Ace-Garageguy

As always, I thank everyone for your continued interest in this thing. It does help me to keep it going and not go spinning off on some other project. And yes Tom, I got much the same impression of Bonneville as you did. Very unearthly, and distance has no visual reference like we're used to.

Well, if both companies could measure accurately, and divide by 25 accurately, by whatever means and no matter how many years apart, the two SHOULD fit well. Scale is scale, and apparently both companies did their work quite well...happily for us. The fastback conversion I did a few years back fit quite well, also.

If you ever do, be sure to show us your results. My method avoids having to add styrene to the door tops to get them to line up, and avoids what looks like difficult filling very close to details at the bottom of the rear glass. My method also puts all the filling in the body crease where it's relatively easy (for me, anyway), and keeps the windshield frame in one piece, which should make it easier to get the windshield to fit. Your opinion may vary.

Yeah, well...there's this thing called "excessive charge heating" that happens when you supercharge your supercharger with no intercooling or aftercooling or something like water or methanol injection, and instead of more power, all you get is pre-ignition, destructive detonation and holes blown in piston crowns. Cool, huh?

And then there's the baby Bianchina microcar, built on a Fiat 500 platform by a later iteration of the Bianchi company, Autobianchi...

OK...I DID find an online GM '49-'66 interchange manual (posted by the Pontiac Club of Phoenix) and the part numbers for the '50 Olds coupe decklid (the Revell kit) and the hardtop / convertible decklids on the real cars are different. The '50 Olds hardtop / convertible decklid part number is the same as the '50 Pontiac hardtop / convertible decklid. The part number is also different for the Chevy Bel Air (hardtop and convertible), but this could easily be due to different holes in it for trim, different latch attachment, etc. What this means is that the decklid on the Chevy BelAir I used (AMT kit) for the above swap could very easily be correct (or close to it) as the Olds coupe decklid (Revell kit) IS DIFFERENT from the Olds hardtop / convertible in real life. The '50 Olds hardtop and the '50 Chevy Bel Air hardtop decklids look pretty similar to me...though the Olds deck looks like it could be a little fatter, more vertical at the rear, this could also be due to camera angle, as the Chebby is shot from a lower position relative to the car. This is, of course, the kind of thing kit designers are up against when they have only photographs to work from, and no real car for reference.

How about an anonymous "yuck" button?

Yes, the models ARE different. However, in the real world (and according to the classic Olds forum) some of the decklids interchange. So, both the AMT Chevy and the Revell Olds can't be right. It's up to the builder to decide if staying with the Revell deck style is worth the hassle, and to research whether the real-car post-style decklid is even the same as the hardtop. From the Classic Oldsmobile forum... '49-'52 Chev, '49-'52 A body Pontiac, and '49-'51 A body Olds (76 and 88) will interchange to the same body style. 2 and 4 door fast back lids may, or may not, interchange. 2 and 4 door sedan may, or may not, interchange with Holiday (Bel Air and Catalina) and Convertible lids. Coupes (not to be confused with 2 Door Sedans) are all by themselves Zo...my guess is that the hardtop GM decklids are the same across the board (Chevy, A-body Olds and Pontiacs). I don't have an old Hollander interchange manual to verify this, however. Do you?

And now for another way... Cut the Chebby like zo... Cut the Olds to match and drop in the donor roof and tail. You have to match the angles of the donor piece to the tops of the rear of the Olds doors... Line up the bottom of the beltline chrome of both parts (you will lightly file the top of the AMT donor chrome to match the top of the Olds chrome) and make sure the line of the windows is straight... Do it right, and you have very little fill work to do, and what there is is in the body crease...to me the easiest place to do it and get clean results. You WILL have to mildly reshape the leading edge of the roof panel and the corners of the windshield frame. Simple, and if you're careful, the '50 Olds windshield should still fit.

Have the engines back on the bench, as I've now got all the injector stacks and Hilborn bodies in one place (there's one more set of injectors in an unopened Thames kit).

Hokay, she's still moving, albeit slowly. After making up some front engine mounts, I shot the frame in SEM self-etching black primer, and then started filling the ugliness left behind from its gluebomb days. Sanded, re-shot with SEM. Much better, but still have a way to go. The SEM really shows up flaws, and also takes the Bondo-brand filler nicely with no adhesion problems. This shot also shows the very nice steel Ford wheels kindly sent to me by Joker. Mounted on old old AMT ribbed tires, they have the right look and diameter for the front. Not bad, but not done. A little more careful fitting, filling the corner and matching the curves of the bottom of the bellypan pieces. Now just have to copy it for the other side. Opened up the tonneau more for the base of the windscreen. Have to get Lefty to sit in her one more time to make sure everything is right.

Frankly, I was a huge fan of the Revell kits of that period (especially the Challenger and Showboat kits, and the truly great parts-packs). The detail was simply outstanding, especially for the time, and I always attributed the difficulty of getting everything to fit properly as a function of my own less-developed skills, and NOT as deficiencies in the kits themselves. The complexity of the Revell engines of the time, that went together more like REAL engines (rather than simple blobular halves), and the inclusion of tooling of some internal parts, was in a very large way responsible for my developing an understanding of how engines actually worked, and served to start me on my ultimate career path. I've recently been building a Challenger, and beginning restorations of some gluebomb '56 Ford truck and Chevy kits, and I find that the kits build beautifully if you have the patience and skills to make them work. No, they're not easy shake-the-box projects by any means, but to damm the kits as "finicky" misses the whole point of offering opening panels and a very high level of detail in general. The woody with all its opening panels (and all of its derivatives) is to my mind the best model A Ford ever offered, and I have amassed many of the things because the parts are just SO GOOD. Revell's current '50 Olds and '56 Ford kits are, to me, a return to what I think of as Revell's golden-age, and now that we know how good their kits can be with current technology, it's difficult to excuse major scaling and proportion errors.

Very clean. Love to "low bucks" local sponsorship concept too.

One source for a somewhat similar set is in the old AMT '49 Mercury.

No. Ferrari sued several manufacturers of Daytona look-alikes and essentially shut them down. The producers of the show agreed to destroy the replicas to avoid legal issues, and were offered two real Ferraris for season 3 onward. The Ferraris supplied to Miami Vice were Testarossa cars, not Daytonas. There also was a fake TR stunt car built on an old Pantera chassis.

Here we go again. Revell HAS made some beautiful stuff recently. But if you want to excuse poorly-measured work, excuse your own. Don't try to make "most modelers don't know any better anyway" excuses for professional tooling designers. People in the industry get paid enough to get major dimensions on model cars scale-correct. Expecting major dimensions to be correct IS NOT RIVET COUNTING.

Usually available NOS or used on ebay as that particular kit for between $10-$30, and in the old AMT 8158 "Blueprinter" parts pack. It also comes in the AllisonThunderland funny car kit, this older-issue AMT parts-pack, and the more recent multi-engine pack below (TDR also offers a 1/8 scale 3D printed version for under $300, if you want to go big):

More like a hot-rod wood chipper. Great way to get rid of the kids, and make concealment of the little corpses easier. Kiddie mulch.

In June.

All ya gots ta do is read the label. Some rubbing alcohol "products" have additives...kinda like pasteurized-process-cheese-food "American Cheese" isn't really cheese, you know?

Ah yes, like so many things in life, it just kinda depends on your perspective at any given moment... I had a girlfriend whose female roommate put up a huge, sealed-in-plastic poster of a shirtless Ponch in the shower. Talk about uncomfortable... I like Revell. Always have. I like pie too.

Depending on what kind of soap you use, it MAY leave a residue. You won't know until it fisheyes all over, and you have to strip it again. I started using 70% isopropyl as a final-cleaner on real $10,000+ car and aircraft paint jobs. We can't waste time and money stripping them if we go oopsey woopsey.

I ALWAYS scrub stripped models with Comet and plenty of hot water, with a toothbrush. Then, I ALWAYS thoroughly clean the model again with 70% isopropyl alcohol (available at the drug or grocery store, cheap). If I do these two steps, i NEVER have any problems.

You've no doubt noticed that not all wheels have exactly the same outside diameter. Depending on exactly what you've got, you'll have to remove material from the outside diameter of the wheel you want to use. I find the neatest results are achieved by chucking the wheel in a drill motor or variable-speed Dremel, and using it as a lathe to turn excess material off the wheel. It's important to keep whatever you use to sand the wheel rim exactly perpendicular to the wheel. A pair of digital-readout calipers makes the work quick and accurate.