Tom Geiger

that was a running joke way back that Nascar guys didn't realize they were building the same kit over and over! I do know a guy who had one chassis and spent his time painting and decaling bodies which he'd place on that one chassis for display and pictures.

I think what he said was that he recently moved and will be setting up his model bench shortly.

This looks like the start of a very cool project. I remember reading an article about the Caravan, maybe it was in National Geographic of the era? I'll be watching.

And that's why it drives me nuts when somebody comes on the board and does the comparison that Model Cars Magazine should be $10 a year because they get another magazine for that price. The big magazines have huge circulations and yes, is pretty much paid for by the advertising. And they'll beg you to take that magazine for near free so that they can command the advertising prices by circulation. My wife subscribed to Oprah Magazine for a year. Then she didn't renew. She got a bunch of renewal pleas and they never stopped sending issues! The latest piece she got from them offered her the magazine for $5 a year. We just laughed. She didn't want the magazine.

Murphy

With the Dodge Omni's still growing on trees, try to find one of these, scarce but cheap when found!

Add the Volare kit to that list. I was buying Pacers for $5 each just to steal the Suburbanite snow tires out of them for my truck builds. At one show a dealer saw me looking at his $5 Pacer and told me I could have all five that he had for $15. I took it. As I walked away a dealer friend of mine was making fun of me carrying all those Pacers. Fast forward a year or so and he had someone from the Pacer club contact him for kits, now he was calling me trying to buy them from me. No Pacers for you! In that same era, my club did our first Brown Bag Model Contest. The deal was that you'd get a cheap kit sealed in a brown bag and you had to build it in some creative way. I was tasked with going to a swap meet to get the kits. I wasn't allowed to spend more than $5 a kit. I went dealer to dealer and managed to buy up the 25 or so kits I needed, some were marked higher but once they heard why I was buying them they became $5 kits. This was the era when people were 'investing' in models. People saw me walking around with a stack of those same kits and were questioning me if I was onto something. Did I have an inside tip that these would skyrocket soon? LOL The contest turned out pretty cool. I built the Cavalier. Friends built a Fiero, Dodge Omni, Dodge Daytona, Ford EXP, Pinto Wagon and a few others. Consensus was that they were pretty decent kits to build and we all had fun building something we wouldn't have otherwise.

Sam, set up an eBay Search Agent for this kit and they'll email you daily when they have something to report. I love the Heller Citroens and see them there for $80 on up, but the ones I've bought have been in the $20-25 range due to the search agent. It shows me everyone as it comes to market, then I bid low and hope for the best.

Nice model and a super car... I guess you were pretty special if you drove one of those back in the day!

Cool build! My father was in the US military and we lived in Germany from 1969-72. Those old Airfix 1/32 cars are near and dear to me since that was what was available. I still have a few from back then, have rebought others including the old Dennis Fire Engine and the double decker bus.

Bernard, to answer a question you had, I believe a guy like Tom West is hired as the project manager for a model kit. That does put him front and center on the accuracy of the model and how close it represents the real thing. He's also involved in the design of the kit. How many parts will there be? How will they go together? Will there be an interior tub or separate sides? And then how well it goes together. There's the project budget, milestone date targets and managing the team involved, both in house and contractors. Now a days, add in the wrinkle of working with people in remote areas like China. You don't see them face to face, nor share a common language. A lot can get lost in the translation. Another interesting thing is as the tooling designers (I'm told the Chinese are brilliant at this) work from drawings, measurements and data supplied to them by people in the US. They probably have never seen that 1:1 car in person!

It's a model car, it can be anything the voices in your head tell you to build. Back when I did the '32 Ford with the VW chassis under it (representing a kit car) the judges critique was that it didn't place because it was an improbable build. What did win the class? A '39 Chevy with a Ferarri drivetrain. Somehow that was more realistic to them! I like the build. I like it anytime someone does something with a kit that we haven't seen done before!

Aha, I figured it out. I'll buy some PEZ and paint them Testors gold!

Very cool build with a Euro flair we don't see here in the USA! I like it very much, especially your split window conversion on the Beetle.

I see, therefore I buy! If I see something I think is cool, and the price is right, I add it to the hoard. Now the ironic part. For all the expensive resin and neat old kits I own, I tend to build my projects from kits built cheap, new releases and old buildups and junk.... something funny going on around here! My last few builds -- 65 Chevy Pickup - started as a new release, only took me 15 years to finish 61 Falcon Ranchero custom restoration - an original built up broken in pieces, given to me by a friend 60 Valiant Lakester custom restoration - ditto. A period build body given to me by a friend New Camaro with T-Tops - new release given to me by my club for a same kit contest Dodge Van Camper - Old broken body from the bottom of my paint booth. 51 Chevy Traveler Camper - Chevy from a parts box containing about two of the kit bought for $5 at a show. Camper given to me as an old built piece by Rich Manson. 56 Ford pickup bed trailer - Old broken builtup from the bottom of my parts box Hmmm, I rest my case..

Maybe heating up a pin or small nail would give you that bent in look of a bullet hole.

But would the plastic Caddy be able to tow the heavy metal Cord? Looking at the size difference between the two, and seeing some of these classics in person, they were indeed huge and on truck like chassis. Could these have been classified early SUVs? Certainly a Suburban size! And no wonder they saw second lives as trucks!

Anyone's guess! I'm surprised nobody has cast a correct bed for it. I'd buy one for sure! But you can always cut down the wheel base and add the step side bed from the AMT '53 Ford kit. Ford used that bed all the way through the 1970s with minor modifications.

The kit still has 1977 on the license plate area of the front bumper. Maybe the back too, I don't have one in front of me. Tires - if those plastic ones are nice (I never looked close at them before tossing them aside) maybe we can get Al Raab to make us some in rubber. Thanks for the mention of my interior. It's actually very easy to do... I used Evergreen plastic strip to make the molding. I believe it's too large, I'd use smaller next time. The window crank handle is a resin bit done by Norman Veber, Replicas and Miniatures of Maryland. Those are done so nice that I've used them on several builds. I bought 5 packs one of the times I saw him at a show just so I'd never run out. And as you mentioned the arm rest is carved from wood, either a tooth pick or a small bit of basswood. Took all of a few minutes, the hard part is making two exact duplicates. The good part about making stuff like that is since the material is just raw material, you get an infinite amount of tries, not like one shot at ruining your only kit part. And for the record, the Volare kit interior comes with a console and buckets. I cut out the console and flattened the floor to allow for a bench seat. That one is probably my third try at making one suitable. It came out of the '66 Chevelle wagon kit. I split the back and redid the pattern to sorta match the Volare rear seat. Headrests were from the parts box. Here's the interior 'busied up'. It's a messenger car so that's all the mail. The two mail trays in the back seat came from the model railroad G Scale guys and are a perfect replica of the mail trays I used to haul around in that era. In fact I still have a few in my garage! And the front seat. Note from the interior picture above I saw that the drivers seat needed some finishing so I added the edge with some model boat rigging rope I had. The mesh itself is fabric sent to me by Hollywood Jim.

Buy it all! Depends on the deal of course, sometimes a percentage off retail is still more than we're buying kits for at shows and eBay. If bought right, you may be able to get your investment back by selling extras to friends.

There's a company called Dumas that does boats in various scales, some in 1/24 that are really cool. There is a Chris Craft runabout and a few different cabin cruisers. All done in wood. Pricey at $50-100 a kit, but you get what you pay for!

Wow! That woody body looks very cool for that price.

Congrats! That's a cool job, and they're lucky to have you!

I like the build. There is that certain romance of bringing a glue bomb back from the dead. Very akin to pulling a 1:1 out of a field for restoration. Part of the fun of the hobby. And Slant Six! Go for it. I had Offy manifolds that worked with a four barrel and one for two one barrels. The two one barrels would be cool, not sure of the period. And split exhaust. There was a guy on the west coast that offered a cast iron split exhaust manifold.