Ace-Garageguy

Wait...huh?... Palindrome...ain't dat da have-gun-will-travel dude?

Muy beautimus.

Rick Dore is credited as having designed most of Hetfield's builds, and working closely with the builders themselves. The '32 project was different, in that Mr. Dore had almost no input in it, other than locating an "original" body which turned out to be a nightmare. The body shell, far from being nice, arrived in black primer covering gallons of bondo. It had been hacked together from several shells apparently, and was so badly warped that getting it to sit on the chassis correctly took a lot of juggling, jacking, twisting, cutting, welding, stretching, and sweat. Josh Mills himself is responsible for all the design work on the '32, including the dead-perfect lines of the custom top, and was given pretty much of a free hand, by Hetfield, to build the car exactly as he wanted. Mills was chosen for the project because of his well-earned reputation as a master of period-correct hot-rod building, and his encyclopedic knowledge of vintage parts. An interesting point...the aluminum cylinder heads on the engine are uber-rare Osiecki parts, actually cast in Atlanta in the late 1940s.

Looks fine to me. I can't see any difference at all. Dammed rivet-counting nit-pickers.

Yeah...I've been getting it too. Seems to have cleared up, though.

Big block or small block? Kinda makes a difference.

Beautiful. Sure wish we still lived in a world where there were car colors other than resale-silver.

This one was built entirely here in Georgia by Josh Mills and his two-man crew, plus Bert Litton who performed all the upholstery work and built much of the custom top. The top has a steel under-structure designed and fabbed by Josh. The car was a contender for America's Most Beautiful Roadster in 2017. Everything not fabricated in the shop during the 3+ years of construction was either vintage (the body shell and frame are real steel gennie '32 Ford), or NOS, with nothing newer than 1949. The car is actually a very dark brown, with the frame and running gear finished in black. This period-perfect piece is a collection of subtle design elements that are largely lost on anyone who's not a 70+ year old rodder who really knows his parts, and though it's turned out to a beautifully high standard, obviously, it's a car that could be built by a real guy in a real garage behind the house. I was privileged to witness the entire process (I had nothing whatsoever to do with this '32 Ford build), as I was employed during the period to build a '33 Plymouth coupe and a '47 Caddy convertible for Josh's clients, in Josh's shop. Working alongside the talented guys who built this thing, who all had the same high standard of commitment to quality, and where cutting corners was an unknown concept, was one of the best times of my life.

Very nice. I've been wondering if I wanted one. You sold me.

Yeah, there's some of that going on, but if you shop wisely there are still plenty of smoking hot deals. There's lots of total ripoffs, too.

Keep a good attitude, try not to worry. My father had 2 uneventful bypass surgeries many years ago, and they're much better at this stuff now. Sure, it's a kinda big deal, but you'll be fine.

Very, very cool.

Thanks. Now I'm going down the internet rabbit hole, trying to get a few good pix. I could almost swear I remember a Pontiac housing in those years that did have a bolt-on rear cover, but I could very well be wrong. It's been a long, long, long time since I've had my hands on one. EDIT: I found a Rodder's Journal article identifying the Olds/Poncho housings and pumpkins. Looks like the pre-'57 housings had a round rear cover stamping, while most of the later housings had the cover with the stamped in ring-gear clearance dimple. Pumpkins on the right. Close enough for model car work.

2nd grade. No wonder kids can't make change from a dollar, or get whether 1/8 is bigger than 1/25...or not.

The Revell SWC Willys was the first in the line. The real car used a truck axle when it was modeled, and the model correctly reflects that with six-bolt wheels. It looks like Revell elected to copy the axle tooling for the Anglia and Thames, but the kits have 5-bolt wheels. Other carry-over tooling is much of the engine, and gearbox. Though there's a lot of talk around about the Anglia and Thames having Olds axles, to the best of my real-car remembry, the desirable '57 and later Olds axle does not have a removable rear cover...as the Anglia and Thames rear ends do. The '56 and earlier Pontiac/Olds axles do have removable rear covers...I believe. EDIT: Maybe not EDIT 2: SEE 2nd POST BELOW So the Anglia kits can probably be said to have pre-'57 Olds/Pontiac rear ends. EDIT: Apparently not...still checking. EDIT 2: SEE 2nd POST BELOW BUT...file the bolt heads off the rear cover on the Thames and Anglia rears, and file the right half of the rear cover flat, and they'll look close enough to a '57 and later Olds/Pontiac to pass. Like zo... For what it's worth, there's plenty of confusion in the real-car world when it comes to positively identifying these old rears, even when there are cast and stamped-in numbers as clues. EDIT: I'll happily be corrected by anybody who actually knows.

Thanks for posting enough additional info so the "they're 1/20 scale" makes sense. The rear wheels in the first Revell SWC Willys are 6-bolt 4-slots. EDIT: I just used 'em as the pattern to drill the Revell parts-pack wheels I'm using on my M/SP Corvette build, which runs a light truck rear end.

You have another interested observer here. I have a few of these acquired really cheap as parts sources, and one saved intact to actually build.

A lot is going to depend on a particular builder's technique. I don't "use heavy coats", but I learned to shoot "full, wet coats" in order to let my materials flow out and thereby eliminate much sanding required to remove orange-peel. If I shoot full wet coats with Duplicolor primer, most kit plastics of fairly recent manufacture will craze. Up until the reformulation of the PlastiKote line a couple years back, I could usually shoot full wet coats in safety.

So this guy's saying he has the magic calibrated eyeball and spidey sense that he uses to "interpret" the actual dimensions and numerical relationships, totally subjectively, into what he thinks they should be to represent vehicles realistically in scale. I call bovine exhaust on his approach. If he wants to design cars, he ought to be working as a real-car designer, not stretching and reshaping something that already exists to present it the way he thinks (completely arbitrarily) HE wants it to look. I'm sure every misshapen mess on the market has some equally arbitrary set of "artistic reasons" that it looks more like a young child's toy than a scale model. I've had industrial model makers try to pull this crapp with MY designs. I spotted what they were doing immediately, and kicked their backsides out the door. I ended up building my own models directly from the prints in several cases, and guess what? The models looked exactly as they were designed to look with no "artistic interpretation" from some doofus third party required. But hey...most people building models just don't have the artistic talent, particularly in 3D, to spot the things that are wrong with many kits. We routinely see people say "I just don't see the problem", and others saying "I don't care anyway". So it's easy for these "artistic interpretation" designers to get away with this stuff, 'cause most modelers aren't going to catch it. And those of us who really do have accurately calibrated eyeballs have to take what's made, and accept it as wrong, or waste our time correcting it.

I'm sorry, but if you stop and think the least bit critically about this, it's ridiculous. If a given car's static ride height in reality is, say, 6 inches, the ride height of the model should be 6 scale inches. Maintain the same numerical relationships, and models will look correct every time. The often repeated notion that models have to be warped and dimensions juggled by some super-secret oogy-boogy factor that can only be seen and interpreted by magic kit designers to "look right" is sheer gibberish too. Yes, I know this from personal, highly critical real-world experience. For simple proof, consider this: a small photographic representation of a real full size car looks "right" without any magic manipulation of dimensions. Why? because all the spacial and numerical relationships are maintained exactly as they are in reality. The stupid too-tall and too-wide tire issue is something else that makes no sense. Measuring and dividing isn't hard. At all. Especially if that's what you get paid for, because you're supposed to know how.

A further note: the people involved in the project at the time were very well aware that the energy input required to distill fuel-grade alcohol would tend to make it non-competitive with petroleum based fuels available at the time. The primary focus of the project was, in reality, to develop simple and cost-effective SOLAR stills, to hold down distillation energy inputs normally required from other sources. My involvement was in helping to determine how crappy a still could be and still produce something a car would run on, so I'd test low-grade alcohols and gasoline mixes. So my statement about the cost of energy in as opposed to energy out is the result of direct real-world hands-on experience, and not mindless parroting of the petrothink alluded to above. One result was a still made of plywood sheet and corrugated roof tin, with some PVC pipe, that could turn out 140 proof ethanol on the first pass, using fermented grass clippings as feedstock.

...Oshifer...honesht...ish not me thash been drinking; ish my car...

The AMT Barris Surf Woody has a twin Paxton setup for a Ford smallblock too. The Surf Woody can be found for under $20 including shipping, and is a goldmine of other kool parts as well.