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So, the web theme for NNL East this year is the AMT 63 Impala kit that was reissued last year: I did some brainstorming on what to do and was pretty much set on doing some form of drag car with the kit, until I saw this 63 online: I think it’s a hearse conversion, but it’s retained the low roofline of the stock car, and seems to be a sedan which has had the rear window moved back and the roof lengthened rather than using the more-logical (but rarer, I assume?) station wagon as a basis. Then, I fell down a rabbit hole of reading about the interesting world of ‘street freaks’... ...and a plan was born! I figured a street freak version of that hearse would be a pretty interesting build, and I liked the idea of combining some of those gasser influences into a street car. A quick mockup before I started hacking plastic... I can already tell that this build is going to involve more scratch building than I planned on, not least because the kit chassis has almost everything moulded in, but I’ll start with the fun stuff. My plan is similar to what the builder of that 1:1 seems to have done - just lengthen the roof and slide that rear window right back. Used my new Tamiya scriber, mostly, to score some lines like so... Then removed the rear deck lid from the section I’d removed: And reattached the rear window portion as far back as it would go: Those black styrene strips are to keep it aligned whilst the glue dried, and to give me something to attach a new panel to, to extend the roof: The roof panel itself is pretty flat, but those curved edges seemed like they were going to be tricky to recreate so I built up a little thickness of styrene bar in the gaps so that I can sand them smooth and shape them to match the existing shape: And that’s about where I’m at so far - I’ll get some sanding and shaping done on the body tomorrow when the glue’s set up, and then we can start figuring out how tricky it’s going to be to make this thing into a jacked up pseudo-Gasser! More soon, soon as I’ve done more!