Art Anderson

If one were to look up, and read, the decision by the Supreme Court Of The United States, regarding the "counterfeit new parts" for American made cars back almost 30 years ago, it should be very easily understood why carmakers don't just give access, free of charge. Basically, the Court ruled that in order to protect their component parts from direct copying, the automakers had to step up, protect ALL their designs, patents, copyrights and trademarks against ALL comers, be they 1:1 parts makers, toys, model kits, even down to the likes of Gummi candies. And, that, my friends, means licensing. Oh, and the ruling does extend, by reason of precedent, to manufacturers of just about everything you can imagine, not limited to just automotive. Art

Back in those days, we had a local OBYN who "practiced what he preached"--needless to say, he had a family large enough to require a Cadillac Series 75 Sedan-Limousine for a good 10-15 years! What scale is this one? Art

The earliest Model T's, along with most early cars, really didn't have any cowling, just a wooden "firewall" (more correctly referred to by it's horse-drawn carriage name "Dash Board" (which was there to keep mud and horse manure from being "dashed" up into the lap of the driver and his passenger!). It wasn't until 1914-15 that the Model T Ford got a formed, sheet metal cowling between that "dashboard" and a still-wooden firewall benind the engine. Art

To fill it out more completely: In 1/25 scale, there have been only a handful of Model T Ford kits: Tonka Toys produced a line of "Diorama" kits, two of which were keyed around a 1913 Model T Ford touring car, which was curbside only. That car is the only "Brass Era" stock Model T ever done in 1/25 scale to this point in time, and they are pretty hard to find anymore. Aurora produced a 1922 Model T kit, decades ago, never reissued by anyone since the early 1960's. AMT did a pair of 1923 Model T's in the mid-70's, a Depot Hack (woodie station wagon in other words), and a C-cab 1/2 ton delivery van. And of course, AMT produced the legendary 1925 Double T Kit, which has been reissued many times, both as a double kit, and as singer version kits as well. AMT also produced a 1927 Model T Touriing, which keeps coming back into production. Art

Simply put, Renwall never did do a body shell for the Visible Chassis. For just a bit of history: The Visible Chassis was pretty much a sales dog for Renwal--parents went nuts for the Visible V8 engine, but when it came to the chassis, not many kids had shelf-space in their rooms back then (That was the era of the 1,000-1,200 sq ft 3bdrm house with 3.5 kids, 2 parents, and a dog) Plus the much higher price probably turned off a lot of potential buyers. IIRC it was at least double the price of the V8. Art

Actually, India Ivory looked a lot better than a stark "refrigerator" white back then--as all white paints tended to "yellow" somewhat in the sun. If you look at a paint chip chart for any make of car back in the 50's, you will see that most of the colors we tend to think of as really "brilliant" were in fact rather "muted", which apparently was to minimize UV fading. Art

Regardless of the type of airbrush, or it's price--when one is working with a syphon-type unit and getting intermittent spray, chances are pretty good that air is getting admitted into the material (paint) delivery side of things. That can be aggravating as all get-out to find, as usually it's something so small and simple as to defy all reason at times. However, tracking it down isn't hard, truthfully: Start with the material (paint) delivery tube that extends down into your color jar: Does this tube reach all the way to the bottom of the jar (hint: It takes only a little bit of clearance between the bottom of the jar and the end of this tube to allow paint to flow into, and up through the tube to the airbrush). Next, check the top of the delivery tube where it meets the underside of the color jar "nipple"--is that a tight fit, and if a plastic tube (most are nowadays) is there even the tiniest of splits in the tube at that point? If so, it should be easy enough to reverse the installation of the delivery tube as any little crack or split in that end more than likely will be immersed in your paint until that last few dregs of paint are left in the color jar. The next thing to check would be any seals around the base of the hollow nozzle--those will admit air, with the "vacuum" (which is slight, but nonetheless a vacuum) inside the venturi of the airbrush itself. If that seal is missing, or split, replacing it should go a long way to correcting the problem, or so it seems to me. Art

On the undercarriage, all the frame, along with suspension parts, were painted GM Chassis Black, which is a semi-gloss black. The entire body was painted in red oxide primer before going to the finishing department. There, the body was mounted on a roll-around cart, rolled into the paint booth, where a team of two or three painters used hand-held production spray guns to apply the body color. When they came to the firewall, they painted that down to the "break" where the toeboard (slanted forward part of the floorboard) met the vertical firewall--but there would have been some overspray onto the red oxide underside of the body in this area. The same was true with the rocker panels--factory painters ducked down, sprayed the undersides of the rocker panels, which left a band of body color overspray along the sides of the floorboard underneath. This same overspray was also evident around the sides and end of the trunk floor, but not so visible up inside the rear wheel wells. As for color availability, Bel Air's could be had in any color from the Chevrolet color chart, including solid, one-color paint jobs. India Ivory is a very light ivory or cream colored white. The wheels were painted the lower body color, and on a model having full wheel covers, the very lip of the rim will show, as well as the back sides of the wheels between the tires and the brake drums. Art

Of course, there were no 1954 Thunderbirds (TBird started for 1955 model year), but a '54 Corvette is easy to do--very much identical to the '53, differing only id minor details, that probably wouldn't be seen on the model. As for a '54 Ford--Ford used exactly the same body shells 1952-54, only the trim and grilles changed, likely upholstery patterns as well. Art

Having grown up in the 1950's, taking Driver's Education in a '59 Chevy Biscayne 4dr sedan, AND owning a real '59 Biscayne 4dr from 1994-2005, those cars were NOT heavily built--they just looked that way. In short, they were large sheet-metal "boxes" with not much in behind them to stop an impact. A long-time next-door neighbor when I was a teenager owned the largest tow-truck operation in my city--I got to see more than my share of wrecked cars, including '59-'60 full sized cars that were as badly crushed and crumpled as the '59 Chevy in that video. As for the engine, most generally that got punched way back into the interior, many times in a severe head-on collistion, the engine block would wind up where the front seat cushion was supposed to be. In addtion, little was known back then about how to "engineer" the crumpling of the front of the chassis, front-end sheet metal, even the body shell itself. Art

Actually, a Mercury convertible would be very cool--given that Ford Motor Company built all their '49-'51 station wagons (the station wagon body shells are exactly the same save for the door skins--due to styling differences) on convertible chassis. Of course, while the frame designs are the same for both makes, the Mercury is something like 4" longer overall and in wheelbase. One can only hope, huh? Art

Revell's '50 Ford F1 flathead engine is vastly better than the old AMT '49 Mercury unit, as it should be, given the 32 year span between the engineering and tooling of each. The major turnoff for me with the AMT engine is the cylinder heads--way too flat/thin, and for whatever reason, somewhere along the way, AMT decided it would be cool to engrave the plug wires right across the tops of the heads. However, the transmission on the pickup engine is wrong for a passenger car, while the AMT-49 Merc transmission is actually quite accurately done. That's easily corrected by cutting the pickup tranny off the bellhousing, and replacing that with the unit cut off the AMT engine (in exactly the same place, of course). The aircleaner, and possibly the carburetor from the AMT kit are correct for the station wagon. Here are a couple of pics of how I adapted the '50 Pickup flathead to my '49 Merc station wagon frame, and the mods I had to accomplish on the engine: Modifications needed to the '50 pickup engine's oil pan and exhaust system: Engine in chassis, with exhaust system parts laid out: Everything test fitted together: Art

A good way to see what well-thinned paint should be (enamel or lacquer) is to "decant" some paint from a rattle can into your color jar, and see how that airbrushes. From that point, "the consistency of 2% milk" is a very good place to start with these two types of paint. From my experience, that's about as thin as enamel should be, because unlike lacquers, enamels take a lot longer to "flash off", which means that excessive wet enamel can, and most likely will "run" either by gravity, or by the force of the air/paint coming out of the airbrush. In this, lacquers are a lot more "forgiving" (I've shot lacquers so reduced with thinner that they barely covered when doing a final "leveling" coat--but that's taking it to the extreme edge. Art

AMEN to all the above advice! Of course, from where I'm sitting, first and foremost--build what you want, in the style you want--make yourself happy. Art

IMO, "Paasche H-series" says it all. Art

"X" as in the "hourglass" shaped frame, which was pioneered at Cadillac in 1957, or "X" as in an X-shaped crossmember? If the latter, that was first used on the 1929 Cord L-29 front drive chassis, to eliminate chassis "twisting". Art

However, the '39 Ford hydraulic brakes were little more than a conversion of the existing parts to accept hydraulic cylinders in place of the mechanical "monkey motion", and were never really considered to be nearly as good as 1948-48 brakes. Art

Of course, unless one is looking at say, a Pocher kit, or a very high-end 1:43 scaler, most of the model car kits we buy and build are created down to a certain common denominator. That can, and often is, price, or as most kits I've ever experienced, designed to appeal to the greatest number of pairs of hands. The latter practically dictates some compromises, so correctly scaled miniature spring shackles fall right in there or so it seems to me. Art

Skip, I started with tan, then "swiped on" the brown oil paints, then added the decals--finally, the clear yellow. As for real wood on station wagons, Ford Motor Company was the last to seriously mass-produce Woody station wagons--Ford and Mercury production of these stopped with the end of the 1951 model year (Chevrolet & Pontiac closed out their true woodie station wagons by mid-1949 in favor of their then all-new steel "faux" woodie station wagon bodies. Packard dropped their woodie "Station Sedan" at the end of 1950 production. Ford did, however, use molded wood (hard maple) "framing" trim on the 1952 Country Squire, but for 1953 and beyond, fake wood frame trim was the only thing available. Buick, however, continued offering their Roadmaster Estate Wagon with a partially woodie body through the end of the 1953 model year. Art

Yup! Every so often, when I'm biking the footbridge over the Norfolk Southern and CSX main line RR tracks here, I see a train load of automotive scrap going by--and the shredded remains of old worn-out cars are kinda awesome to see. art

Just to clarify things a bit here: In the early 1950's, builders of hot rods (street rods) tended to gravitate to Fords from Model A's to '32-'34 Fords (in fact there was a frequent argument back then as to just when "Hot Rod" ended and "Custom Car" began). One of the beauties of using Model A and early Ford V8 parts and components was the general interchangeability (seemingly old Henry Ford wanted parts from newer Fords to be readily adaptable to older models). In addition, by 1950, junkyards were full of old Fords, and piles of old Ford parts--as well as auto parts stores with brake rebuilding kits for 30's Ford brakes. A very common setup, even through the late 1950's was a '32 Ford (built any style you can imagine), the chassis set up with a Ford torque-tube rear axle (some used the standard '32 Ford rear spring, the more daring adapted Model A rear crossmembers into the rear of the Ford frame so they could use the high, double-arched Model A rear spring, which when shackled to the lower '32 axle spring mounts, lowered the rear of the Deuce several inches. Up front, a dropped front axle did the same thing. For brakes and wheels, a set of 1940 Ford brakes was a classic setup--that being the first year of truly conventional hydraulic brakes coupled with a narrow 5-bolt lug pattern wherein the wheel lugs bolted into a forged steel hub (1936-39 Ford wheels, the so-called "wide five" wheels, bolted to the outer edge of the brake drums which put a lot of strain on brake drums, causing them to bend or warp with repeated side impacts--with curbs and the like). The '40 Ford brake drum bolt pattern is the same as Model A's mid-1928 through 1931, 1932-35, and 1940-48, again making wheel choices (from junkyard parts) pretty wide. Needless to say, 1940 Ford juice brakes got the call a lot on those earlier Deuce hot rods. 1935 Ford wheels, being the last year of "wire wheels" at Ford, and the scarcest 6:00-16's, didn't often get used, due to the difficulty in finding a set that didn't have at least one or two bent spokes by then, but there were rods which had them. With that in mind, the "rat rod" wheels and tires that Revell introduced in such as their '29 and '31 Model A kits are perfect, as those were probably the most commonly seen rims and tires in Ford-based hot rodding in the 1950's. By the end of the decade, speed equipment manufacturers were beginning to offer "adapter" plates which bolted to the 1940-48 hubs with one set of holes, and then matched the slightly different bolt patterns of say, Chevy steel wheels (there were other styles of wheel adapters made as well, to adapt other makes of steel wheels to a Ford-based Deuce. These made it possible to use Ford 16" rear wheels and the new-for-1956-57 14" steel rims from Detroit. So, the "field" is pretty much wide open for you. Art

Head-on, or rear ended, they did as well (or as poorly) as anyone else's "ladder frames". There was a lot of concern back in the day as to side impacts, due to there being no frame rails outboard of the center of the frame--but then most other cars having full ladder frames suffered badly in side impacts, up to and including "wrapping around a utility pole or tree trunk). From a torsional standpoint, the GM X-frames were noticeably stiffer against "twisting" than any other contemporary frame, due to the center spine acting as a "torque box"--that structure was incredibly stout. Art

Don, The interior side panels were plywood, faced with Honduran mahogany, from what pictures I've been able to scare up. For that, I probably will lighten up some Testors gloss brown, and then wood-grain that with the same technique as I used on the body sides, but be more sparing with the oil paints. They will get the Tamiya Clear Yellow treatment just as did the outer panels. As for the dash, the upper portion should be tan, with light woodgraining, and while none of my pictures show the lower portion very well, it does get painted dark brown, but I cannot determine if that was woodgrained or not (the dash was painted on the real cars, with woodgraining added by decal--very common back in the day. The moldings along the top of the side panels will be #1141 tan, and I suspect they may well have had the faux woodtrain decal applied to them. Art

Note, however, that the engine paint isn't anything like your say, Testors #1144 metallic gold, but a gold metallic enamel. A good approximation of this color can probably be had from Scale Finishes, in Acrylic Enamel, which would have to be airbrushed, over a primer to get this look. Check his website, I think he has Chevrolet "Anniversary Gold" which is a metallic gold body color--would be very, very close! Art

Don, I used the Tamiya Clear Yellow acrylic, with a 1/4" wide flat synthetic brush, mostly to avoid having to mask the thing off all over again, and also to give a bit of "irregularity" to the depth of the clear yellow color--as wood doesn't always finish out exactly the same shade all over, due to variations in the color of the wood itself (beyond, of course, the grain). Looking forward to seeing how your's comes out! Art