Force

Looks great...you captured the look of a real 70's truck.

Nice. I recently found an old original issue W925 with the torsion bars myself, it was opened and I have not gone throught it yet but I will for sure find out when the time comes to build it.

Yes...and the underside was white with black drive shaft, suspension and axle, the bellhousing was a Lakewood scatter shield and was red. But this doesn't take anything off your build, it looks great.

I'm up for that one...and you can do the Sox & Martin version too with some Slixx decals.

Italeri kits goes together quite well and I have built a few of them in my day. The downside is the 1:24th scale, the multi piece cabs and the generic and inaccurate things for chassis and engines as you say, that will maybe not bother some but I don't like it and for the price they ask for these kits I do expect more, the Revell Germany truck kits was about the same price when they were reissued last and the detail in those are less generic and more accurate most of the time. I have said this before but there are only two chassis and engine combinations for all of the Italeri US truck kits except for the Volvo VN wich has it's own chassis and no engine, one chassis and engine for the Peterbilt kits and one chassis and basic engine for all the others, so it's a bit too generic for my liking. But if you don't mind that and want to build a fairly good kit the Italeri kits are not bad at all, the shortcomings of chassis and engines can often be fixed, at least for the US truck kits as there are lots of stuff for them in the aftermarket, for the European trucks it's a bit worse, you can find chassis parts like suspensions and such but not many engines and transmissions that are correct wich I think is a bit strange as many of the European truck kits are hoplessly outdated in that area.

Most of the Tamiya kits are good but the downside is that many don't have opening hoods and detailed engines, but the ones who do are very good. I like the BMW 635 above and there is a Mercedes 500 SEC in a couple of versions with engine, their Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing is very good, the SLR McLaren is a nice kit, many of their Porsches and other LeMans kits has detailed engines, and Exotic kits like Ferrari's and some others have engine detail. Hasegawa and Fujimi has some nice full detail kits, Revell Germany, Italeri and Heller has some. So it's just a matter of doing research on the kit you are interested in and see if it's full detail or curbside, there is lots of information on several websites and forums for many of these kits.

Maybe if it was a decent kit I might have bought one...but it's not worth it as the Revell/Monogram kit is waaayyy better.

Yes that's true, it's an American forum after all and most American car kits has opening hood and detailed engines. There are other car kits from Asian manufacturers but many of them don't have any engine detail or opening hood, Revell Germany has some non American subjects as well. So it depends on what you are after.

Too many to list...browse around here on the forum and you will find some good ones.

Yes, and all the other changes they plan to do with the next generation cars they will do away with everything that was left of what was special and significant to NASCAR racing and made it stand out from other racing series, so NASCAR Cup will be like most of the other saloon car racing series...but on ovals...kind of boring if you ask me. Well enough ranting and back to the subject.

Yes a bit diffuse when they changed and some teams used older wheels longer than others. Back in the 80's all the Monogram Ford NASCAR kits came with 5-hole wheels and the GM cars like Buick, Olds, Pontiac and Chevy had 9-hole wheels all chrome plated, and I believe that changed sometime in the 90's to the 8-hole design they use today...most likely sometime around when chrome plated wheels was banned. One thing is clear, the wheels they use now will disappear when the next genearation (generation 7) cars comes in 2022 and they will go to 18 inch BBS aluminum wheels with center bolt.

Nice progress. I looked at pictures of real trucks and about half of the base of the air kompressor shows above the frame rails, so maybe it's a tad low but it can't be that far off.

This list is a combination och work and research from several contributors here on the forum and it has been fun to put together...a labour of love so to say. So if this topic is useful to someone at least I am glad and I think that goes for the other contributors as well.

Are you sure...I mean the torsion bar suspension was discontinued very early in the production and the tooling was changed, the run for the torsion bars could maybe have been blocked off in the tool but if it would have been easy to just open it up and run plastic through there I think they would have done it allready and make the W925 a W925 again.

Yup, they will for sure interfere with the outer rockers and rocker shafts if it was a real engine, and they also looks to be a bit too wide from top to bottom. They should also have five bolts for attachment to the heads and intake manifold, two at the bottom (wich I can see) and three at the top (not really visible on the pics above).

Allthough it has many details and parts it does not look like it's the best representation of a FE engine...the package says 427 but the 427 version of the FE never came with the tri-power option like the 390 and 406 did, it will fit but I don't believe any 427 left the factory with one as it just was available with single or dual 4 bbl carb (Q and R-Code).

I think it came out just nice.

Very nice.

Cool!!

Yup, this kit started out as a 1977 Dodge 2-door car back in 1976 and has been modified several times over the years and got the 4-door body 1982ish with the TJ Hooker kit...so the basic tooling is quite old.

It's on mine for '21.

Don't mention it, I'm glad to help.

Yes, and do it before the interior is attached to the chassis and before the rear inner fenders and it will go in easier.

Well there are realisticly just three manufacturers of US car and truck kits to talk about today as many of the older brands has been bought and merged with others. Round 2 who owns AMT, MPC, Lindberg, Polar Lights and some ERTL molds. Revell who owns the Monogram brand. Moebius Models now owned by Pegasus Hobbies. Occationally some others do too but these three above are the main ones who does the majority of the US car and truck kits we have today, lately Atlantis and Salvinos Jr are coming on and has bought some old molds from other brands and produces some car kits. So it's not like it was back in the 60's and 70's when all these brands were separate companies, and many like Jo-Han and other smaller brands are gone forever.

Monogram usually was in 1:24th scale but they went to the common 1:25th scale for most of the kits in the 90's but that was under the Revell umbrella since they are the same company since many years. Revell went away from multi piece bodies a long time ago so the bodies are one piece and 1:25th scale. There has been nearly nothing new when it comes to car kits from Round 2, or RC2 before them, and Revell is the company who has done most of the new US car kits released the last 20 years together with Moebius and a couple others and the quality is quite good, so I don't understand why one would stay away from them.