mrm

This model started as a paint experiment and then took on a life all its own.... Story of my life...LOL Body: The body is from the Rat Roaster with the cowl from the Phantom Vicky and the windshield from the same kit. Grille shell came from a 5 window kit and then the bottom portion was filled in and a radiator was scratch built with the help of some MCG photo etch. Then a MCG photo etched grille was inserted. The fenders are from the 5 window kit. The rears have been bobbed to come closer to the rolled pan on the body and the running boards have been filled in and smoothed out. Tail lights are MCG photo etch and so is the license plate frame. Interior: The doors and seat came from the original Roadster kit. The floor is from the Rat Roaster. The steering wheel is MCG and so is the gauge panel, the dash vents and pedals. The seatbelts are scrapbooking paper from my wife's stash with Detail Master photo etch buckles. Ken's fuzzy ur covers carpet duty and the piston shifter I believe came from Revell's '32 5 window. Chassis: The frame started as a Phantom Vicky part, but pretty much only the center crossmember tubing and part of the rails remain. The front clip came from the Rat Roaster, while the rear was scratch built. the front suspension is standard fair Revell '32 while the rear has quickchange center section, which I made a mold for and poured from white metal. An aluminum axle goes through it and it is attached to the frame via scratch built triangulated four bars and scratch built coil over shocks on the inside of the axle. The inspiration for this set up came from Boyd Coddington's Alumatub. Drivetrain: The engine and transmission came from the Rat Roaster, supercharger and all. It received a MCG resin/photo etched Edelbrock valve covers and air filter. Everything was painted in Molotow chrome to match the kit's chrome parts. Engine is fully plumbed and wired, altho there s barely any space to see it. The Corvette headers go into scratch built exhaust from solder and aluminum tubing. The paint is Kreatex waterbased paint from Hobby Lobby with the flames done with Tamiya colors. Everything was masked with bare metal foil and then the flames were freehand cut out. I am not completely satisfied with the paintjob, but I still learned a lot from it. I hope you like it and thanks for looking.

Coil overs are an upgrade to regular shocks when replacing a shock/spring combo. For example on my Corvette I threw the stock buggy transverse spring and the shocks in the trash and replaced them with nice adjustable coil overs. Same way on the rear of the hot rods you can use coil overs instead of the traditional leaf spring and shocks. However steps need to be taken to triangulate the rear and lock it in place when removing the spring. At the front it is impossible to do that with the setup you are trying to use, due to geometry, space and functionality. Besides it does not look aesthetically appeasing. If you want to use coil overs at the front with I beam axle you need a different suspension set up. Something like this: Now, about the brake pedal/master cylinder, they are actually included on all the Revell '32s and on the AMT Phantom Vicky. However, on many of today's street rods the master cylinders are not visible on the firewall, not underneath the car, as they are hidden behind the dash. And the model A kit you are working with is a strictly hot rod version, so that may be the reason.

Temperatures here just got to almost 50 degrees and I ceased the opportunity to spray the Turquoise on. It is not terrible but I still don't like working with it. It still sprays heavy even through the airbrush and it does have that bass boat effect, because the metallic flakes are definitely not to scale. Pigmentation is very weak. It may be just this color, I don't know. What I noticed is that on my hand holding the parts I was painting, the overspray was almost entirely silver with barely any color to it. Anyway, all the parts I needed are painted now and curing. This is the other thing; with Tamiya color, automotive paint or nailpolish, heck- even the old Boyd colors, dry time is almost instantaneous and they could be clear coated (2k clear) within the hour. This thing dries like an enamel almost and I will have to wait 'till tomorrow at least, which slows me down tremendously.

I did not bother with Revell. This morning I threw the warped frame in the '29 roadster box from which I sourced the good frame and drove to Hobby Lobby. I showed them the frame and the twisted chrome three and they exchanged the kit for a new one. We opened it and inspected it, so no issue with the replacement. Easy-peasy, 10 minute ordeal a block from home.

Looking like quite the ambitious project so far. Great work. I just can't help it and need to say that I have never seen such a front suspension setup. The coil over look great, but totally wrong on the front. Someone recently posted a model of the Li'l John Buttera's '29 Roadster, which has coil overs with an axle. Maybe you should take a look at that set up if you are absolutely set on using coils at the front.

So, back to the rear end of the kit. This is how I build the rear ends of the model As or any of the Revell '32 series kits. I first scrape off the chrome where I am not going to need it. Then I glue the ladder bars to the rear axle, using the frame as a jig. When the glue has set, I paint all the chrome I want to keep with Liquid Mask. Then I spray primer, paint and clear. When Everything is cured, I just peel the liquid mask. After primer, everything was sprayed silver as a base coat. I normally don't do this, but this model is serving on guinea pig duty. I hear a lot of people on here using silver for "sealer" and as a base coat for metallics. This never made much sense to me as if you are combining the proper paints and use a good quality product, grey primer should be sufficient. However I am going to use Testors Extreme Lacquer Turquoise, which I was told on here works really great when shot through an airbrush. So I used Tamiya TS30 Silver Leaf as a base/sealer which will be followed by the Testors Turquoise metallic. It was already late and 32 degrees in my garage (where I paint), so the Turquoise would have to wait 'till tomorrow when the temperatures can get in the 50s. Meanwile, the brakes were assembled and after a light coat of black metallic were "chromed" with Molotow pen. Well, there isn't much else I can do until the color and clear are on. So stay tuned and thanks for looking.

Well, it is not a new tooling. And it shares more than half it's parts with the 29 roadster. They were both issued about 6 years ago. The issues with the warped parts is not a tooling issue I believe. I am sure there are some people way more knowledgeable than me that could shed some light on the issue. If I had to take a wild guess, it probably has to do with the quality of the plastic used, temperature and the way they were packaged. In other words quality control. Still, these kits are a lot of fun to build and go together pretty well with many different options straight from the box. You should definitely build one.

Great start. I always wanted to build a rod with a flathead v12. By the way, that GSL XXVII is going to be in a year and a half, correct?

I forgot the last picture...LOL Primer time! I love using Tamiya grey primer. One of my favorite things about it is, that Hobby Lobby carried it. The other was that it could hold up to some pretty hot paint, like most automotive lacquers I have shot over it. Well, apparently HL no longer carries Tamiya product. Not being able to get their masking tape there is also something I'll miss. However, they now carry Mr Surfacer 1000 primer, which if I remember correctly is Gunze Sangio product. So this is what I am using for this build and putting it to the test. It dries slightly slower than the Tamiya and it is about the same color. For this particular build I am using Testors paint, so I am not going to test how well it holds up against some aggressive stuff.

Beautiful paint! It definitely suits the car.

Hi all. This is going to be the second model of the challenge I gave myself to get back into building, after taking over a year off the bench. I wanted to challenge myself to build two pretty much identical models, but to give them completely different attitudes just with paint and building style. Actually, this model is what started it. The short story is that I was surprised to see this model reissued and bought two of them. I was immediately captivated by the model on the box art, but had different ideas in my head. So instead of figuring out which of the two ways to build this hot rod, I decided to make them both. But first the back story about why I fell for the box art: Back in the summer, at the Good Guys Nationals in Nashville I met this really nice gentleman standing by his Deuce coupe, which was painted in this blue-green metallic over white interior. We struck a conversation and at some point I mentioned that for some reason his car reminds me of ice cream. He laughed and his face lit up. He then proceeded to tell me how this will be his last hot rod. He said he finds what I said funny, because he doesn't drive the car much and mainly uses it to take his grandkids for ice cream on weekends. His grandkids called it the ice cream car. So when I saw the box art, the first thing that went through my mind was "The Ice Cream Car" and that I have to build one. So here we go........ First I would like to bring up an issue with the reissues of both the '29 roadster and the '30 Coupe. The '32 frames in the '30 coupe kits are atrocious! The sink marks all over them are something else and so far all of them (I've bought 3) are twisted. This one however goes way beyond that as it came mangled out of shape beyond any chance of repair. I believe that one rail of the frame is actually shorter due to some shrinkage. I sprayed some color on it to both test the color and to show better the damage. I opened one of my extra '29 kits to get a replacement frame. For some reason the frames in the '29 kits don't need so much filling on the rails as those in the '30 kits. This frame was also slightly twisted, but still workable. What I noticed tho, was the windshield frame, which is just mangled. And it is a chrome piece. Revell needs to step it up slightly. The original releases of both kits did not have these issues. Anywhoooo.....the frame was assembled with the crossmember and the shock towers glued in place. It always bugged me when I see these left chrome. Especially on the '32 kits. Next the rear radius rods were prepped by scraping the chrome off the plates that get glued (welded in 1:1) to the rear end. Unlike on my "Attitude A", these are going to be chrome, so the chrome has to be masked off for painting. But more on that next time. for now the frame was used as a jig and rear rods/ladder bars were glued to the rear end prior to painting. Stay tuned and thanks for looking.

Thanks guys. I appreciate all the nice comments.

Thank you. I appreciate it. My comment was directed more towards the reply to your compliment.

Thank you all for the comments, guys. Greatly appreciated. There is no need to get into semantics, as I don't believe that it really matters who was the first to glue two pieces together. Having said this, my previous box stock '30 was built from the original release of the kit and hit show circuits five years ago and also had its body filled. It was one of the first build models of the kit to hit the shows. None of this really matter of course and I am pretty sure that a whole bunch of modelers have taken the same approach. Now what does bother me, is when someone copies your work (which I am also fine with) but then goes on to toot their horn how they are first ones to do something and how original they are.

Bob, Glen, Josh and Kurt, thank you guys for the kind words. This was a cool quick build that I truly enjoyed. This particular kit came with the six carbs. Well the Buick nailhead motor comes with the choice of six carbs or the injection stacks. So it depends on which edition of the kits you are working with. In the first edition, the '29 roadsters came with the Buick motor and the '30 coupes came with the SBC, which in turn can be build with three carbs or blown. In the second edition of the kits, the engines were swapped and the coupes got the Nailhead, while the roadsters received the SBC.

"A is for Attitude". The model is 100% box stock. The idea was to create a model A with a "bad boy attitude". It will be followed by a "Grandpa take us for ice cream" one. The challenge I presented myself was to build two exact same models with pretty much the same parts (both box stock) but projecting two completely different vibes. https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/800x600q90/922/qawaQX.jpg I hope you like it and thanks for looking P.S. I'm just adding the WIP link

I just discovered that I had a WIP topic on this model, which covers some of the progress and some ideas that were dismissed. Here it is:

Hi everyone. This is a model I finished about four years ago, but never took the time to photograph and post. Well, the other day I had some time and finally took some pictures. The model is very obviously based on Revell's Paddy Wagon, but there is a lot more than meets the eye. The body had its side windows filled in and the frame received quite a bit of work. The frame and axles received a major rework to make them more realistic, with numerous resin plastic and photo etched bolts and nuts. The front received three piece photo etched brake discs from Detail Master, with scratch built calipers that were plumbed with braided wire and machined fittings. The wheels use the original kit's centers, but were reworked at the front to fit the Rat Roaster tires. Each wheel received a machined air valve. The engine and transmission from the Rat Roaster were installed which was easier said than done and necessitated a completely scratch built radiator. It may look like the original one, but it is far from it. Plenty of photo etch on both its sides, covered by brass grille. Everything is wired and plumbed with plenty of photo etch, braided lines and machined parts. The valve covers and air filters are resin with photo etch from MCG that have been painted gold to match the rest of the engine. To say that making the photo etch throttle linkage was a pain, would be an understatement. The exhaust was dechromed and then sprayed with various Alclad colors. The exterior was painted brown and all the graphics were masked off and painted on. No decals here. Then the details were added, like the handles from a Revell '32 Ford and the billet aluminum gas cap. The two short rear panels were sprayed a little rougher and not sanded, to look somewhat beat up and danged up. The interior was pretty much 99% scratch built. The dash was cleaned up and received a digital gauge cluster. The shifter was made from jewelry wire and styrene. The pedals are photo etched parts from I'm not sure who. The seat is a highly modified portion of the original kit's seat. The whole floor is brass photo etched diamond plate by some railroad model company that I don't remember. The partition between the cab and the cargo area is scratch built from sheet styrene and rods. The cargo walls are stained and lacquered balsa wood with strips styrene and rivets made for military models, covered with BMF. The shelf is all scratch built from sheet styrene and then sprayed with Alclad. The ceiling is made from wood stir sticks. the fuel cell is from the Phantom Vicky and so is the battery box. All the steps were rebuilt with railroad photo etched brass mesh. The chain at the rear is also railroad modeling item. The dolly came from one of the recently reissued AMT Coca Cola kits. The delivery driver girl was a female mechanic holding a wrench, which I reworked and repainted. Tail lights were from the parts box. This model was a true labor of love and I poured a lot of effort in it. I absolutely love the end result and it is one of my favorite creations. However, it has been a total failure at model shows, as it has never won anything. I really don't understand why, but honestly I don't care much. It brings smiles to most people who see it and it is definitely a conversation piece, which to me personally is more important than a trophy. I hope you like it and thanks for looking.

Thanks guys. I actually picked a spray can of a paint I would like to try on the interior and I am working on it tonight. Those Scalemotorsport decals just didn’t work out for me.

Thank you. I need to dig up another half a dozen projects I had started long time ago, but somehow I keep starting new ones. LOL By the way, the chassis of the Eliminator is melding 3 chassis together, as the front suspension and cross member are from the Phantom Vicky.

I just dug up this project, tucked in a box, that I had completely forgotten about. by the way, what’s the deal with the Foose Caddy? That kit was in every Hobby Lobby and all of a sudden, POOFF and it’s nowhere to be found?

Yeaahhhhh……OK…… you may have a point…..LOL

Very cool. I love the front suspension setup. You don’t see that very often.

Very cool project. I always wanted to build one of these, since it is a miracle I didn't die in one, on prom night in the woods of Indian Head, Maryland. I was not the one driving, but was on the back seat with my girl, which made the experience even more....uuuggghhh....memorable!

This is definitely an exceptional build, but I don't understand the Lincoln connection. This is like no Lincoln I have ever seen.