papajohn97

According to a HAMB reference that was posted in 2012, the silver car was re-painted red: I was interested in more detailed pics of the red car while I was building this silver A/FX model, thinking I might also eventually build a model of the red one. In addition to the photo of the one taken with your Uncle, this is the only other one I could find: Besides the red paint job, looks like he replaced the dual Holleys with Hilborn FI (nearly all the FX/ match racers went that way in ‘65). There is a beautiful tribute car making the rounds in retro drag events in recent years in So. CA, I took a photo of this car at the Hot Rod Mag 70th anniversary event at Pomona in 2018 and saw it again at the Nitro Revival in Irwindale last year: Your Uncle was THE MAN to see about tuning a Ford drag car in the 60’s, such a sad lost to the drag racing world.

Just now joining this WIP party and really liking your progress so far Bob. Your “debugging” of the dash to body fit is a good reminder to dry-fit liberally and get all the little fit problems solved before painting. It’s interesting how good a few of the ancient tooled AMT kits still are (‘49 Merc, ‘49 Ford) after sixty years. Love this Maroon color. I’ve never had much luck decanting rattle can paint and airbrushing it, I’ve had better results just spraying Tamiya lacquers straight from the can (Tamiya’s nozzles are the best). What color(s) are you planning to go with for the interior? I think a grey & white or black & white might really pop? Good luck on your sanding!

Thanks Bill (Bills72sj). Unfortunately I didn’t shoot any pics of my disaster repair process but hope to post the finished build soon (Grump’s ‘65 Plymouth S/SA Black Arrow) and will try to include a close-up photo of the damaged area. Hi Trevor (Bainford), I used Mr. Color GX100 Super Clear III bottle lacquer thinned 1:1 with Mr. Color Thinner and airbrush sprayed. I’ve always loved Tamiya TS-13 rattle can lacquer clear coat on car bodies but have found it to be way too hot over decals, even when sprayed in many thin coats (last “wet” coat always eats the decals). I believe the Mr. Color clear coat omits a strong solvent that’s in the Tamiya TS-13 (toulene?) that eats decals. I sprayed three heavily decaled car bodies this week using the Mr. Color CC and only had a few areas where the CC reacted with the decal causing slight “bubbling”. I think this happened where there was a tiny bit of residual air between the decal and surface after setting. I would use 2K but I’m a cancer survivor and need to limit my carcinogens exposure to Irish Whiskey ??!

Forgive me if I’m repeating a tip that’s been previously posted. I had a decal disaster today! In the process of masking off the edges of a painted/ decaled car hood to airbrush the underside black, I managed to damage a racing stripe decal that was mounted and clear coated on the top of the hood. A 3/4” long length of one side of the black stripe peeled off and stuck to a piece of green Frog tape that accidentally came in contact with the hood. So much for clear coating protecting mounted decals from masking damage….. I discovered an effective way to extract the torn decal piece from the tape without damaging it. I sprayed a small amount of WD-40 into a plastic paint cup and then submerged the tape piece with the decal piece stuck to it into the cup for a minute or two. The torn decal piece easily slipped off the tape without any damage! I rinsed the WD-40 off of the decal piece by dipping it into another cup of IPA (isopropyl alcohol), carefully dried it with a paper towel and was then able to remount it back onto the hood using a drop of white glue diluted in SoluSet applied between the decal and hood. Disaster solved! It’s always best to avoid getting tape anywhere near a mounted decal but it’s nice now to know there’s a way to salvage it if a disaster occurs. Cheers, John

Hey Jeff - so this is where that partial Moebius Satellite kit went that I sent you - Cool build!!! More pics please! I can’t build enough of these Moebius ‘65 Plymouth kits, one of my favorite kits. I’m currently building a production line of three more super stockers which I hope to post soon. Looking forward to building a few Moebius ‘65 Dodges next year!

This is the most interesting execution of this kit that I’ve seen. You’ve mastered the fine art of scale model weathering (“less is more”!). This build is so good I wanna copy it! The good old days of shoe-string back-yard built racers with day-jobs drag racing. All that’s missing are some wheelie bars made out of stolen shopping cart parts! Love it!

Beautiful model. I’m particularly impressed with all the high-quality scratch built details you incorporated into the interior and engine bay, looks like a ton of work! I remember admiring a brand new Avanti in a shopping mall parking lot in 1962 (I was nine years old). It looked so exotic and radically futuristic, like the first C2 Sting Ray coupe I saw later that same year, both of them really left an impression on me. At the time I figured flying cars were only a few more years away!

Dang that’s nice! An A+ on that candy orange paint job. The color, the original mostly stock body with the cool stock head light pods, the big crate motor, the front Halibrands and massive rear slicks and wheelie bars and that “ready to lunge” stance….it all just clicks. Sweeeet!!!!

Nice job Dale! A very accurate representation of a milestone drag car. I have a set of Slixx decals for this car and would love to build one like this as a “bookend” for my early sixties super stock model collection showing the evolution of drag cars from showroom stock to flipper funnies. Which kit(s) did you use to create this model? It’s too bad we have to kit-bash to accurately recreate early funnies like this one. Thanks for posting! John

Really really nice job Ryan on this Starliner. I built and posted an evening orchid one as well last year, the best color on this car IMO. Painting the MCG PE emblems is a great idea, I masked and dry-brushed the molded on emblems on my build using gold enamel but your’s look better. Love the herringbone fabric seat decals as well. I think this is AMT’s best kit and have two more on my stash and hope to build an early stock drag car with one of them. Question: did you use tires from an AMT Impala kit because of the funky Firestone sidewall emblems molded into the Starliner tires?

My dear friend of +50 years heard I was immersed in building models of mid-sixties super stock drag cars and gifted me his collection of “Super Stock & Drag Illustrated” Magazines. He was the original owner of these mags which he splurged on a subscription to in his middle school years. These are from ‘65 through ‘71 and are hit & miss month-wise but who’s complaining? They smell funky (like an old bookstore) but are in excellent condition. Boy ‘O boy are they fun to look at! I would love to buy the missing months in late ‘64 and ‘65 (missing about 8 of the 14 months) but, based on current eBay prices, I would blow through my remaining hobby budget for this year and then some…..Thank you Gordon!

I’m driving a 4cyl Mazda in my retirement years these days but my last drive-to-work car was a Stirling Silver 2011 GT 6 spd (first year of the mighty Coyote). Drove it 81K miles, ZERO problems, Michilin Pilot SS tires transformed the handling, my favorite car of the +20 I’ve had. Unfortunately I had to sell it in 2017 to pay for a new roof ?. The thing I miss the most is the sound of that engine on cold starts in the morning with the windows down. Im jealous. Post us some pics when you take delivery.

What a magnificent scale model of one of the weirdest, loudest and most innovative drag cars that ever raced. I’m particularly impressed with how accurate you were able to make body relative to period photos, the four bar rear suspension, the crude hand lettering (probably much more difficult to do than it looks?) and the scratch-built/ 3D printed crude tunnel ram and wild trumpet headers. Very very cool!

Thank you all for the kind comments and compliments, makes me want to keep building and posting more of these legendary door slammers. Hoping to start a B/FX version of the Moebius ‘65 Comet that I can post here in the near future.

Oooohhh, very nice! Hard to believe you started with the stinky AMT Mustang “Funny Car” kit (too bad it doesn’t build OOB anything like the pic on the box!). Great job on the mods to the front suspension, engine, rear quarter windows, beautiful paint and all-around clean build. I particularly like the side-view stance with those mags. Bravo!

This AWB A/FX - Match Racer was built using the Revell 1/25 '65 Chevelle Z-16 SS 396 kit with a variety of spare parts from my spares box and after market items. This is the first build I've done where I relocated both front and rear wheel wells (both moved forward 7" (.28" at 1/25 scale) which was a lot more work than I anticipated both in cleaning up the body and making a bunch of corresponding changes to the chassis/ engine mounts/ drive shaft/ etc. It was a "scale modeling learning experience" that tested my patience and motivation at times...I look forward to a simple OOB build for my next project! Build details are described over in the WIP - Drag section. Cheers, John

I wrapped this one up today and glad it’s over! My skills and patience tends to diminish as I get near the end of a challenging build and this one really kicked my &%#$ as I tried to get everything to fit, be aligned and generally behave…Seaton’s Shaker won the last few battles but I like to think I won the war! The biggest problems near the end were related to getting the interior tube/ chassis/ body to assemble properly, installing the front and rear grills/ fascia/ bumper to the body (not well engineered by Revell on this kit) and then installing the final detail bits in the engine bay (fuel lines, cooling lines, condenser, cooling hoses). Theres some residual misalignment here & there but it’s about as good as I can do on this one for now. I’ll post more pics in Under Glass - Drag. Thanks everyone for following along, providing good suggestions and questions and passing on words of encouragement. John

Mounting the Moon tank onto the front bulkhead of the body turned into a painful trial & error/ cut & fit exercise. I had to trim a little more off the front of the fuel pump to clear the tank: I finished applying and trimming the BMF around the window frames and side rain gutters and then installed the windows: I cut .005” clear styrene shapes for the right and left front side windows and wing windows and bonded them within the body to simulate the non-roll-down-able plexiglass. I still need to install the firewall detail/ brake cylinder, fine-tune and finalize the body-chassis assembly, add the front/ rear grills/ bumpers/ install cooling hoses and fuel lines, install door handles. I’m hoping to wrap this build up this week, it’s become a grind…. John

Beautiful clean build Sid. I love the two-tone color choice and clean paint execution as well as that gorgeous interior. I feel your pain on the challenges of joining chassis to body and getting everything to seat perfectly, seems like I have the same problem on about half of the 1/25 builds I do. I’m slowly learning the more dry-fitting before painting, the better! I would be proud to have your build in my display case “as is”. The one thing that sticks out to me with this Revell kit which surprises me (and is unrelated to your excellent build quality) is the unrealistic looking finished tires + wheels. The wheel rims appear to me to protrude way too far beyond the outside face of each tire and the tires also appear slightly undersized to my eyes. I built the Revell ‘57 “Black Widow” 150 coupe kit which was tooled a few years later than this ‘56 and the wheels and tires look so much more realistic to me. I have this ‘56 210 kit in my stash (it was my first 1:1 car) and I’m tempted to use the wheels and tires from the ‘57 kit when I get around to it.

These are Top Studio Detail Master parts I ordered a few years ago from HLJ.com. Unfortunately they are getting harder to find these days, the 1.2 mm sets (the size I used here) are still availability from BNA (Australia) and a few Chinese sources, check eBay.

Lots of dry-fitting, bending, trimming, dry-fitting again in an effort to join the engine, the headers, plug wiring and chassis together with the goal of the velocity stacks to protrude out the cut-out in the hood in a somewhat centered fashion. Here’s photos of my last-dry fit with the headers bonded to the engine but the engine/ trans not yet glued to the chassis and drive shaft: I’m glad I didn’t yet bond the engine/ trans to the chassis as it’s unlikely that everything would have cleared and been fully asemble-able if I had. There is not much clearance between between parts and that was after a lot of trimming on the headers and chassis A arms. If I do bond the engine in, I think I’ll wait until EVERYTHING else is assembled onto/ into it first. Here’s a few pics of this dry-fit body + interior + chassis + engine/ trans balanced over all four wheels & tires (not snap-fit yet onto the axle posts on the chassis). I like it! Still lots to be done on this, I’ve had to shorten my scratch-built fuel pump to clear the Moon tank, also need to make some side windows (car had all Plexiglass with no roll-down cranks), paint or BMF the window frames, make and install the fuel tank lines and water lines (which will disappear past the firewall, they would go into a 5 gal water tank/ pump in the trunk), add the brake cylinder/ reservoir, grills/ light covers/ bumpers, etc…. Still enjoying this build but it’s been a lot more work than I anticipated. Looking forward to an easy O-O-the-B build on my next one! John

With AMT/ Round2’s re-release of this old annual ‘64 Comet Caliente kit with (I’m told) a fairly decently tooled body but no engine:, I’m thinking of using the body and interior from this kit and some Slixx decals to recreate this Dyno Don ‘64 A/FX car but with a detailed 427 engine and a moderately accurate chassis: My question is this: has anyone taken a crack at doing this car with engine via kit-bashing? The two possible kits I’m thinking of using for the chassis and engine are shown below: 1. This excellent Revell kit for both chassis and engine?… 2. Or this excellent Moebius kit below for the chassis and an FE block 427 out of the Revell Thunderbolt kit or other suitable source: I’ve read somewhere on this forum that the hood cut-out of the AMT Comet is shorter than the hood from the Moebius kit so that’s one issue I’m aware of. MCW offers resin replacement hoods for the ‘64 body with the double front scoops (or a teardrop) options so the hood issue may be easily solvable. I’m ok with making moderate mods to the chassis and other parts to make the body fit the chassis but, like most of us here on this board, I prefer to learn from other’s experiences when attempting a kit-bash project. I welcome everyone’s input/ opinions/ experiences! Cheers, John

I’ve been looking for additional sources for 1/25 sixties super stock drag car decals and am interested if anyone has recently ordered and applied decals from SlotCar-Fever.com (coco_mn (11880 star) on eBay, slotcarfevercheyna on Etsy)? I’m looking for sharply printed “vector graphics” decals (like most kit decals from AMT/ Revell/ Moebius/ Tamiya/ etc. as well as SLIXX, Yesteryear ) vs. the lower resolution “rastor graphics” type decals (SMP). Do Slot Car Fever decals have crisp sharp graphics? Are they thin but strong and easy to work with? I don’t mind having to cut each decal shape out individually and being inkjet printed, I’m ok if they are printed on clear or white based decal sheets. Let me know if you’ve used Slot Car Fever decals and if you’d recommend them. Much thanks! John

OMG! I put the “S-E” logo on upside down on the drivers door….senior moment? Luckily I was able to soak the decal to loosen it and then correct it. Posting WIP’s are a great way to perform public quality control inspections on a build….embarrassing but effective!

I finished airbrushing the Mr. Color clear coat (nice stuff) onto the body by thinning it 1:1 with Mr Color thinner then I let it cure for a couple days before applying the decals: These decals from Yesteryear are super nice and thin but oh-so delicate. I broke a few but was able to finesse them back together. I used a little white glue heavily diluted with MicroSet beneath each decal to try to reduce ghosting but I’ll not be surprised if a few don’t ghost a little after these dry. I love decaling these super stock builds, the decals really make the paint pop. I’ll clear coat over these once dry and then apply some BMF to the window frames. John