Mike999

Thanks! Great to see the Petersen Museum again. This exhibit reminded me of Alan Girdler's book "The Harley-Davidson & Indian Wars." (A great read.) That Traffic Car is neat and a "great build idea." I'm already wondering about parts sources. The old 1/16 scale PYRO kit shown below might provide a useable frame, but it's a Harley. Revell did some 1/8 scale trikes. TESTORS did a 1/12 scale die-cast Indian Sport Scout. Or going the other way, down to a smaller scale, Thunder Models does a 1/35 scale Indian 741B military motorcycle from WWII; it has 2 kits in the box, so that's enough wheels to do a trike. Then we'd only have to scratch-build the body and frame...

This might make some of us feel better (or worse). The kit shown below regularly sells for over $1000, and has for many years. It's a 1/32 scale kit of the Pershing I missile with transporter truck and trailer. According to various Internet sources/rumors: the molds for these kits were designed by the Engineering and Prototype Laboratory (EPL) of Martin Marietta Aerospace in Orlando, FL. The kits were produced by Renwal, around 1973. The models were never sold to the public, only to Martin Marietta employees. A few were built by Martin Marietta and given to Generals and various DoD people. Promos, we might say. After one run, Martin Marietta destroyed the molds, so the kit will never be produced again in plastic. Years ago, Marco's Miniatures re-popped the Pershing kit in resin. Those resin copies are now almost as rare as the original plastic kit, and sell for almost as much. So if you ever see one of these at a flea market or yard sale...grab it!

No luck for me on that search yet. Haven't found a single picture online of an armed HH-43. Unless my memory is failing...which is quite possible...I saw that pic in one of my books about helicopters in Vietnam. I have several of those books and will just have to look thru them. I remember seeing that photo and thinking it would make a great addition to the HAWK/Testors kit. I did find this rare photo of an HH-43 sitting on the ground during a Vietnam rescue mission. It has the "stovepipe" exhaust extension for countering heat-seeking missiles:

HAWK was big in the 1950s and 60s, mostly in aircraft kits. I just did a quick eBay check. Those H-43 kits are always available, especially the later TESTORS re-issues. Sometimes they even go for reasonable prices. On Nov. 14, one got 10 bids but only sold for $12.50.

Many years ago, HAWK did a 1/32 scale kit of the H-43 Husky. It had counter-rotating rotor blades just like the real things. As a product of the 1950s it was simplified. But the Cobra Company fixed that with a resin upgrade set for the interior and other parts. I have both of those kits in the stash, but my H-43 is the much later TESTORS re-issue. One of these centuries, I'd like to build a Vietnam rescue version of the H-43. Some of those had a six-barreled mini-gun mounted inside.

I got the same '50 Ford too! And a Lindberg custom '37 Ford. Which is OK, that's the old Testors Boyd's Smoothster kit. It has a nice modern drivetrain and a chassis that will fit under quite a few bodies with a little tweaking. Thanks for showing the photo booth. I'm looking for one and yours is nice.

Here's a training film on flying the Buccaneer, produced by Brewster and the US Navy. Notice how many manual actions the pilot has to carry out in a dive. While trying to also release the bomb, with people shooting at you. Amazing. The thread has some good comments, including this one: "You can thank Jimmy Work, the head of Brewster, for the company's problems. He tried to turn a minor aircraft parts suppler into a major aircraft manufacturer overnight. His products were poorly designed, poorly made, and the company was poorly managed. In the end the US Navy had to take over the company after Work was sued for $10 million for financial irregularities. At one time Jimmy Work even had hired Alfred and Ignacio Miranda as the company salesmen. The fact is they were crooks and had been involved in frauds, spending time in prison for illicit arms sales to Bolivia. Either Work was a crook himself, or in way over his competency level, or both."

I can't resist books with that kind of title (and the same goes for "worst cars" books). Have quite a few written by aviation historians, like Phil Scott's "The Wrong Stuff." The writers often disagree, though they all seem to agree on a few turkeys. One of those being the Brewster SB2A Buccaneer (or Bermuda in British non-service). That was just an awful airplane. Its production was delayed because Brewster had a lot of orders for its little Buffalo fighter, which was probably a good thing. Nobody was ever foolish enough to use the Buc in actual combat. The Navy foisted some off on the Marines, who only used them as training aircraft and unit hacks, safely in Florida. The cover of Steve Ginter's book pretty much sums up the Buc's career:

Don't get a LEE or HELLER kit of the '58 Cadillac. Those are cheap copies of the ARII kits. They include motorizing parts, like a battery tray, and other changes from the original kit, all of them bad.

A "sealed kit" story... Does anybody here remember the big George Barris model car auction back in 1986 (IIRC)? I lived pretty close to his shop at the time, in North Hollywood CA, and went to it. Barris had collected case lots of kits from the model manufacturers for years, and many of those fetched big bucks at the auction. But...Barris stored all those kits in the attic of his shop. So some people bid big bucks for their Holy Grail kit. Then opened the box and found that the tires had melted thru the windshield or parts were very warped.

Somebody already posted the awesome ARII "Soryturd" 1/20 scale dune buggy. Here's another from the same series, the "Hurrycane." With "Sand Super" tires, tiny winch (?) and smiley-faces on the light covers.

You could build that as Steve McQueen's last movie car - the yellow '51 Chevy convertible he drove in "The Hunter" (1980). For its last release, Round 2 copied the photo below for the box art.

Those parts are from one of the AMT "Prestige Series" kits, released about 1987. Some Prestige Series kits, like the Mercedes Gullwing, included the display/diorama parts like yours. Other Prestige kits, like the '65 Lincoln, had a display base and pen holder. One Prestige kit was totally different, the '63 Corvette convertible. It had the old AMT Drag Strip Parts Pack with the vintage TV camera, loudspeakers, lights etc. In 1987 that Parts Pack had not been seen or reissued since the early 1960s, so it was a welcome surprise. The kit also had the Corvette hardtop that had not been seen in many years, and IIRC the stock hubcaps. There was also a "Customizing Series," as Steve mentioned. Kits in that series included some evil A+B epoxy putty and customizing tools that weren't very useful.

Yesterday's mail brought the re-issue of the MPC '74 Road Runner. Also the off-topic Freedom Models 1/35 scale Nike-Hercules missile & launcher. I posted a picture of the Nike box art in "All The Rest/What Non-Car Model Did You Get Today." EDIT: I just went to the mailbox and this arrived via eBay. An original AMT '61 Buick wagon, nicely built and painted. It came with a built but complete U-Haul trailer and the A-frame engine hoist. And most of the Chrysler display engine. The fuel cans and fire extinguisher are glued inside. I'll take the kit apart and remove those. I was thinking of stripping and re-painting it, but the paint job looks pretty good. So I might even leave that alone. Maybe just a little BMF or Molotow on the trim. (Pic from eBay listing, no time for photography today.)

Sort of false advertising here, I guess. This 1/32 scale Fujimi Mercedes "Kommandeurwagen" dates back to the early 70's, when military modelling was really taking off thanks to Tamiya and Italeri. But it's just a re-box of an older kit from Paramount, another Japanese kitmaker. Paramount advertised it as what it really was: Emperor Hirohito's 1935 Mercedes-Benz 770, complete with separate chrysanthemum badge for the grille. When the opportunists at Fujimi got the Paramount molds, they just printed a decal sheet and...voila! A German staff car! Well, most of us didn't know any better back in the '70's. It's a pretty awful kit, with interior and chassis detail sacrificed for motorizing. It still goes for big bucks on eBay, and I've seen it super-detailed with a scratch-built interior and engine bay.

This just came: Freedom Models Nike-Hercules missile in 1/35 scale. I left the picture big so everybody can enjoy that box art: incoming Russian Tu-95 "Bear" bombers, being attacked by F-102 Delta Darts and Nikes. A nightmare scenario back in the 1950s. This is the first 1/35 scale kit of the Nike-Hercules. Revell did it way back in 1957, but in 1/40 scale. A few years later Renwal did a Nike-Ajax in 1/32 scale, but that's a totally different missile. If you're truly insane, the launch pads of these kits are designed to interlock with each other. So you could buy 4 of these kits and build yourself a complete Nike-Hercules site! I hope these Cold War missile kits are a trend, and it looks like they may be. Both Dragon and AFV Club have both done kits of the HAWK missile. Dragon did it in several different configurations, including a tracked launcher. Dragon also did the Lance missile and its transporter.

Some Hallmark tree ornaments are motorcycles that look close to 1/25 scale. They also do a line of ornaments that are antique pedal cars, again close enough to 1/25 scale. I've found quite a few of these at flea markets.

Here's a link to a DB-4 build from earlier this year. The builder shows the Revell/Doyusha bodies side by side. The Revell kit is 1/25, the Doyusha 1/24 but you know that and can probably work around it. The second link goes to a history of all the DB-5 kits, posted on the FSM site in 2017 by "Gear Head 6." He writes: "In the 1990s, Doyusha in Japan tooled up a very basic curbside chassis for a vintage DB5 slot car body of unknown origin." I never knew that. http://custom-model-society.boards.net/thread/2181/aston-martin-db4 http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/4/t/150420.aspx

I stopped in the closest Ollie's today. Same as yours, only a few models and they were scattered all over the store. Nothing as good as that Transtar Eagle. Buried under some other stuff, I found a Lindberg Crown Vic with the display case and grabbed it. I need another CV like I need another elbow, but the display case and goofy "security decals" made it worth $9.99. A couple of on-topic books were lurking in the store. "Muscle & Chrome" is a hardback photo history of American cars from the '46 Ford Sportsman to the '71 Hemi Charger. Every car's engine compartment gets a photo, which is useful. "Knucklehead" is a large-format hardback history of the Harley-Davidson you-know-what engine. With many old advertisements etc.

Good catch on those wheels/tires. AFAIK, The Show Modeling is out of business. They started up in the early 90's and did an incredible number of 1/35 scale vehicle accessories. Everything from photo-etched sets to paper Zimmerit sheets and plastic parts like your wheels. TSM was a Japanese company, so their instructions were sometimes...interesting. One of the slogans printed on their packaging always cracked me up: "For Your Good Hobby Life!" Those sagged resin tires are often over-rated, IMO. Worst case, the resin caster just re-pops the original wheel/tire with a sag. And any mistakes in the original part are carried over to the resin item.

No shortage of those back in the day! A writer at the L.A. Times once mentioned those joints where "you go to the bathroom, wading ankle-deep thru what you hope is water." I went to a place like that one night to hear some musicians that usually backed up Frank Zappa. We were kind of irked at having to sit thru goopy love songs by the opening act, some guy nobody had ever heard of. His name was Richard Marx.

Thanks! That was really well done. It's making me want to re-read Christopher Hilton's book "Le Mans '55: The Crash That Changed the Face of Motor Racing." Along with the gruesome events, Hilton covers a lot of little human interest stories. e.g., a young boy and girl from the Le Mans area were both at the race, but didn't know it until years later. When they grew up and got married. There's also a good 1-hour documentary about the crash. Made by the same people who did "Grand Prix: The Killer Years."

At the Los Angeles ValleyCon show back in 2012, I picked up one of Ray's '58 Cadillac 2-doors. As Bill said, the trim is way wrong. For one problem, the old JoHan "Fleetwood" lettering is still across the rear end. That only belongs on a 4-door, not on a Coupe de Ville. I got the resin '58 in a package deal with an IMEX '58 Cad convertible. The seller told me he planned to cross-kit the two kits and make a fully detailed '58 Coupe de Ville with an engine. He gave up on that idea. The R&R kit is on the small side of 1/25 scale, the IMEX kit is 1/24. The IMEX chassis might be stuffed under the resin kit but it would be a huge project.

I have a resin '56 Chevy 4-door sedan, made to fit the newer Revell '56 kit. No idea who made it, I found it at a kit show a couple of years ago. It's well done, with the correct 4-door interior panels. I've seen the same conversion kit on eBay for outrageous prices; nearly $200 "or make offer" IIRC.

Glad to hear somebody else does that. Maybe we should start a new thread: "The One That Got Away...And Came Back." Many years ago on eBay, I sold the Matchbox 1/12 kit of the Vincent Black Shadow. This was before the Revell reissues, so the kit was hard to find. It got lots of bids and sold for a great price. I should have been happy but wasn't, since I instantly regretted selling it. Not long after, I saw the same kit on eBay with no bids and the auction nearly ended. I placed a low bid and expected to get sniped. No, I won it, for much less than the one I sold. Lesson learned - I've had that "replacement" Black Shadow kit for many years and plan to keep it. On-topic: I just picked up another AMT '23 Model T roadster, and the Revell '70 AAR Cuda.