Ace-Garageguy

A couple more points... 1) The black-and-white photo on the left of the 4th post from the top shows a manual floor-shifted transaxle, THE transaxle that came out of the brand new '63 Tempest that was rebuilt as Mickey Thompson's famous A/FX car. 2) The color shot next to it shows an automatic transaxle from the same vehicle line. Note the completely exposed torque-converter on the left end. That was exposed, at the rear of the unit as-installed. Seeing one of these things running on a lift, and the famous "rope" driveshaft, gave me perhaps my first "WTF were they thinking??" moment in the car biz. Keep your hands away from the crazy thing. 3) The manual and auto boxes used different crossmembers, IIRC. Seems the wagons were different too. 4) Nobody in the hot-rod community ever understood why GM chose to build two very similar but almost totally different transaxles for two contemporary cars, as a little more homework could have made one unit that would have worked equally well in both. All I can offer is that GM divisions operated with more autonomy in those days. Engineering departments from different divisions definitely influenced each other, but apparently, wringing every last nickel out of every product by cross-platform component sharing wasn't as prevalent as it later became. 5) Image-search "Tempest transaxle". Lotsa pix of the things installed, assembled in their suspension carriers, and sitting on the shop floor nekkid.

And just for grins, and to showcase the point that "you can put anything in anything if you want to bad enough"...here's a Corvair with a Jaguar V-12 in front, driving through a modified Tempest gearbox. One has to ask "why?" http://corvaircorsa.com/V-12-01.html

That, and some folks just used useless glue. I've seen "rebuilders" that were originally assembled with Elmer's, contact cement, and the notorious "non toxic" garbage.

AND...The Road Agent, at least as modeled by Revell, uses an auto-box and does NOT use the transaxle inverted. The automatic gearbox pan is shown in the conventional position, which it would absolutely positively HAVE TO BE. So...if the real Road Agent used an automatic gearbox, just about the only way the rig could work with the engine forward of the gearbox is with a reverse-rotation cam. Again, these were fairly common and are still available. Compare the rear suspension though, and you'll see the visual similarity to the Tempest assembly...

To the best of my recollection (from actually working on the cars) the Corvair ring gear can not be "installed on the opposite side of the pinion". That trick is common for reverse-rotation setups that use early VW gearboxes. I've done a bunch, but it doesn't work on everything because of physical limitations, like internal clearances, etc. The manual-shift transaxle CAN be turned upside-down, however. IIRC, the Kelmark kit-car (mid-engined configuration) suggested just that for the budget builder who couldn't spring for a big ZF or Hewland. There's also the possibility Roth used a relatively common reverse-rotation cam on his Corvair engine, or used the Crown Manufacturing mod that used a different mainshaft to place the engine ahead of the gearbox. In the end, the Corvair parts in the Road Agent will give a reasonable approximation of the early Tempest parts, good enough to get by anybody but real die-hard under-car guys.

I beg to differ. Though the Tempest and Corvair transaxles have some similarities, and though both the automatic versions share the 2-speed Powerglide architechiture and share a few internal parts, they are NOT the same.

One more FYI...I just dug out the Revell Road Agent. I'd forgotten that it was built mid-engined, and used a rear crossmember and suspension that are visually similar to the Tempest manual gearbox / suspension shot I posted above (the black-and-white one). So there you go.

Another FYI...Good Corvair gearboxes are in the Revell Road Agent kit and some others. The Corvair gearbox is "related" to the Tempest unit, though they're very different. To see what the gearbox looked like set up for mid-engine use, google Crown Manufacturing Corvair, or Corv-8, or similar. (Crown made the engine adapter and the internal parts that made the swap practical)

And just FYI...The Corvair manual transaxle could be configured with a different mainshaft. This was done when building mid-engined Corvairs with V8s. By fabricating a torque-tube arrangement, and mating it to a bellhousing, a front-engined, rear-transaxle car COULD have been built in the early '60s as well. Both Porsche and VW gearboxes from the period could be used in mid-engined cars as well, turned around (with the ring-gear swapped side-to-side), and sometimes upside-down. Again, a torque-tube, driveshaft and conventional bellhousing setup COULD have been built in the period.

Well that sucks. She was some kinda unusual woman. At least she went out doing what she loved most, with a passion for life.

Really nothing much else of that era. It's a big, ugly lump, and not visually similar to anything else. BUT... Carroll Shelby used a ZF transaxle in the rear of his front-engined Series I. The gearbox itself had been around since the early '60s, and is available configured for what you want in the Revell Shelby Series I kit. It COULD have been set up like that in '63.

Looks like nice work, Dennis. No surprise there.

Several cars over the decades have had similar setups, though the Tempest kits I've seen have the typical blobular chassis. Cheap sources for a similar setup are Plymouth Prowler and Corvette C5 and C6 kits. There are more, but those two are probably the cheapest. Revell's Sting Ray III is another one. Typically, any of these kits can be had for well under $10 plus shipping. A lot depends on exactly what you want to represent. More info, please.

As I'm becoming increasingly tired of being a fat-old-guy, and as there's really nothing I can do about the "old" part, I've been working pretty hard on the "fat" part. Lotsa aerobic exercise, as much as I have time for, and it's beginning to show real results. AND...modifying my evening meal to be only fresh fruit or vegetables, as much as I want (including a reasonable amount of dressing on the veg...and not the nasty "lite" stuff, but real blue cheese, etc.), and a little cottage cheese to satisfy the desire for fat and protein, has started returning benefits too. A whole pint of fresh blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, or grapes will really fill you up and have very few calories or sugar, in spite of some of the common misconceptions going around. A big juicy tomato and some dressing's great too. I've already gone from my 36" jeans being tight at the waist to needing a belt with 34-inchers to hold 'em up.

Absolutely beautiful, very inspiring.

"Styrene" is a blanket term for a material with an almost endless range of possible characteristics. It's a complex subject, considering it's such a ubiquitous material, and somebody could have a PhD in "plastics engineering" and still not know everything there is to know about "styrene". Toughness, hardness, impact resistance, solvent resistance, Tg (glass transition temperature, or the temperature at which the material becomes permanently deformed), and a variety of other factors can be influenced by exact composition of the base "resin", as well as a fair number of additives that can tailor it for specific applications. Earlier Johan kits, circa '61 ( I have several, and have tested various solvent-type and other adhesives on them) used a particularly solvent-resistant grade of "high impact styrene", a material that was developed to counter "pure" polystyrene's tendency to shatter, leaving very sharp edges (NOT what you want on a kid's toys). It behaves rather like ABS (a modified "styrene), being harder to work, tougher, and harder to "glue" than other styrene grades. And as Plowboy mentions, it can be brittle. On the flip side, we have the very soft, poorly-solvent resistant gray goo many AMT reissue kits were being pumped out with a while ago, and a somewhat more solvent-resistant and harder grade recently...though generally still nowhere near as solvent-resistant as Johan's older stuff...and an endless array of in-betweens (which is why I always recommend people TEST THE PAINT MATERIALS YOU WANT TO USE ON HIDDEN AREAS OF THE MODEL YOU WANT TO USE IT ON FIRST). While the Johan version is a little more challenging to work with, the upside is that its high solvent-resistance makes it almost impervious to the hottest automotive-grade rattlecan primers...with no surface crazing whatsoever when shot wet to flow it out. Again, on the flip side, I have recent Revell kits (the '30 Ford coupe was the worst offender) that practically shriveled up when shot wet with Duplicolor "sanding" primer. Surface crazing was so bad, the models were only suitable for heavily rusted, weathered builds...not what I was going for. Revell's old 1/8 scale '32 Fords, molded in black, are somewhere in between. Revell's last-reissue chrome engine parts-packs, after being stripped to reveal the whitish translucent base plastic, are very resistant to hot primers, yet still glue easily with solvent glues. Get the picture? The stuff is all over the board. There's been endless argument about whether this is a real phenomenon or not, but anyone who works with a wide variety of kits, and who's really paying attention (and demanding high-quality results from their work) will be fully aware of it.

Yup. Across the board, much of business "management" today seems to be primarily concerned with engineering out every last penny of "unnecessary" cost, and if quality suffers, who cares? It's easy to blame the "offshore" suppliers of the krapp that's marketed here today, but a fair share of the blame HAS to go towards the quality-control folks on THIS side of the pond. If you accept second-rate garbage, you'll get nothing but second-rate garbage. I've been seeing this trend towards sub-standard materials and specs that aren't adhered to in offshore-made tools and real-car parts for decades. SOME US companies are beginning to realize that if they sell the cheapest trash they can get the highest profits on, they'll eventually lose customers...and these smart ones are doing something about it. But if the market doesn't make any noise about poor quality materials, they'll just keep getting worse.

There's snippets of truth in several of these posts. As Gary says, rusty bare metal is ugly. As I and several others said, white coatings were thought to help contain energy within the exhaust system, supposedly helping with cylinder evacuation (look it up) in the '60s, and directing more energy into the turbines in turbocharged cars later, as Matt mentions. There IS actually some basis in reality for this. Light color headers will be measurably "cooler" on the surface than dark color headers. Not enough cooler to keep from cooking the skin right off your hand if you grab one, unfortunately. I still have a scar on one calf from a Cobra side-pipe. On "zoomie" headers that are only 20" long or so, it's difficult to see that any sort of coating would have a measurable effect on power. Only very accurately-instrumented dyno testing could possibly prove it either way. I CAN tell you that "wrapped" headers made from steel (not stainless) will rust out quicker on the street, for a variety of reasons. Here's the rest of the story. The earliest coatings for exhaust system parts were "stove paint", the black stuff that was used to paint pot-bellied stoves. More heat-resistant than other kinds of early paint, it still had to be frequently reapplied to stay looking pretty. Builders of air-cooled engines would often use it on cylinder heads, imagining the black would aid heat dissipation. It was actually found to hold heat in if it was put on thick...but that's a whole 'nother discussion. Another early exhaust coating was "porcelain", basically melted glass applied to exhaust manifolds. Jags used it, among others. Every once in a while, you'd see it on a competition car or custom where the builders had money to waste. Unfortunately, due to differences in expansion characteristics between cast-iron and glass, it would tend to crack off after a while. It was also brittle, and would crack if a tool hit it, or around the nuts that held the manifold to the engine. Lotsa early competition cars also ran chromed pipes to keep them looking nice and prevent rust. It's considerably more durable than porcelain. The chrome plating "colors" at the hottest points, which I think looks cool, but some people don't and spend time trying to remove it. But chrome, if not done well, will blister off too. It's also an expense for no performance increase. The high-temp paints like VHT were a cheap alternative to plating. That's pretty much it. The colors came along a little later. You can still buy the stuff. And it still tends to burn off at the hottest points... Without ANY coating, non-stainless exhaust headers will look like this pretty quick.

I recently did a photo recon on Google (re: my M/SP Corvette build) to verify my memory that white headers were on drag cars in the early to mid 1960s. Yup. They were. Why? Clean look, cheaper than chrome (which always colors, and sometimes blisters on hot parts). One theory had it that, like exhaust wrapping today, the white paint would reflect heat back into the exhaust gas (rather than allowing it to radiate out so fast), with the result being a little more energetic exhaust stream helping with cylinder evacuation. I don't know if it really works.

Nice project. I've recently been very impressed by some of the Danbury Mint die-cast vehicles. Unfortunately, the quality can be a little uneven, but overall, I think they're about the best in 1/24 scale.

Nice.

Uber cool.

Yup, there's that...AND...the manufacturers claim that starter life won't be affected, which is absolutely ridiculous. We're seeing them fail VERY early. Stands to reason that if the starter engages 10 to 50 times more frequently than it would on a normal vehicle, it would wear out sooner, right? But "reason" has fallen out of favor, now even within the engineering community. Stupid knee-jerk "environmentalism" and "safety" concerns that can be exploited by marketing morons who convince the clueless populace they're "necessary" now rule the show. In spite of the fact these newer starters typically use different brush, commutator and bearing materials to try to fend off early failure, it's still STUPID. And when the starter fails, it's MUCH more expensive than earlier designs to replace...not to mention the poor likelihood that cheaper offshore replacements will be made to 100% specification compliance (which is already a serious problem for the automotive repair industry, as anyone within it who has a brain and who's not lying will admit). Then there's the heavier drain on the battery and charging system, with more expensive batteries failing earlier, and modified system architecture to support all the additional idiocy required to keep the wipers, heat, and AC functioning with the engine OFF...as well as restart the engine 10 to 50 times more frequently. Several years ago, Mazda's Robert Davis suggested that the advantage might amount to 0.1 mpg on the EPA city cycle, an improvement that could be achieved at less cost using different technologies. ONE TENTH of a mpg over an entire driving cycle...at the cost of idiotic levels of complexity and much higher repair costs. But the manufacturers don't have to fix 'em once they're out of warranty, so they don't care. And Mary Barra STILL makes $20+ MILLION dollars a year. EDIT: Yes, there is some fuel savings for people who value their time on Earth so little that they're somehow content to sit in heavy commuter traffic, idling and creeping, or are too damm lazy to get out of their cars and walk into McD's.

After exhaustive "real world" testing, this guy prefers the Spaz Stuff... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkG5kW3u6kQ