Ace-Garageguy

I'm still watching too. As I've said before, you have a good eye for proportions and mods that flow well. Lots of original and unusual ideas here.

So far today I haven't had to talk to a single idiot.

I forgot entirely until I read it here. OMG OMG OMG !!!!!!! I BETTER PREPARE FOR DISASTER !!!! OMG OMG OMG !!!!!!

I'm building one as a chopped custom. All the remarks so far are accurate. It's definitely NOT a shake-the-box-self-assembling kit, but with skill and patience, it will make a beautiful model. It's very short on detail though, so depending on what you want from it, a lot of kitbashing may be required. I haven't measured it out, but I think the wheelbase and rear doors may be a little short. It also has hard plastic tires.

It WAS in the air for a couple days, but tonight's low is going to be back in the teens...and for several days running...which means I'll have a hard time keeping it much above 45 inside.

Nice work so far. Now...I'm not being critical, only trying to be helpful. If you're going for an accurate period look, you need to bring the nose down. The real gas class cars usually had almost level frame rails. Extreme nose-up wasn't permitted. Yes, the nose does come up when the car launches, but at rest, it should sit level. I know a lot of guys build "nostalgia" cars this way today for some odd reason (probably because everyone else does and they never looked at photos of the real cars) but it's not period-correct if you're building a gasser as it would have looked in the '50s or '60s. If you're building a "nostalgia" car of today that sits way nose high, you're dead on the money.

Surely one of the best looking of the big old classics. If she had laced wire wheels, thanks to your always masterful use of colors and textures, it would be difficult to tell if these photos were of the real car.

You do it much like you'd do it on a real vehicle, by adjusting the relationships between parts. Because the axle normally mounts under the front springs, you can lower the truck the height of the spring (where it attaches to the axle) by mounting the axle on top of the springs, as suggested. You can also cut down the length of the round projections that the rear of the front springs mount to on the chassis. I have the model in front of me, and that will give you as much lowering (or a bit more) as putting the axle on top of the springs. You can lower the truck just a little this way, or as much as 1/8 inch. This would be the same as relocating the spring hangers on a real truck. If you find the axle hits the frame after lowering, it's perfectly acceptable to file small notches in the frame for clearance. This is called "C-notching" on real vehicles, and is / was often done to facilitate lowering. It's acceptable on a real vehicle if the frame is correctly reinforced in the notched area. You see axle 48 is supposed to be glued to the bottom of the springs 46 and 47. To lower the vehicle, simply glue the axle to the top of the springs in exactly the same location. Do NOT turn the axle over, but DO file off the mounting pins from the axle. That will give about 3/32" of drop. For more, file material off of the round pins that the rear of the springs attach to (on the chassis).

Ahhh...now THAT is a helpful bit of info. Thanks.

When I got back into the hobby in around 2005, I bought a bunch of kits I never had as a kid. Rather a lot of them had the old-style blobular AMT everything-molded-in-one-piece chassis. I put most of them on the shelf until I could decide if I wanted to go to all the effort of building realistic underpinnings. Same thing happened when the gorgeous box-art suckered me into buying the AMT '62 Corvette. I knew it wasn't very good before I bought it, though.

Mentioned in post #2: "There is a fairly good AMT version in the old Willys / '32 sedan double kit, but they're getting rare and pricey." There's also a decent-looking (when built and detailed) nailhead in the old Monogram Orange Hauler kit. Though it's supposed to be 1/24, it measures in at roughly the same size as the other good 1/25 ones mentioned here. Interesting thing about it is that it's backed up with a Dynaflow automatic.

Absolutely. The tech it takes and the knowledge to modify it is staggering compared to what it took to put a carb, cam, manifold and headers on an old Mustang. Even in my own work building mostly "traditional" cars, a lot of the clients want EFI and computer-controlled automatic gearboxes.

The most recent issues (front-blown SBC, 427 Ford, a mis-labeled 365 Caddy and a Pontiac) are all over ebay, often amazingly cheap ($5) if you buy in multiples. I've paid between $25 and $50 for the Buick and Hemi original issues.

The world has changed, and the whole instant gratification thing is only a symptom. The "can do", self reliant attitude left in the wake of WW2 had a lot to do (and the memories of widespread rationing, constant low-grade fear, no new cars for the duration, etc.) I believe, with the way things were then. Life in this country in general has now become pretty easy to get by in, and developing some kind of manual or technical skill just isn't seen as necessary, or cool, these days. You can buy a lot of reliable performance car on the second-hand market easy-payment-plan, so there's no real incentive to build a hot-rod ANYTHING, unless you just want to do something different...which is as unusual now as ever. It takes considerably more knowledge to performance-tune a recent vehicle than it took to build a hot-rod when I was young, and getting dirty doing it has lost its appeal to a generation that gets a pretty decent used car from Dad (and they're not even expected to mow the lawn in return). But also, when I was young, I firmly believe more people had hobbies. And that's why hobby shops were available to us as kids...not for us, but for our parents. Adults had model train layouts in my neighborhood, and some guys built hi-fi systems and dabbled with electronics. Others had woodworking shops where they made great looking furniture. My own father built models, kites, and a full-scale Snipe sailboat from plans. A lot of models came as a block of wood, and a picture of what the finished model was supposed to look like, but many "modelers" today cry and complain if the parts don't all but self-assemble. There are STILL people who build models from scratch, and who engage in the other hobbies too, but the percentage is certainly down. Just compare a vintage issue of Popular Mechanics, with a wide range of plans and projects to do yourself, with anything on the market today. It's very true that parental influence is usually necessary to expose youngsters to anything their peers don't care about, and as people are generally herd animals who go along to get along, doing something different from your peers, no matter at WHAT age, is just too radical for many folks.

For as long as these things have been around, the tooling still seems to be in excellent condition. The most recent runs I have are every bit as crisp as the first ones, with no flash usually. Some of the more recent runs do seem to have deeper sink-marks, as though the plastic shot was cut off just a fraction of a second too soon. Other than that, they look great. One rarely sees a chrome engine in reality, so doing a run of the tools that are left (I've never seen the Buick or the Hemi re-released, or the non-Potvin-blown SBC) in an opaque plastic (the originals are translucent when stripped) would get money out of my pocket. I hope the recent re-runs of the excellent AMT engine trees will be successful enough to prompt Revell into doing a non-chrome run of engine kits.

Reading that pleased me.

Excellent.

@taaron76: Beautiful work on the '57. Those are the kind of results that keep inspiring me to give it a shot.

The Revell and the AMT Riv engines are pretty close to the same size. I just compared them, but not the klugey '40 ford version. The bore-spacing of all the nailheads was the same (just like you get 265 Chevys and 283 and 302 and 327 and 350 & 400 Chevys in a very similar looking basic engine) but the deck height was higher on the bigger ones with longer strokes. Buick designed the engine initially to accommodate increases in displacement, but to still be manufactured using the same machine tooling.

Don't feel bad JB...I can'r remember anything that's actually important.

I'm afraid I won't be able to accurately follow the chrome lines molded in to the body. I've seen lotsa wavy BMF, and frankly, I think silver paint (or nothing) looks better than bad BMF. I'm also concerned about ruining a perfect paint job by getting wavy lines, and then peeling the stuff off, only to have it lift the paint where the knife blade scored it. And, if there's the slightest orange-peel under the paint, or if the foil goes down lumpy or wrinkled, or pieced together, I think it looks horrible too. So many ways to foul it up. Yeah, I'm intimidated. I'm about to man-up and try it on a primered AMT '57 Ford gasser. Primered so if I totally bugger it, it's an easy fix. '57 Ford because it looks like a kinda tough one, so if I can do a decent job, I'll feel like I actually accomplished something.

The Revell parts-pack nailhead is found in the Tommy Ivo "Showboat" (not the Challenger) though the Showboat version has different oil pans to accommodate the angled mountings, and different bellhousings. Both versions only come with slightly underscale Hilborn-style injection setups. There's another blown version of Revell's nailhead in the Tony Nancy double dragster kit. Thompson's Challenger ran 4 Pontiac engines...also available in a parts-pack version. Again, the Challenger version is different, having a full-length deep sump oil pan, and a chain-drive for the blower, plus different fuel and ignition parts. The only other decent nailhead (the '40 Ford version bites) is in the AMT '66 Buick Rivera. It features 2X4bbl carbs, and factory front cover, accessories, etc. There is a fairly good AMT version in the old Willys / '32 sedan double kit, but they're getting rare and pricey. The Revell and AMT '66 Riv nailheads are pretty close dimensionally. Yes, the Revell and AMT engines represent the cast-iron GEN1 OHV engines of similar architecture built from '53-'66 (264-322-364-401-425) and NOT the later 215 alloy engines or their derivatives. The little 215 Buick/Olds went on to become the basis of the Repco SOHC F1 engines in the series winning Brabham F1 cars of '66-67.

Just from being car crazy since I can remember, and building, racing, rodding and restoring them for over 50 years. I have enough ideas and build notes to easily last me another 50 years. Sometimes the weirdest things pop into my mind, like today while driving, I noticed the butt of a particular Asian high-end import would look really cool as a '32 roadster-esque lowboy.