tim boyd

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

Thanks everyone for all the positive comments, and especially Steven for showing your own '61 NY. I did want to comment on Peter's suggestion above. I intentionally do not use use panel line accent, and I realize that this runs against the views of many of you as to what constitutes a fully detailed and completed model. Ever since I was a kid I felt that the panel lines of a car - those that distract from the overall flow of the car, are something you would like to visually eliminate in a real car, and that feeling continued to scale replicas. Later in my career in the auto industry, I saw various manufacturers actually emphasizing the panel line separations with their design languages (late 1990's-2010 Bangle era BMW trunk/tailamp treatments as an example), which further intensified my dislike, as did learning more about car design while working (in a business management/chief of staff type role) alongside some of the industry's best car designers during the last 1/3rd of my career, and then still later on while having overall leadership responsibility for my then-employer's three global advanced design studios. All of which means that I personally do not like the emphasis panel lines add to scale model cars, particularly those that use black ink on a light colored car. I put it in the same camp (in my own view) as military modelers who go way overboard on the aging and patina effects they use on their armor models. Of course, this is all a matter of degrees, and some could just as righly and accurately point out that the lack of panel accents (such as on my models) unduly draws visual attention to the unduly "lighter"/lack of realistic appearance of those body panel separations. All of which is to say, isn't it great that we all get to make our own decisions and choices as we build and display our models? Thanks very much Peter for bringing this up as it a gave me the entree to address this as I've been wanting to comment on it for some time now. Now back to our regularly scheduled program Best all....TIM

It was part of the 1961 Chrysler paint palette and was featured in the brochure in this color scheme. The paint was called "Dubonnet" Metallic and the Jo-Han Chrysler New Yorker hardtop annual kit was finished in MCW Automotive Finishes formula of that color using the Chrysler assigned code of "00-1". The rest of the model was assembled factory stock to duplicate the brochure image. 1961 was the last year the New Yorker was offered as a 2-door hardtop until it returned to the carline in 1965. After the 1961 annuals, Jo-Han started duplicating the Chrysler 300 2-door hardtop in their annual line through their las Chrysler C-body offering for the 1968 model year. The 1962 kit was actually the 300-H version. Here's some pictures.... Thanks for checking it out....TIM

Kieth....don't know if you are aware of this or not, but just in case not, MPC made a sister kit to the 1966 Monaco...a 1966 Dodge Polara 500 convertible. If you could find one of those it would certainly expedite your project. Maybe you could find some gently (abused) gluebomb projects for sale at the auction site to make the project more affordable. Best....TIM

While it escaped the reviewers in both of the model mags (at the time), Revell fixed the incorrect lower rear quarter panel treatment in the Torino GT (green cover car) reissue a few years ago, along with some other minor corrections. I would imagine those changes would also carry over to this release. TB

Hi David....thanks for the comments. Believe it or not, the MPC Monaco kit actually had an engraved vinyl top as produced from their tooling. IIRC, the MPC 1965 Monaco kit also had the engraved vinyl top. These were among the first - and possibly the first??? - kits to have this feature. The engraving was actually pretty heavy. One could file/sand away the engraving to build a painted roof model, but it would take a major effort. However, having said that, like you, I generally prefer 1960's cars without the contrasting vinyl roof feature. I need to check my Mopar reference file. I don't recall a vinyl top being standard from the factory on these two cars, but if it were, that would explain why it was tooled that way by MPC. Best....TIM

Thanks....TIM

Dave....really nicely done. Congrats! TIM

For a really interesting comparo to my build, check out this model by Dave Sproul....TB