Ace-Garageguy

I just wish I'd been smart enough to hold on to some of the cars I turned for small profits over the years...Porsche 356s, including a Speedster and a Convertible D, a first-year 911, several E-types and Alfa Romeo convertibles, 2 Jensen Interceptors...the list is heartbreaking when I realize my present poverty could have easily been otherwise. Oh well. Maybe my 2-owner Geo Metro convertible will be a home-run someday, ya' think? It's already worth 10 times more than I paid for it.

Looks like great fun... :)

Just beautiful, everything about it. I especially envy your clean, wrinkle-free foil work.

.020" styrene sheet makes great tubs for drag car rear wheel wells, if that's what you mean. Cut a strip of the material that's wider than you want your tub to end up. Draw it over an edge of something...this will make it take a curl. With a compass, draw a circle on another piece of styrene, the diameter of the wheel tub you're going to want...make sure it's bigger than your slick by enough margin to allow for suspension movement. Cut out the styrene circle. Determine how tall your tub has to be, and cut your circle accordingly. With liquid cement, CAREFULLY glue the partial circle into the edge of the curled strip you made earlier. MAKE SURE IT'S SQUARE and LET IT DRY THOROUGHLY. Trim the ends when fully dry. Attach the entire assembly to your chassis (you will have measured everything and know where everything needs to go already). CAREFULLY file and fit the outside edges of your tubs to fit snugly inside the body shell. Voila...well fitting wheel tubs.

Hot diggity !! Cool build, great work, love the suspension and tightening up on the panel fit. This is gonna be sweet.

Blunc is on the right track. 25 and 26 appear to be coolant lines running from the heads to the block. Though this particular engine has a different prop drive, those two parts you're needing referenced are clearly visible. Part 27 appears o be a crankcase breather or oil filter of some sort. This engine has a prop drive similar to the AMT kit version, but no such breather or filter is obvious. It's possible that AMT took their measurements from an offshore boat or pulling rig installation, in which case some plumbing MAY not be correct for any other application.

I always appreciate thoughtful suggestions, but I think the majority of the "droopy" look is coming from the angle the car is viewed from in that photo. The lower rear surface of the early body is actually LOWER than the later bodywork, closer to the ground, and more squared off. Compare the latest photos to the reference profile and you'll see that the tail on my model is STILL too high. As for interfering with the frame, the bondo is getting mighty thick and heavy in some areas, but that's okay, as this body is only being used to display once, and then it will be the plug for a set of molds to make a complete set of skins in .020" thick fiberglass. I'm sure some of you guys have seen he almost-scale-thickness parts I've done for other builds, and these skins will utilize the same techniques.

More from the real world... http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aabmmk.htm

And I hear you too. I specialize in mostly pre-emmission vehicles myself, and a lot of my preference for "smelly old cars" has to do with wanting to avoid the frustration I run into keeping my other computers running happily...where there can be hidden glitches within glitches within glitches. The great majority of the car-buying public view cars as disposable transportation appliances, and that's what most of them in fact are. At the same time, I have to really admire what computer aided design and engineering have done for combustion-chamber design, cam profiles and engine management in general. And I agree that NEW cars are usually virtually perfectly reliable and clean running. It's just when they get older that they become serious problems to maintain, and it's a very serious shortcoming.

Nice project, and welcome back. The '55-'57 fords are some of the best looking old American irons going, to my eyes, and the convertibles are real traffic stoppers...especially two-toned. According the the wire-gauge tables, 18 gauge is .0403" in diameter. This equals right at 1 inch in 1/25 scale, which is just about perfect for a sway bar.

Love it love it love it. You just never see these, and the car has really great, understated lines. I tracked down (in Texas) the 1:1 '63 Dynamic 88 convert I drove in high school, and it's on my 'keepers' list, to start rebuilding maybe this year. Your spin on this hardtop has me fired up again. Nice work.

Oh man, this is nice.

The world really needs more teachers like you...quick.

Not yet. The next big move is to chop the top, and I haven't decided if I want to finish the chassis mods and glue it to the body shell as a fixture (so I don't lose the nice tight door-opening lines), or to use some other method to keep everything aligned.

Thanks. And I would like to show both versions of the car together, to better illustrate the differences. I don't know if I'll have the patience to build another one though...just doing one side and putting it on a turntable could be my lazy-way-out.

Testors makes a 'brass' color in their Buffing Metalizer line that might get you kinda close (but no cigar), and there's also a wax-and-powdered-metal product called Rub-n-Buff (craft stores) that comes in several gold tints. (Gold Leaf, Grecian Gold, Antique Gold). It could possibly work for you to repair areas where you've removed flash, if you haven't stripped the entire plated part (and create the illusion of good plating). The Rub-n-Buff gives a 'sheen' rather than a plated 'shine'...this photo is indicative of what to expect...plated above, Rub-n-Buff below...

Looks great to me, especially considering the small scale and the manufacturer. Very attractive colors too, just right for the body style.

The short answer is yes, it should work fine if there's enough paint on the model. Like you say, go slow, and be very careful on edges and high spots. The rest of the answer is that all kinds of problems can crop up, like paint deciding to flake off, or rings showing up as you sand through successive layers of paint. The only way to know for sure if it will work is to try it.

I've never seen the 49er dragster box before, nor did I realize it was that inexpensive a kit. I scored several of them as gluebombs a while back, and have been using parts to build period diggers. Thanks for the info.

What happened to gas for 15 cents a gallon? :huh:

There's no question that cars today outperform their predecessors in those areas, but at what cost for this perceived improvement? Airbags and crush zones compensate for sleepy idiots texting and crashing mindlessly into one another, but my '73 seat belt-equipped vehicle never killed me when some fool tried to occupy the same space. And my '73 vehicle was as reliable as a stone axe...and when it was 10 years old was still easily and cheaply repairable without resorting to myriad computer diagnostic tools and techs who didn't know how an engine actually runs. As far as cleaner goes, yes, LA's air is better now than then...but I make my earlier point...my good friends 2001 vehicle HAS TAILPIPE EMISSIONS THAT ARE IN SPEC, but the onboard computer is fritzing. Therefore, local law WILL NOT ALLOW IT TO BE REGISTERED EVEN THOUGH IT'S CLEAN, and it will take close to $1000 to fix it. Where's the logic?

Moving along nicely, looking good.

Great project. I love seeing bodged models saved and recycled into something unusual and interesting. Very nice.

My sincere thanks for everyone's interest and comments !! For some reason, this one's really got me motivated to at least get it to the 'bare metal' stage, so between moving the house and shop (and re-habbing a badly vandalized house), I've been trying to snatch a few minutes here and there to sneak up on the correct profile. This shot shows a little of how different the plan view of the early tail is compared to the supercharged version. T And this gives a little idea of how the nose plan views differ...early car on the right. This is the profile as she sits today, with a total of .040" of styrene added to the insides of the front wheel openings, which has allowed me to lower the fender tops and make that pretty curve...(which still isn't quite right). The tail of the car will be lower still in the rear, and more squared. The underside of the later car rises much more behind the rear wheels. This front 3/4 shot begins to capture the subtle voluptuousness of the original design... ...but I think this may be my favorite angle.

As you probably know, the Mustang II front suspension geometry is extremely popular as the basis for many aftermarket hot-rod IFS setups. Usually the crossmember is fabricated from rectangular steel tube and plate, and the control arms are made up of round tubing, but the geometry remains Mustang. I recently put the FatMan Fabrications version under a 1:1 '33 Plymouth, and there's a pretty good 1/25 scale representation in the AMT Phantom Vickie kit. It has a separate crossmember the control arms locate to, and it's easily adapted to a variety of other chassis. This is the unit swapped into a '34 Ford chassis.