Chuck Most

That's why I used the Buick nose on this El Camino SS kit! Reverse engineering at its... well, not finest, but reverse engineering nevertheless!

This was patterned after the new- tool '62 body (the one that's out now as the Passionate Poncho). Theoretically the body should drop right on, but the fact its just a little bit smaller than it should be is the problem. The body is by Jimmy Flintstone.

Gang- Here's the situation. I recently picked up a resin body for a '62 Pontiac kit. It looks good, and it didn't need too much cleanup, so I thought it would be smooth sailing. Then I started fitting pieces from the donor kit and noticed that just about everything seemed too big to fit the body. I started measuring, comparing the kit body to the resin one, and the resin one is roughly 2 scale inches shorter (or narrower) in almost every dimension! I've seen more than a few warped and distorted resin parts in my time (I'm a big fan of R&R! ), but this is the first time I've seen one that appears to be shrunken! I'm pretty sure there's no way to fix it aside from trimming the AMT parts to fit it, but I'm worried about a couple of things. Is it possible the body could shrink even more? I'd hate to get this thing done, only to have the body spit out its chassis a few years down the road! And I've got quite a few other resin bodied models- could this happen to any of those? Like I said, this is the first one I've seen that looks like it shrank a bit after it was cast. The body has no other distortions or other problems besides that.

He's right... the old Packard plant is still there! Well, what's left of it.

Hmmmmmm......

Very nice color on Maggie, Rick! Been a while since I've seen you lurking 'round...

Meh, they'll never replace the original.

Man, I've gotta go big-scale one of these days!

The car looks very sweet, but those drivers look just a little bit sickly...

Nah, that kit's not too bad. You ought to see the Arii '72 T-Bird kit!

I'll take 'em!

This is very cool. I've wanted a Horn Toad for, like, FOREVER. But I don't want to pay collector bucks for one. I love that slant-mounted Pontiac 6!

Love it! Who makes that kit? And do they make a Mangusta, as well? I must have one!

Weird- I've got a '67 Fury 4-door, too, and the Jo-Han '68 kit. I'm planning on doing the opposite of what you did and use the model as a kind of '3D Concept Sketch' for how the 1:1 will look when it's finished. Great job- I only hope mine turns out as cool (the model AND the real car).

It looks like a cut-down '56 grille to me, with the Desoto teeth underneath. The cab looks '53-'55. If I were going to build it, I think I'd use the AMT Trophy Series '53 F-100 (NOT the flipnose!) and raid a grille from a Revell '56 F-100.

The new tool Ala Kart was no turkey- turkeys have grace and sophistication! The Ala Kart was just a substandard surrogate for the original kit. If the Moebius Hudson were somehow approaching THAT level of 'non-goodness', I wouldn't be nearly as excited about it as I am! Never having touched the actual kit, I'll say again I'll reserve my final judgement until I've got one in front of me. In the meantime- here's a REAL turkey!

I do agree with you, Casey, but in the case of the Magnum, I think the base model looks way cooler than the R/T and SRT models, just because it doesn't have the blinding polished wheels and chromed headlamp housings. Give me the satin-finish wheels and blacked out headlamps any ol' day of the week, thanks! I could do without the 2.7 liter V6, however, and I think most modelers would, too!

I guess I do have a couple more!

He also consulted with George Barris in the late '50's and early '60's, before he became head of GM design. Yep- some of the General's finest were produced under his watch.

Not to be too nit-picky, but the white truck has 'drums, one crate, and the push broom'. Come to think of it, though, that bed looks a bit naked with only one crate, kind of wonder why they only supplied one in the kit.

Idiotic question, I'm not even close to being an expert on late model Mopars- but what would be so difficult to convert the existing SRT-8 kits into the R/T versions? Other than 're-dressing' the 6.1 into a 5.7, adding different wheels and a different front fascia, what else would there be to it?

Yes! I'll finally have that '89 Mercury Tracer kit I've always wanted!

It's amazing how much junk you forget all about on your photo-sharing site, isn't it? This one is pretty cool- it's an HO (1:87) scale model of a '39 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery. The bumpers and wheel/tire castings are white metal, and the body appears to be cast from fiberglass resin- it's kind of a 'muddy water' color, and is nearly transparent. It is also quite brittle, as fiberglass resin usually is. Detail is fairly good, but the resin body has some pretty nasty pinholes in the running boards and headlamps. I have no idea when it was produced, but it came two to a pack- The back showed some of Maguson's other products, which were a pretty eclectic mix of HO scale detailing items- And here's a built up example next to the unbuilt kit- here you can see some of the pinholes- I used the better of the two castings to build the black car, the more worse-off pieces are to the right. It's pretty obvious I suck at small-scale projects, but the thing is remarkably well detailed for its size! I actually found this digging around in the aircraft details 'bargain bins' at Dean's Hobby Stop in Flushing, MI. I've never seen any others like it, nor have any of the other local modelers, but I just had to have it!

One of the things I love about this hobby- all the diversity! All we need on this thread is a monster truck and I think we'll have all the bases covered!

The big gripe with the way AMT did the front chin spoiler isn't really a problem with the kit, per se. But most builders simply paint the entire thing dark gray, and from certain angles, the front bumper looks like it has a big chunk missing out of it, because its color blends in with the wheel opening.