tim boyd

Most excellent, Steve. I think I have those very colors (from MCW) in my paint stash. Pristine, neat, and very inspiring, I have to say. , Best...TIM

Guys...given the interest some of you have expressed in my prior Chrysler 1960's C-Body models, I am going to go ahead and post the last two in my built model collection The first is this Jo-Han 1963 Chrysler 300 restoration. I started this in the very early 1980's from a store-bought buildup that, if I am remembering correctly, was originally painted fluorescent pink. I took photos of the restoration process, and it eventually became an article published in (IIRC) SAE in the early 1990's. . It was built box stock except for the AMT mags from an "I don't recall" 1AMT annual kit (perhaps their original 1970 Monte Carlo annual kit?). They were paired with the Revell tC3 Corvette and Shelby Cobra road racer kits Goodyear bigs'n'biggers (eventually found in many of Revell's street rod kits). They were mounted in the chassis' "lowered" axle holes for a nice/moderate ground hugging stance. . At the time it was near-impossible to get era-correct specific paint colors, so I painted in with a 1980 Chrysler Cordoba off-white paired with a flat burgundy/maroon interior. Bare-Meal Foil was employed as well. Ever since I was a kid I've always liked the 1963 Chrysler design. It was, admittedly, a bit of an odd duck at the time. However, this one should be credited to Exner, not Engel, as the latter was not on the job long enough to have designed this one from scratch given all his other higher priority work (like fixing the '63 Plymouth and Dodge B-bodies to the extent possible given the late date.) More recent auto historians, or at least some of them, have also taken this view. Anyway, here's the model.... Thanks for checking this out....TIM

Thanks for the added insights here, Chris. Really interesting! I have a Metalflake kit somewhere, guess I need to drag i out and check out the changes. As for your build thread, my kit had a broken windshield very similar to yours, too. Did you ever finish your own project? Best....TIM

Heh Alan....thanks for the comment. I know Dave, wherever he might be these days, would be pleased to hear that he is still inspiring modelers with his works of automotive art....Best....TIM

Paul....not sure how I missed this thread up to now, but I will be following it with great interest from this point forward. Great concept, and I really like your idea of starting with an old military boat model rather than working from scratch which is pretty much my take after looking at a few Dumas boat kits i bought a few years back. Also, very interested in your Power Wagon as that is a topic I would have sure liked to have seen as a model kit. Also of interest, another one of the top-end builders who posts on this forum from time to time has just embarked on a very impressive big boat/trailer/tow vehicle project. I won't name him as he has given me no indication, he wants to go public just yet, but his ideas are very creative and i think his project would be a great compliment and comparison to yours if it takes off. Best wishes for your project and congrats on your progress to date! TIM

Ron...I've been checking that one out and really like what you've done.....but thanks for the heads-up. I was thinking that there had been a gap in your building and was very excited to know you are back at it! TIM

Thanks for posting, Steve. I remember seeing this one elsewhere recently and being very impressed. Chopped top, really tasty fadeaways, and really nicely done! TIM

Thanks all for the comments. Glad you liked the color I do agree that the color worked surprisingly well given the body design and ornamentation back in the day. Having watched paint color trends over the years in my 1/1 scale career, I think I can say with a great deal of certainty that a color like Dubonnet Metallic, if offered in today's marketplace, would be Dead on Arrival. Kinda sad, but true...TIM

To all who commented and looked....thanks for your interest, and your comments and feedback. Best to you all....TIM

Ron.....great to hear from you, and thanks for the compliment. SLC for 2023 is certainly on my radar screen and entered into my Outlook calendar. All....for those who don't already know, Ron is a very long time top end model car builder, and whose outstanding modeling skills have been featured in the mags for over 30 years. Very Best...TB

John...sorry for the delay in responding to your question. I recall when I built the model also looking at a Jo-Han'62 Chrysler 300H I was building until the paint messed up and I stopped the project. My vague recollection was that the Jo-Han was the better kit, but not by a very wide margin. Key takeaway: let the series preference (300 vs. Newport) be the determining factor in which kit to build. Yes, the Revell is harder to find, but the original Jo-Han 300J annual kit (vs. the 1970's Golden Olides reissue) is even harder to find than the Revell kit. Also, the Metalflake series reissue of the Newport is the same kit except for the color of the styrene, and may be easier to locate than the original annual kit. In any case, both the Revell and Jo-Han kits are typical early 1960's model kit technology and show excellent basic body proportions, and they respond well to a straight box stock buildup using today's modeling techniques (as i did with this build), or as the basis for a far more involved and detailed buildup with extensive kitbashing and aftermarket additions (such as the spectacular replica stock builds of Steven Guthmiller)....TIM Thanks for asking....TIM

All- I'd like to acknowledge and thank each of you for your comments and observations. Very best to you all....TIM

Greg....correct you are. Thanks for pointing that out...TIM

For all you young'uns ou there, this thread of pictures is a very accurate remembrance of the average American street scene of the early to late 1970's. Great times even if we didn't fully understand it at the time. My ride during this was pretty conservative by comparison, for a couple of reasons. This car was my college and early work life transportation, it had been ordered and purchased new with recognition that factory musclecars were never to return and so this car would have to last a long time. It was a 1974 Road Runner E58 (360 4bbl hi-po wedge), factory tach, cruise control (I was doing some long distance driving or work), interior and exterior decor packages, buckets and console, radio delete ( so I could run an AM/FM Stereo 8-track). I had a fresh set of mags almost every year. Shown here it had the BFG Radial T/A's that I won for finishing second nationwide in the 1976 MPC Customizing Contest (back then Radiall T/A's were very high-buck and essentially unaffordable for a college student - yeah, I was one very lucky dude on that one). Fortunately these pix omit the skinny jeans, silk disco shirt, choker necklace, and long hair of its driver/owner! These pix were taken at the 1978 USMA Street Machine Nats at the old Michigan State Fairgrounds at Woodward and Eight Mile Road in Detroit... Look closely and you'll see i had added some 1973-74 Plymouth Satellite Sebring Plus trim (e.g rocker panels, et al) and a Mopar accessory luggage rack. The front end was slightly lowered (bless those torsion bar adjusting bolts!), with some owner-added pinstriping on the decklid. Those were my second set of "Bazooka" tailpipes.....by 1978 they were already scarce in the Mopar parts system....took the local dealer six months to find a set....in Hawaii, he told me.,,, By this point I had already fixed the body once due to lower body rustouts, eventually it rusted out a second time and I gave it to a Lincoln Mercury dealer service manager in St. Louis when I was working there....but only after 140,000 miles over 16 years and essentially zero mechanical failures. Still miss that car today. Here's the scale replica of it I built in 2020.... TB

Yep....that was a popular factory option back then, even on musclecars back then. In my senior year at high school ('71-'72) I bought a set at the local C-P dealer and put them on my dad's 1969 F8 Chrysler Town and Country wagon. They looked really sharp. But after graduating in June '72, I bought a set of Rocket mags (poor man's Cragar S/S), 15x6 reversed, and a set of H78/J78 blackwalls. As strange as that sounds, those actually looked really, really extra sharp! As for the bearings on the front and rear, axles not so much! TB

Continuing to show some of my Mopar C-Body model cars, here's a 1967 Dodge Polara 500. It was built from a resin kit mastered by one of the very most talented model car builders to ever pick up an X-Acto knife, Mr. Juha Airio. I built mine using a 1967 Dodge Polara brochure as my primary reference, and Juha's efforts masterfully replicated not only the exterior, but also the entire interior right down to the instrument panel design. Outstanding! I built the underbody using the chassis and suspension of the MPC 1965/66 Dodge Monaco/Polara kits, as they are far better detailed than the same parts in the Jo-Han C-body kits of the same era. The body was painted with MCW Automotive Finishes 1967 Dodge Code 88-1 (not B5!) Bright Blue Metallic, a 1967 B-Body color that may have become available on 1967 Dodge C-bodies at mid-year. It was a bit brighter than the Code CC-1 Medium Blue Metallic that was available on the Polara-Monaco all year long. The interior was finished in the white with black trim option to better show off Juha's replica accuracy there. The engine was a 383 4-bbl finished in actual Mopar engine paint, and lightly detailed. This is one of my favorite Mopar models (as well as one of my favorite 1/1 scale C-bodies). Someday I would like to do a 1967 model year evolution of the "planned but never produced" 1966 Monaco 500 Hemi fastback I showed here last week, built with the same 1966 Chrysler 300/1967-68 Fury fastback roof stamping and the also planned but never produced 1967 C-body evolution of the 426 Street Hemi with 3-2bbls and A/C. I was able to catalog a second copy of the resin kit to stockpile for such a conversion, should it ever work its way to the top of the "build" list... Thanks for looking....TIM PS - I thought I might have posted images of this one in the MCM Forum some time back, but did a forum search and nothing showed up. So apologizing up front if this is a repeat of a prior post...TB

Interesting that a number of you have expressed interest in some of my Chrysler 1960's C-body models, and have shown yours as well, so I will go ahead and post a few more. Here's a box-stock buildup of Revell's 1962 annual kit Chrysler Newport convertible, finished in the production color 'Bermuda Turquoise". This was built about 20 years ago or so, and the only major effort was to repair a broken A-pillar and windshield header found in the original unbuilt kit box. The kit was pretty basic, even in the context of early 1960's model offerings. Body proportions were pretty good, but when the tooling source engraved the Newport sidebody trim it ended up angled slightly upward toward the front in an unrealistic fashion. The trunk lock surround was also far more elaborate than found on the actual production car, probably a result of last-minute efforts at Chrysler to simplify the overly ornate Exner- era exterior ornamentation as the car went into production (remember the model car tooling was probably completed several months earlier). You can see that non-production trim treatment in one of the images below.... Big question, of course, is whether Atlantis acquired this tooling along with its other purchases from the Revell-Monogram tooling bank, and if so, whether it could be made production ready. While I have assisted a bit in a very minor role with bringing a few of the Atlantic products to market, I've heard nothing from the owner on this particular subject. One other interesting factoid. I coined the term "Mainstreamer" to describe this model and other model kits of the highest volume, "mainstream" offerings of the auto manufacturers (as opposed to the top of the line performance or luxury cars that most often found their way into annual kits of the 1960's automobiles). That term has subsequently acquired a certain degree of acceptance in the auto modeling community since then - thanks guys! TB PS - here's a few more images.... PPS - please feel free to share your images of this kit, if you have one, in this message thread....

Thanks Steve and Mike...for the record, here's mine....also noticed, the removeable air cleaner is on backwards....luckily that is about a 2-second fix.... TB

Thanks Steve. I recall being called on the carpet on this subject after an article where I made the same mistake a couple of decades ago....TIM

Wow D.W., that is one sharp Hudson model! TB

Bill....i think you are probably remembering this from one of the Roudn 2 '63 Nova wagon threads or maybe the '64 Cutlass convertible thread. And I know there are a lot of model kit buyers out there in hobbyland who agree exactly with your thoughts on this.... TIM

Steve....thanks for weighing in on this topic. Your track record of replica stock projects and moving the goalpost in this model genre speaks for itself, so your thoughts on the subject I suspect carry a lot of weight with the audience here. I have often re-scribed panel openings but not to the extent that you do. Rest assured that I will be trying your techniques out on my next applicable build. Best....TIM

Phil....what Dennis said. ' As for your flames, the 1/1 scale Roadster's flame job, though nicely laid out by Roth, always struck me as a little crude as a result of Tom's "rub through" red to yellow paint fades. So in some ways I could say your replica captures the idea of a flame job better than the real car! Very obvious you knew your subject and knew it well. Congrats on a great effort....TIM

Craig....whoa.....that '66 Newport looks super-sharp! One of my best friends is a fellow former Ford Exec who finished his career overseeing the company's cycle (product) plan, and he views the 1965-1968 Chrysler C-bodies as one of Chrysler's best ever efforts. Particularly the interior treatments and materials. He also has a 1/1 scale car collection (about 12 or so), but rues the day he sold his 1965 300L convertible in the mid 1990's. Best wishes for your Monaco kit builds and I know that I and many others here would like to see pix as you progress those. I don't think most modelers know just how advanced these 1965 Monaco/1966 Monaco 500/1965-66 Polara kits were, particularly when compared to the 1965-68 Jo-Han C-body kits. Thanks for your comments and observations.

Jeff is exactly right on this Years later, Tom West sent me the entire original text of his history, which included a number of items that didn't make it to print in SAE if I am remembering correctly. Tom's comprehensive history was one of the key sources I used in preparing my "Collecting Drag Racing Model Car Kits" that was first published in late 2020.... TB