Ace-Garageguy

Warm enough to work outside on my old '89 GMC longbed. Might get her to at least fire today.

Real-car body-shop supply and paint stores have filters designed specifically for this. They used to give you as many as you wanted with every purchase of other materials. Home improvement stores usually have filters too, but the mesh screen is looser for house-paint than it is for car / model paint. I've also used material from discarded stockings / pantyhose (helps to have a female around) as a paint-filter medium. Nylon doesn't disintegrate in most solvents...but try it first before you commit to using it.

Raymond Loewy's '53 Studebaker design is so good, so all-of-a-piece, that the vast majority of attempts to "improve" it as customs fall short, and usually make a beautiful car into an ugly mess. This one looks pretty good to me. Not entirely my taste, but respect for the purity of the original design is what makes this one work better than most. More here... http://www.barrett-jackson.com/Archive/Event/Item/1953-STUDEBAKER-CHAMPION-CUSTOM-ROADSTER-112604

Just like you section a real one...very carefully.

The real car comparisons and Art's dimensional references are helpful. The slightly-off proportions of the model and the many minor but obvious errors are what prompted me to build the thing as a custom rather than trying to go stock. I'm also using Revellogram '59 Caddy chassis and guts. If you look at the rear comparison shots, you'll notice the real decklid tucks under a little, while the model slopes to the rear. The model's Dagmars are too big and not pointy enough. The rear window is wrong, especially the corners being sharp on the model and round on the real car. Side glass appears to be slightly too tall. And somehow, the tail of the model looks to me more Plymouth than the iconic Cadillacness the real car represents. The shape of the top of the rear wheel arches is flat on the real car, rounded on the model. Etc. I also think the model body could benefit from a minor sectioning job just over the line of the front chrome side spear. That built blue model looks awfully good though. Methinks I'm needing a few more of these for rocketship customs. And now that I've figured out how to do a durable brushed-metal finish (for the Caddy roof) I just MAY have to build one of these as a stocker.

Corvette "Rondine" built by Pininfarina around '63.

So....ummm...how do you get a straight line with the liquid mask without using masking tape to get it? My fine-line painting skills certainly are not up to that task, and probably never will be.

Trying to do 4 full customs with a lot of heavy mods in one build thread is a large undertaking, but you're making good progress. Like eating the proverbial elephant, one bite at a time gets the job done...eventually. On the other hand, if you see more custom mods in your imagination, I say go for it. A lot of of the best customs in the real world are no longer recognizable, at all, as what they started out as, but became entirely the realization of the builders vision. Enough is never enough. And your original intention and vision doesn't have to be carved in stone...even on a real car build.

Now that's funny. We have snow in the forecast for tomorrow night / Monday, and the grocery store parking lots are already filled to capacity.

The V8-60 represented in the Migdet kit is indeed a small engine, but it CAN look good in a small car. One recent AMBR winning '26 T track-nose car ran an Ardun-headed version, and it looks pretty good to me. The parts in this new Revell kit should supply a lot of goodies for building something like this.

This is mine. Not spring loaded, but came with software that allows it to be infinitely adjustable, and adaptable to just about any model car body. Easy to clean too, if you put a disposable glove on it.

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.