Michael Bloes

Fantastic. I find that having about three cups of coffee before lettering often does the trick.

Not the OP, but Replicas & Miniatures make them: Battery Terminals, part number P-140, a pack of 12 for $8.50. You get three pair of inline and three pair of side feed.

That's so bitchin. You went with the styleside bumper in the back instead of the step.

Great tablecloth pattern, btw.

Wow, a second round of comments! You guys just won't let this one sink to page 2. Thanks again.

Fantastic. Is this the original kit with the box art with no words and the yellow custom car shown?

Thanks, Jason but it's ok - I'm gonna keep looking for something closer. If I get ambitious I might even just scratchbuild a pair.

Thanks, I just checked that out - they were the LAST products listed. Nice though. I bought a whole kit just to get my grill.

I have a larger slot car collection than model car collection. I'm thinking of writing detailed descriptions for each car so that when it comes time to dispose of them, they don't just throw them up on ebay with a "Here's another car from my dad's collection. No returns"

Good luck. I have two kids - boys 30 & 18. I'm a lifelong slot car, racing and bicycle guy and they have ZERO interest in any of it. My youngest doesn't even want to drive.

It has the dent, but you just can't see it in the pic above. Here you go: I'm still looking for the mirrors. They're not truck mirrors (even though they came with the truck), they're like Mustang mirrors or Fairlane mirrors or something. So I can't use what came with the kit.

Full article: By day, Mark Gustavson is a lawyer in Salt Lake City. In his free time, he makes model cars. His current project is a 1/25th-scale version of a car that exists only in his imagination—a 1964 Mustang with elements of a Mercury Cougar. The 69-year-old Mr. Gustavson expects to spend about $5,000 on supplies, including a tiny cylinder head he will pay a machinist to produce. That doesn’t count the 900 or more hours of labor Mr. Gustavson expects to put into a car he will be able to hold in the palm of his hand. He insists on clarifying one point about his hobby: “I’m not the only whack job.” Tens of thousands of other grown men, and some women, build model cars, tanks, rockets and airplanes. They have taken what was once a boys’ hobby to levels that might strike the uninitiated as a bit crazy. For boys in the 1960s, building a model was a rite of passage. Many gave the hobby up after discovering how tricky it was to glue bits of molded plastic together without creating a sticky mess. Then videogames and other electronic toys virtually killed children’s interest in model kits. “This is like the old-guys thing,” says David Henk, president of the South Hills Modelers Association in suburban Pittsburgh. “We hate to say it.” “It’s almost like a secret society hobby or something,” says James Fullingim, president of the Central Texas Scale Modeling Society, which has a couple dozen members and meets monthly in Killeen, Texas. The number of model makers is hard to estimate, partly because not all of them join clubs, enter contests or attend conventions. One indication of the hobby’s breadth: Scale Auto and FineScale Modeler, magazines for modelers, have a combined circulation of more than 43,000 in North America, according to their publisher, Kalmbach Media Co. Modelers are up against the indifference of their children and the difficulty of explaining the appeal of their hobby to those who have never tried it. Bill Murray, a retired electrical engineer who lives on Long Island, N.Y., has filled his basement with hundreds of models and tools for assembling them. What will happen to all those treasures after he dies? “My offspring keep saying they’re going to have a massive garage sale—anything for $5,” Mr. Murray says. “If that’s what they want to do, that’s fine.” That wouldn’t be fine with Mr. Gustavson. He is the founder of a model museum in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. It occupies 1,200 square feet inside an office building and has run out of space for new models. Mr. Gustavson and friends are trying to raise money for larger premises. “These are not toys,” he says. Mr. Gustavson’s wife of 46 years, Janet Gustavson, says his hobby “does seem a little obsessional at times,” but she sees it as a creative pursuit that has led to many friendships. “After a while you kind of catch the vision and think, well, I can support this,” she says. Ken Hamilton, 71, of Charleston, S.C., thinks of modeling as a lifestyle, not just a hobby, and displays some of his models in an art gallery, alongside other artists’ paintings and sculptures. For one creation, he started with a kit for a camping trailer. From scratch, he then created an adjacent rabbit pen, featuring rabbit droppings made of poppy seeds and hay derived from dried asparagus ferns. Mr. Hamilton’s modeling tools include tweezers, forceps and hand-me-down scrapers from his dentist. Recently he has been working on a diorama featuring an abandoned school bus converted into a camper. Inside are ashtrays made from seashells, containing real cigarette ash. Mr. Hamilton painted snippets of wire to resemble cigarette butts. A TV set has a rabbit-ears antenna capped with bits of aluminum foil to improve reception. “I remember doing that as a kid,” Mr. Hamilton says of the foil-enhanced antenna. In building a model, “you’re able to convey a story. I like to give the work a sense of the past and the present and possibly even a future.” When he created an 8-inch replica of a 1970 Mustang Boss 302, Tim Boyd, a retired Ford Motor Co. executive, peered under the hoods of the originals he was modeling to make sure he was accurately reproducing the wiring and emissions equipment. Like many modelers, he sweats over interior details that can’t even be seen once the model is complete. In a quest for accuracy, modelers examine old photographs and search archives. While making a model of a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, Mr. Fullingim tracked down a pilot who had flown the propeller plane to ask for a description of the cockpit. In Pittsburgh, Jason Malenky favors an authentically beat-up look for his miniature cars and trucks. He uses a jeweler’s drill bit to create rust holes; he once scraped lint from an old white sock to mimic the stuffing spilling from a worn-out car seat. With a mixture of dust and Elmer’s glue, he created mud to insert behind a truck’s bumper. Mr. Hamilton has dipped aluminum parts in ferric chloride acid. “It eats away the metal in a realistic manner,” he says. This sort of “weathering,” or showing the effects of time, can be controversial in modeling circles. Joe Reiman of Tucson, Ariz., wrote to FineScale Modeler magazine in 2017 to condemn what he saw as excessive weathering of model military planes. “These are elite organizations that would never allow aircraft to get this grungy,” Mr. Reiman wrote in the letter, published under the headline “Overweathering has to stop.” Another debate among modelers is how far they should go in the quest for authenticity. Some rebel against perfectionism. Scott Zasadil, a 62-year-old data scientist in Pittsburgh, says he sometimes throws away the tiniest pieces from model kits. “If with a magnifying glass you can’t tell what it is, I’m not going to put it on there,” he says. Even Mr. Hamilton, a legend in the modeling world, needs a break now and then from the pressures of high performance. Sometimes he makes a model entirely out of a kit, with no added parts built from scratch. “It just kind of reminds me of all the fun I had as a kid,” he says, “building something right out of the box that you don’t have to think about.”

First off, thanks everybody for the positive comments. You know, I knew this, and it just slipped through the cracks with everything else I was trying to do with this model. I mean, I even have my own truck for reference.

My interior has had pretty much everything replaced. Dash is all handpainted and I added padding to the dash. I have a Ford logo in my horn button but it was too small for me so I just left it out on the model.

My motor is recently rebuilt so I didn't really feel a need to weather it. My truck has power steering so I had to add another pulley for the p/s pump. My air cleaner and valve covers are from some resin / p/e kit for small block fords. I added the ribs to them myself using some micro styrene rod. Distributor is actually wired 1542 etc.