giant cat hairs in the interior photo!

Finally finished this one. Unfortunately I don't have photos of the struggles to get it done. I'll post some more pictures in the Under Glass section.

Very cool. I'll be watching this one.

Looks great from what I see. I think the photos didn't do it justice.

Looks great. Very nice attention to detail.

Looks good. When I started this project 10 years ago I would have been thrilled to find those headers. 3d printing has really opened a new door for me.

Headers - The iconic headers at first are daunting, but analyzing them piece by piece they are not so bad. Looking at the photos, I realized that all of the tubes appear to have the same curvature. With a little experimentation I found a pretty close radius at 9" and the trumpet length of 15". So I drew them up in CAD and printed a set for the passenger side. I made a jig for them as shown and mocked up the fit with the body and chassis. Then I removed the body and replaced the chassis in the same position, allowing me to measure the relative position of the engine and headers. Going back into CAD, I was able to position the header flange in relation to the tubes. Then it was just a "simple" LOL matter of connecting the flange to the outlet pipe by building a tube in 3d. Not simple at all, it took about 2 hours to draw the first tube, but now I've got a process and the rest should be pretty straightforward. This is the #2 tube as drawn. I just printed the flange with the #2 tube. I'll test fit it, make corrections and then try it with #2 and #4.

Nice and shiny! Did you use lacquer or enamel?

Not Liberty next, but definitely another VGG car. '72 Chevelles are hard to come by, and I'm already doing another one for a "cars I've owned" collection. Monte Borrow would be fun, or maybe Vanishing Paint or Betty White. So many to choose from.

Awesome job. The interior photos are amazing. How were you able to get them with the car assembled?