papajohn97

Your masking, painting and foiling look fantastic to me. I love this AMT kit, one of their best. 426 Max Wedges Rock!!!!

Lovely execution on this great Moebius kit. In white, this model reminds me of the ‘56 DeSoto Firedome Sportsman that Jimmy Stewart drove in one of my favorite classic movies, Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (although I think I prefer the cleaner styling of your Chrysler). Beautiful build and nice photos!

Thanks Michael for posting the Comet -T-Bolt underside comparison photo. I was surprised that the Comet was that much shorter and narrower than the Fairlane, a little more cutting than I expected. Sure hope Round 2 re-pops this ‘64 Comet kit before I get too old and feeble to kit bash one like yours!

Another fabulous “cover car” Michael! This one might just be my favorite of yours. Look’s like the T-Bolt chassis slips right into the AMT body without much trouble? Did you use the T-Bolt interior? I may just have to copy you on this one if/ when the Comet kit is ever re-issued (ultimate compliment, right?). I better start looking for another Revell T-Bolt and a set of these decals!

The body mods, that injected SBC, the colors, the decals, the wheels, the stance, it all just “clicks”. Nice!!!! Your build inspires me to take another crack at this kit which I remember struggling with as a kid

Very nice builds of a wonderful subject. I’m with you on this being one of best SS kits ever released, I’ve built two so far (Dick Brannan’s and Gas Ronda’s) and could easily build a few more if I could find some interesting usable decals. The other SS kits I keep building are the AMT ‘62 Bel Air (3), the Lindberg/ AMT Round 2 ‘64 Dodge (3), the AMT ‘64 Plymouth Belvedere (2) and the Moebius ‘65 Plymouth’s (3). Can’t wait for Moebius to release their ‘65 Dodge kits!

Love these “cover car” builds that you’re posting Mike. Did the ‘66 Galaxie kit that you got the cammer out of to build this Mustang also include the two air inlet conduits? I tried building those from scratch for a Mustang A/FX I posted last year (and gave up!). In my perfect scale modeling fantasy world, Moebius would release an accurate 1/25 kit of the H-M ‘65 Mustang 2+2 A/FX with their 427 SOHC (from their Comet kit), accurate front and rear AWB adjustments, period correct wheels and tires with proper “stance”and the weird front torsion beam suspension and then Slixx or Fremont Racing Specialties would issue sets of decals to build all 10 (11?) of the resulting drag cars….a boy can dream…

Your Pops has impeccable taste! The colors, the lowered stances, the choice of wheels, everything just “clicks” on both of these! The paint, the foil work and overall build quality is first class on both as well. I thought the styling of these ‘59 - 60’s Chev’s with the bat wings were weird (kinda ugly) when they first appeared in my kid days but now they look beautiful to me.

Thanks guys for the encouraging responses. Also thanks SuperDan for pointing out the misspelling on the dash decal -that gave me a good laugh. I can’t promise that there won’t be spelling errors on any future builds I post, my spelling skills suck! One thing I did different on this second go round on this kit which helped was to fully assemble the engine + trans + differential before installing into the chassis (instructions call out installing the trans + diff to chassis first). The rear of the engine still suffered downward angular “sag” off the rear axle pivot point but this was fixed by just pushing the sagging engine back up into the chassis/body and bonding the rear of the exhaust pipes to the body cut-outs.

Fabulous job on this one Randy. I have to echo the compliments on the painted wheel covers, a tough area to get right. Also noticed that you painted the weather stripping on the door openings which really makes these open gullwing doors visually pop. All around sweet build!

Sweet! Love the understated colors and overall sleeper look of this Poncho. So are the tires/ model from the AMT “Polyglass Gasser II” kit? If so, I gotta keep a look for that one, can never build too many sixties Pontiac’s!

This is my second attempt at wrestling a 1/24 Fujimi 356 kit into a presentable finished model with all four wheels nearly touching the ground. This one was no easier than first (a yellow coupe I build a year or so ago). I used ScaleFinishes sixties Ford base paint for the ivory exterior, "Corinthian White", and Tamiya acrylics and Alclad metallics for the other colors. Despite the challenges, I love the look of these Fujimi bathtub Porsches, I think its the fabulous looking wheels that come with these kits that makes them worth building. Cheers, John. (PS - the rear tail lights are wrong, the red should be outboard/ orange inboard....always something!)

Thanks Tim for the detailed clarification on kit options for an early Logghe chassis. Your suggestion of modifying a gen 2 chassis from one of the affordable Polar Light FC kits for a Dyno Don FC is a great idea and probably wouldn’t be all that difficult. Look’s like this subject was well hashed out in a thread here from 2019 that I missed:

Thank you Tim for the this funny car model history lesson and for these wonderful pics of your two beautiful builds. So was the conventional early Logghe chassis that you show in your posting (the yellow one) the one that is supplied in the “Hawaiian” version of this Revell kit? I would love to locate a kit for a chassis doner to use to build one of the early Dyno Don flipper Comets - would this kit be a good candidate or is there another early funny car kit that would be more accurate to use (and an affordable re-pop such as this Revell or a Polar Lights kit)?

Nice build Michael! I like the early funnies where the bodies were nearly stock looking. I am also really enjoying this “building the covers” series that you are posting, you’re doing an amazing job on these and I’m very impressed with the high quality/ standard of each build as well as your fast productivity. So I assume you have a complete or nearly complete set of these Super Stock and FX magazines from the 60’s? Lucky guy!!!!

The blood, sweat, tears and time you put into this build really paid off! What a magnificent scale model!

Beautiful build Jim! This bubble top looks good in Mustard yellow and I love the “local business sponser” decals. Also nice work on the engine details and the stainless trim and window frames (foil?). If you were to apply touches of steel paint to the lug nuts and center hub on the yellow wheels, it would make the wheels really pop!

Thanks for posting the header pic Mike! Scratch-building a pair of symmetrical headers out of solder in 1/25 is quite a skill, yours came out great! The few times I’ve tried it, it gave me a sense of what the custom header builders had to go thru back in the day to fit between them the block and the chassis, a lot of bending, fitting, rinse & repeat.

Very cool model of one my favorite historic stockers Mike. The decals came out great considering they are old Fred Cady. Would love to see what the headers look like from the underside.

Really like that understated two-tone green and your foil work is beautiful! I agree with the other other comments how some car designs start to look better (or at least more “interesting”) with the passage of time. Love the over-the-top tail lights and fins on this Dodge.

Your engine detailing is amazing! I don’t see any area that you did not address, all the way down to the fittings on the heater lines. Wow!

Thanks Charlie, the wheels and dog dish caps are supplied in this Moebius kit. The kit also includes the eight lug nut Ventura wheels (with the finned brake drums) and a nice set of chrome mags.

Thanks guys for the nice responses. Here are a few photos I got off of George Klass’s excellent website (georgeklass.net) that captures the type of car I was attempting to model. The first photo (#973) is Carol Cox in her class winning ‘61 Ventura. I have an AMT ‘60 Ford Starliner kit which I hope to build soon also as a showroom stock drag car to park next to this Pontiac. What fun those good old days must have been when a blue collar guy could take his street car to the drags on a Saturday, remove the wheel covers and air cleaner, win or loose a few and then drive home.

I wasn't sure whether to post this one in "model cars underclass" (stock) or here. This is my interpretation of a mostly showroom stock 61 Pontiac Catalina with some mild mods that I believe would fit within the NHRA rulebook for "stock" class (class S/S for 0 - 10.59 lbs./ hp, I figured 368 hp (dual carb 389?) for a 3750 lb. car and came out with 10.19). Dual carbs (Holleys) and the hood scoop (actually a Ford truck part that Pontiac had to assign a stockroom number for) were around then but not on the standard order form as I understand it. I used an actual restored car posted on the web, a beautiful Bamboo Cream colored Super Duty 421, for the "appearance" prototype for this model (here) but wanted this model to be closer to a car driven off a car lot and taken directly to the drags (think Carol Cox's NHRA winning '61 Ventura (first woman to win an NHRA class!)). I'm sure someone might find some errors in my interpretation and the execution of this build but it's just a model car for goodness sake and I had a lot of fun building this one. This is the excellent Moebius kit mostly OOB but I added the resin carbs (Fireball), aluminum distributor and air cleaners (Detail Master) and misc. solder fuel lines and wire linkage and brake line. The carbs and air cleaners are likely over-scaled but I'm happy with the over-all look of the engine. I scratch-built the hood scoop using Evergreen styrene sheet and the tach using Evergreen rod and tubing. I airbrushed Scale Finishes base paint for the Bamboo Cream with a Tamiya TS-13 clear coat and masked and airbrushed the tri-color interior using Tamiya acrylics. Remaining areas were painted using Tamiya acrylics and Alclad Chrome over black enamel for the window frames. I used BMF to do the two super thin trim spears on each side as these were too thin to try to mask and paint with Alclad/ enamel. I'm down to a 1/2 sheet of my "good" older BMF and not sure what I'm going to do when this is gone, the new stuff is terrible. I've been building mostly sixties SS'ers since 2019 and wanted to do an early car that reflected the years when they were driven off of the lot and directly to the strip without a lot of mods, true super "stock" drag racing. I'm happy with this one, hope you like it too! Cheers, John

Nice job Mike! You did a great job on moving the rear wheel wells forward on the body, can barely see any remnants of the “surgery”. Also based on color reference photos, you’ve nailed that orange- red color, do you remember what paint you used? The decals came out beautifully and the wheels you used are a perfect match to reference photos. Your post is ”timely” for me, I have two of these Revell stock Z16 kits and am about to start cutting the bodies and chassis to build this same drag car. From what I’ve read, this car had both front and rear wheels shifted approx. 12” forward to maintain the stock wheelbase and so the body was essentially moved rearwards on the stock chassis. References I’ve read have also described this car as very squirrelly to drive particularly due to extreme chassis torquing at launch. Despite the lack of factory backing, this car was very successful in match-racing against the dominating Mopars in ‘65-‘66. Hoping my results come out half as good as your build here. Thanks for posting!