62rebel

i got a broken windshield (i had a spare good one) that i decided to try to fix, since the question has arisen lately about that problem.... luckily, all the pieces were there, it was a simple matter to butt them together, one by one, and cement them together with solvent. don't even TRY to use tube glue or super glue for this.... only solvent will work. clear parts cement won't work either..... ANYWAY. once the part was one piece again, it definitely had visible seam lines and spots where the solvent etched the surface. can't be helped. so... i broke out the sandpaper and smoothed out the joints, and decided to apply more solvent to the seams in a further effort to get them cleared up... more sandpaper, and then, by scraping the piece across the grain of sanding (i had been sanding lengthwise, i scraped vertically), i was able to get the joints smooth on the outside surface. i also sanded on the inside surface and scraped it as well; with much more effort the main areas COULD be made transparent once again, but those seams are not going to go away, regardless of the effort. BUT: the effort was not WASTED.... a new windshield could be vacuformed from this one, or simply copy it with clear styrene sheet as it is not a compound curved part. BTW: due to my gargantuan thumbs (sometimes i have ten of them), there were smears of solvent on the surfaces, that, once dried completely, could be sanded/scraped and polished clear again. so, for you guys who've, once again, gotten glue where it ain't supposed to be, all is not lost!

blower manifolds for FE's and SOHC's aren't common.... i have one, fairly new, but i can't remember what kit it came out of. i don't know if i have the blower that goes on it, either.

that's a bit of all right, old boy... do get cracking with it.

AND it outsold the ORIGINAL Mustang by a long shot..... three to one over a four year lifespan, i think. pretty good for a car that everyone says is universally hated....

"bouse"?

something hit me... no, not a falling chunk of Skylab. when these kits were new, the target market was tweenage boys... the kids who loved MAD Magazine.... had a Monster Maker in the closet with leaky packets of Plasti-Goop lying around.... hid plastic spiders in their sister's room... watched Scooby Doo and the afternoon movie after school or simply palled around with their buddies until dark or dinner was called..... these kids ate these kind of kits up with a passion... anything gruesome, blood spattered, with fangs and bat wings and spider webs on it, that was the coolest stuff around..... their DADS bought Monogram Classics. they themselves either lost the taste for styrene or simply grew out of cartoon cars.... but these kits had a place of honor in the grand scheme of things.

you'd have to ask somebody at MPC about that.... IIRC, Barnabas Collins flew everywhere.....................

Pinto came out with the Kent 1600, not a 1200 as pictured... but 1600 was still anemic with a chunky car like the Pinto. it was only a short time later that Ford dropped the 2.0ohc in them, which definitely made a difference. BTW no automatics behind the 1600; too weak to lose any HP pumping oil. Mom and Dad bought a '73 as their FIRST "NEW" car.... we kept it for 7 years through Virginia winters and one wreck, put well over 100k miles on it.... the folks we sold it to probably put ANOTHER 100k on it. no A/C, no power steering or brakes, no GPS, no heated seats, no ABS, a three speed automatic behind a 2.0OHC four.... carbureted, no EFI... no catalytic converter, no O2 sensors.... exactly what i wish i could buy TODAY.

he put the battery in the trunk; the rear wheels are plain painted steel on these cars. i'm building the same kit but using the Bullitt parts on mine.

Coddington is spinning right now ..... about redline, i'd say.

the tip posted the other day on filling tires with something is looking like a very good idea for hollow tires at least...

i see i wasn't the only one to try the Monogram bed narrowing trick! removing the cove trim isn't to hard to do, actually, but unless you have a spare body to work with, don't give it a bother. since you had to shorten the bed fenders, though... practice on those pieces you cut off! good looking start!

the pacer had a beautiful six cylinder engine and trans.... great AMC rims, too. i'd love to see ALL of these hit the shelf again. the Chevette kit suffered from the limitations the 1:1 car had... Chevrolet never gave it ANYTHING like what it gave the Vega in terms of trim options, dress ups.... even the T1000 Pontiac was almost a stillborn. funny thing, though... i saw Chevettes on the road for YEARS after the last Vega i saw vanished into the sunset..... and there's at least ONE local guy running a Pinto wagon daily here.... to swap engines in a Chevette/T1000 required replacing the rear axle as well, since that car used a torque tube type drivetrain not seen since the '50's in a Chevrolet. even the kit engineers saw that kids would recognize that if they added a v8 to the kit.....

my favorite truck kit, bar none.

no, he's got a valid concern. most of my stash of old MPC solid vinyl Goodyears are hard as rocks and a little too small to fit ANY wheels easily. so are my Suburbanite mud-snow tires.... hard as rock and shrinking.

oh my gosh that's bloody brilliant and enormous.

haters crack me up.

see how diverse the kit building choices were? both runabouts (hatchbacks) AND sedans.... and there were wagons as well! and few of those kits were "air boxes"..... almost ALL of them had a load of extra optional "goodies". MPC had a pair of racing bucket seats that they added to almost every compact and medium size kit they made, and those were my absolute favorite seats to use in my builds back then... as a matter of fact; i think they had two versions; a low back and a high back version. they were tooled up for the ProStock cars, IIRC... got to hit another swap meet soon. i missed SO many annuals the last time we had one.

it is indicative of the MPC business model to re-vamp (hahaha) existing slow selling kits into new forms... they were the new kids on the block in the late '60's, and this was their bread-and-butter. if you think this was bad.... look at some of the "Zinger" style junk they added to their annuals in the early '70's as an example. you have to remember, KIDS bought these kits.... not adults, for the most part. as a side note, i remember watching Dark Shadows as a kid, and waiting to see the Vampire Van show up.... since it wasn't REALLY a TV show tie-in, of course, it never did.... and the Kotter Kids never drove the Superfly Gran Prix; Fonzie never drove the Monkeemobile, and Colonel Hogan never had his own Jeep..... that didn't stop MPC from selling TV-show themed kits. i might buy one for the novelty of it. i never thought MPC's engineering was all that great on poseable steering, etc.

what is "none mag" racing?

tell you what: anyone so dissatisfied with this kit that they refuse to build it, i will take it off your hands for postage. that will spare you the frustration.

don't think of it as an engine: break it down into shapes. the block will be one rectangle of a given length, width, and height; the head, another; valve cover a half-cylinder , more or less. the bottom of the block may be belled out for crank clearance, or the same width top to bottom. establish center lines and research some reference material fo the engine you want to replicate. some 6's use the same water pumps as V8's, but off the top of my head i couldn't say which. it's easy to find dimensions if you go to a forum that deals with the cars that have the engine you're interested in.

anytime i need to cut windshield/glass i wrap the part in blue painter's tape, using the tape for a guideline and guard against errant cuts. and i always cut it with a razor saw; slow and steady... matter of fact, i use the razor saw to cut MOST parts off the sprue as well; it minimizes the chance of nipping too much off the part or springing it into the great unknown..... but, back on topic: if there were a foolproof way to salvage clear parts we'd love to hear it! scratches and glue smudges are easy enough... but actual cracks or breakage... just like the 1:1 there.

the reasoning behind spacing them out of phase was to disrupt the droning fan noise evenly spaced blades make. even four bladed fans have the blades out of phase. the swept blade design on electric fans negates the need for phasing, so they don't do it on electric fans. trucks and heavy usage vehicles ( ambulances, police cars, high performance engines) would not bother trying to cut noise down, so they tend to have evenly spaced blades (often in odd numbers) on their fans.

i thinned down one of the donor A pillars from the GT500 and backed it with a styrene strip, glued it in; it looks pretty darn close once you remove the vent wing detail and cut back the windshield trim. i'm building up one of the GT500 front valances to see how it will work. i discovered that the GT500 interior tub is too wide in the cargo area to work with the IH chassis plate; the IH tubs have relief contours added to clear the rear wheelwell tubs on the chassis plate. i could probably bypass most of this work and use the late issue '67 kit for full detail but then i'd be losing the period feel of this kit.