2002p51

How do you feel about the same thing in plastic? have you seen what these vintage MPC Challengers are going for on eBay lately!

So, here's the chassis up on all four wheels so now I can start test fitting the body and get the wheel wells opened up. And after a half hour or so of Dremel work finishing up with sandpaper wrapped around a paint bottle, this is where I'm at: I still need just a tiny bit more clearance around the top of the front tires but the fenders are now paper thin right there. I really want to avoid a bubble in the fenders so I may have to raise the front up a 1/32" or so. We'll see.

Yea Tommy, I know about organizations like that. I shoot the Carolina Vintage Stock Car races which runs cars very much like those. There's mostly not much "vintage" under the sheet metal on these cars. But what I'm going for is a very different look, albeit the differences may be somewhat subtle.

Got the idea for this yesterday and started to work it to the mock up stage. This will be an unlikely Saturday night short track style car. I say unlikely because I'm not going for the vintage look but more of a modern late model type car which, because of the Dodge Challenger body, would be impractical and uncompetitive, if not completely illegal in just about any sanctioning body in the country. Regardless, I'm charging ahead anyway. The body is an MPC original eBay glue bomb special that I've had for years. The hood is resin from Modelhaus. The paint came off pretty well with some Easy Off. The right side headlight bucket is broken, which won't matter since I'll just plate over it with "aluminum". i.e. Evergreen. I won't be able to open the wheel wells until I get the chassis almost done and up on wheels so I can see exactly where the tires will hit. I plan on using a set of the wide five hubs and wheels from a Revell ASA Thunderbird kit. The majority of the chassis is an AMT Chrysler Kit Kar. I didn't want to use the Chrysler style torsion bar front suspension so I grafted on the front clip from an AMT GM NASCAR Winston Cup kit. I was thinking about also using the truck arm style rear suspension but decided it would be more work than it was worth so I'll stick with the kit leaf spring set-up. (See, I told you it would be impractical and uncompetitive with today's cars!) The upper hoop and it's supports are made from .080" Evergreen rod. Haven't sourced an engine yet but I have a one or two AMT Duster 340 kits around that would make nice donors. Anyway, don't know if my modeler's ADD will kick in before I finish this or not because, like most of you, I always have a couple or three or six things going on at once. But if I do make anymore progress I'll be sure to post it here. Comments and critique are welcome and encouraged even it's just to tell me I'm an idiot for even trying this!

I wish I could remember where I got the decals for this, but I built it a long time ago. Here's another one you need to build, Jonathan. This is a straight out of the box AMT Oldsmobile. I'm pretty sure you can still find these on eBay sometimes. And here's a link to Ernie's record for 1987, his first year in Cup: http://www.racing-reference.info/drivdet/irvaner01/1987/W

This is a great kit in all it's many reissues. I built this from it a long time ago: Buy several, you'll like it!

Very nice take on a kit that got many of us started in this goofy hobby!

Do you mean the Hot Wheels car? That's an original kit built when they were new.

Maybe, but the "Under Glass" section says; "Post your finished (pau) model cars here in all their glory–your online display case!"

I know what you mean. I have a really hard time when I realize that 1970 was 42 years ago!

You did get that this is NOT a Revell 1/16 scale kit, didn't you? It's 1/25, made from an AMT Tommy Ivo kit.

I don't want anybody to think I've turned into some sort of maniac whose suddenly cranking out finished models at an amazing pace. Three of the models I've posted here in the last couple of weeks are merely completions of long stalled projects that were 80% completed already. So, here's another one. This is Don Prudhomme's Top Fuel dragster from 1970. You may recognize the version as being done by Revell in 1/16 scale, but this is 1/25. The base kit is the AMT Tommy Ivo dragster. I cut the body down, removed that huge tail, and made a new roll bar from Evergreen rod. The engine is mostly from the kit with headers and injector from Revell. The rear tires are resin copies of MPC slicks and the wheels are from my spares box. The paint is Testors Chrome Yellow and I really can't remember which blue I used. But it's the decals that made this project possible and they were made for me by my good friend Skip Samples. He used the Revell 1/16 scale sheet to produce these 1/25 scale decals. (And no, he cannot produce any for sale, sorry.) This now makes six Prudhomme cars in my collection. You can see all of them at this link: http://public.fotki..../don-prudhomme/ As usual I like to read all comments, both good and bad, so have at it!

I don't think so. Look at the first photo, the '22' on the door is undamaged and is starting to peel off. The other guy has a new '22" decal. In the second photo the old '22' is just about all peeled off and I can't see any damage. I don't remember why they were doing this work, but the key point is, if the car was clear coated they couldn't peel those numbers off like that.

Well, you bring up an important point. A lot of people loose track of the fact that a NASCAR race team is, at it's core, a business. And no business can survive by spending money unnecessarily. Adding a clear coat to a race car is a significant expense in both labor and materials. (I was told by a body shop guy that a gallon of clear is over $125 these days!) That's one of the biggest reasons they all use vinyl wraps now. It's a simple matter of economics. You can have a car in the paint both for a couple of days every time you change sponsors or have it wrapped in an hour or two.

Apparently not always: These were shot early on race morning at the Bristol spring race in 2011.

If you use Tenax 7 with Evergreen rod or half round you can eliminate the two hours the Testors stuff takes to bond. Tenax does the job in seconds.

Here's yet another long stalled project finally done. This one has been "on the back burner" for probably ten years. As is typical with short track cars, my research hardly turned up two photos of this car that were the same. Sometimes the car had that hood scoop, sometimes it didn't, the stripes on the roof changed often, markings moved around, you get the idea. So what we have here is a sort of composite, if you will, a somewhat generic representation of how this car looked in general. If that makes any sense! Anyway, the base kit is, of course, that now rare MPC kit. It took a lot of work on the cage to get the body to sit down low enough over the chassis. (Straight out of the box the model looks like a 4x4) I used the engine from an AMT NASCAR Winston Cup T-bird and that took some doing to get it to fit under the low hood too. The wheels are from the kit and the tires are by AMT. The paint is Testors Model Master Classic White and Plum Crazy and the decals are by Fred Cady. As always, comments and critique are encouraged.

Oh I have lots of models that old and older. It's hard for me to think about this, but 30 years ago was "only" 1982! I still have many, many of the models I built throughout the '70s and even a couple from the '60s. For example this Galaxie: I repainted and re-decaled this model in the early '80s, (right after Fred Cady decals first became available) but the original work was all done in 1963 when the AMT annual first came out. The problem I have with that old '57 is that every time I look at it, all I can see are the many things wrong with it!

A week or two ago I posted a couple of photos of the "new" Revell '57 Chevy "Black Widow" that I built. Now that I have that done I can finally use it to replace this in my collection: (I'm sorry, I know this is hard on the eyes! ) I built this more than 30 years ago, sometime in the '70s in fact. It's wrong on so many levels. I made it from the venerable old AMT Bel Air hardtop to which I added the 'B' pillar, completely ignoring the fact that the hardtop had a lower and shorter roof line. The side trim came from that awful old Revell '55 Chevy kit from the '60s. Of course, there's those 5-lug wheels, and it was obviously hand lettered. So now I can strip it for useable parts and dump it 'cause, after all, which one would you keep?

I just went back and looked at the original post and it specifically asked for opinions. So in that way, yes, it is about you and I and whatever our opinion is. And that's what's good about this forum over that "other one", the free expression of opinion. Cause on that other one, well . . . .

No, it isn't about you or I, it's about the hobby, and making the hobby better. Lifting the skills and improving the models turned out by others, like the original poster. I don't think there are any other modeling hobbies, (and I'm thinking about model railroading as an example) where building a replica of something, but doing it any way you want, is acceptable.

Ahh, but you see, doing the research, getting the details right, is a huge part of the enjoyment I get out of this screwy hobby in the first place. If I want to do the Burger King thing, do it my way, I'll build a custom or a hot rod. If I build a race car, I want to get the overall look right, no matter what my personal preference is. That, to me any way, is the whole entire point of building a model of a 1:1 car in the first place. To replicate it as it is, not how I think it should be.

On this we have to agree to disagree. I feel that building a model of an actual car requires that the model should represent that car to the best of the builder's ability. I personally don't like black cars. So would it be okay if I built an RCR Goodwrench car and painted it hot candy apple red, because that would be my way? No, that would be wrong, the car should be black. If the 1:1 race car doesn't have a deep gloss, show car finish, the model of that car shouldn't either. And that I completely agree with!

The very first race I covered for Stock Car Racing Magazine was at Riverside in 1982. This car, driven by Bobby Allison was painted solid white. EVERYTHING else, all of the graphics and all of the green panels, were vinyl stickers: So it's been going on at least since then. Over the years, as the vinyl printing technology improved, more and more vinyl was used. There were still a few fully painted cars here and there, mostly though just the base color was painted. But the economics and labor saving of vinyl over paint, and the ease of changing schemes has made paint almost completely obsolete in NASCAR shops these days.