Force

The only downside I see with the MPC/ERTL/AMT Mack DM 600 and 800 truck kits are the spacing between the drive axles in the tandem, the axles are further appart than they are in most highway tandems and the chassis is a heavy duty as the DM series are for construction purposes (DM=Dump/Mixer).

Cool.

Nice build.

Very nice, I really like the Thunderbolt's. This was before Jake King became the head mechanic for the Sox & Martin team and one of the reasons he painted the engines he built for them Ford engine blue.

Nice pair of Bicentennial anniversary trucks.

Alclad recommends using enamel paint as a base for their chrome for a reason, so why use anything else when it works. I have used Humbrol gloss black and dark blue enamel paint and have never had any trouble...I have even used it on my real 1964 Ford Fairlane 500 Sports Coupe where some plated interior plastic parts had faded and it worked and held up just fine the years I had the car

If you want a more current US style trailer I would go for the Moebius 53 feet trailers.

Lets hope they will remain in the US.

Yes the China government could easily do that. And of course it's greed and profit that made companies move production to Mexico, China, India, Poland and other low wage countries wich don't take environment issues in consiceration and have less rules to follow...of course it's cheaper then to produce the same things in countries that have to meet all the pollution, invironmental and workers rules. The Lindberg tooling is most likely in China now as Round 2 owns the Lindberg brand.

Round 2 doesn't have access to the ERTL die cast tooling, ERTL still belongs to Tomy.

It's not only North American modelers, how many would like to see even higher prices on the model kits wich most likley would be the result if the production would come back to the US, I for one think the prices are high enough as it is, that's what I think but I hope I'm wrong. I would for sure like to see more production leave China, they couldn't care less about pollution and their manufacturing methods are far from environmetally friendly and will destroy their own land and most of the World if this continues, the rest of the world can try to decrease air and water pollution as much as they want but the enormous pollution China do eats that up faster than we can lower ours, the labor is cheap and the quality of the products are often questionable, that's why they can be cheaper. They are also ruthlessly copying things not caring about copyrights with government backing as the state owns most of the production facilities, product development in coalition with a China manufacturer belongs to and stays in China according to their thinking even tho' the real owner who ordered and paid for the development of the product is from anywhere else in the World, kind of weird if you ask me. The government they have...a communist capitalist state ...a weird unheathy combination and that's not a free market, China are also buying up the assets of materials and other stuff in the World and have control of more and more themselves keeping others out. So I don't like that development when a strong economy like China (2:nd in the World after the US) with the careless reasoning they have will have most of the influence on the World market nothing good can come out of it, and the best is to stop buying China made stuff completely...but that will of course have a price.

The 59 El Camino kit has a blown Cadillac engine as the speedy option, the 348/409 in this kit has stock tri-power with air cleaner and tri-y exhaust headers, not much of hop up there, so that's why I didn't list it.

Yes the ERTL tires has a lager diameter and more profile than the old AMT tires...so they are beefier and fill up better, the AMT tires are 10.00-20 and the ERTL tires 11.00-20, the tires in some AMT kits like the White-Freightliner and some other kits are 11.00-22.

Thanks Ronald, I know about that one, it's too new so it´s not that one, the kit I built was of a larger heavier excavator in the 25-30-35 ton range...but as I said...it was a long time ago. Well keep up the good work and you have my attention.

Well I suspected that based on your engine choice.

This model came out very nice indeed.

Nice progress. I wish we would have more construction equipment as model kits, perfect for loads on trailers. I remember I built an excavator model kit back in the early to mid 70's, a club had a youth project to attract more young people to the club and we were a few kids there and each of us picked out a kit we liked to build wich was either donated to or bought by the club, I picked the excavator as I have allways been attracted to heavy machinery and trucks and we were building model kits there for an hour or two once a week for a while. I don't remember much as it was around 45 years ago but I think it could have been 1:24th scale because it was quite large, it could also have been a Hitachi or something like that as I remember it was moulded in orange plastic, I don't know the manufacturer of the kit but I think it could have been an Asian company. My skills weren't that good back then as I could have been around 10-12 years old at the time so it didn't come out that good, and i threw it away after a while...wich I now deeply regret...because I might have been able to restore it if I still had it even tho' it was kind of a glue bomb, but I don't have anything left from that kit. I still wonder who made it and I would like to find another one, but I have not seen anything like that since then.

Nice progress. I don't know if it's your intention but if you are doing a true copy of Fast Freddy's truck the engine should be a BAE Hemi.

The Chevy 348 and 409 looks essentially the same except for the placement of the oil dip stick, it's on the passenger side on the 409 and the drivers side on the 348, otherwise they look pretty much the same...so you can use either one. You can get some 348/409 performance parts in these kits. The AMT old tool 57 Chevy has a S.c.O.T style blower with 4 carbs, headers and finned valve covers. The AMT 58 Impala has a tri-power intake, a Spalding Flame Trower magneto and headers. The AMT 62 Bel Air and Impala Convertible has a dual 4 bbl inline intake manifold, a dual 4 bbl cross ram intake manifold and offenhauser valve covers. The AMT 62 Bel Air Super Stock kits has a dual 4 bbl intake, tube headers and the Z-11 two piece intake manifold and air cleaner. The AMT original issue 63 Impala had a Hilborn style Fuel Injection, finned valve covers and Hedman Headers, unfortunately nothing of that is in the later issues. The AMT 64 Impala has a roots style blower with a two port injector and scoop, headers and finned valve covers. The Revell 58-65 Chevy kits with 348/409 are nice but not much performance parts in them as most are factory stock, several of them has tri-pöwer tho'. Some exceptions are. The Revell 53 Chevy kits wich ha a roots style blower, a Z-11 style dual 4 bbl intake manifold, a Spalding Flame Thrower magneto and exhaust headers. The Revell 62 Impala has a dual 4 bbl intake manifold and a finned air cleaner.

Intersting build and this I'm going to follow. I'm a construction worker and we are building a bypass road around our city right now, and we had one of these at my work last year...in fact we had two for a while as the rock crushers also had one, I tried the one in the picture below out... it was fun and it's for sure a powerful machine. They are not there anymore and the largest excavator we have on the sight right now is a Cat 352F, a couple of Cat 336's and some smaller Volvo EC 220, 240 and 250 excavators.

A diesel turbo is not different from a turbo on a gasoline or alcohol engine...a turbo is a turbo so you can use whatever you find. The difference can be the size but on modern diesel engines the turbo are quite small and insignificant even on trucks and machines like wheel loaders and excavators...most likely so they will spool up easier and quicker.

It all depends on how they designed the tooling, if they had the foresight to design it so it's easy to change inserts to do another version of the same basic kit they could for sure do it, it means they have to cut some new tooling inserts tho'.

Do what you want with it, model kits are meant to be built. It's not like the Revell modern era Top Fuel kits are rare because they were in production for a long time and the first in the series came in 1991 wich was the Gary Ormsby Castrol GTX and Joe Amato Valvoline cars, the first ones was state of the art when they came, Revell did some slight updates 1996 and 2002 but unfortunately not enough to make them up to date for the time. The last two in the series the Tony Schumacher US Army and Kenny Bernstein Budweser King cars was issued in 2002 and if they had done the necessary updates to get the kits correct when they were issued the kits would still be right today almost 20 years later except for wheels and some other small things as the evolution of the Top Fuel cars haven't been so drastic like it was in the 1990's and early 2000's, so it started good but they missed it at the end. This particular kit came in 1992 and the only thing different from the ones up to 1995 are the color of plastic and decals, so they put out a lot of them with different decals under the 11 years they were in production..

The engine in the most recent Volvo FH4 Globetrotter XL or Medium Roof from 2018-19 can be either a D13 or a D16, both these engines looks very similar and I don't have one so I can't really tell wich one it is, but I think it's a D16E, G or the K 550hp version, the later D16K version on 650hp or 730hp Euro 6 has two turbos and it's not that one.

Interesting build Jarda, I'm following this.