Wild Custom '49 Merc...Runner Up National Champion

[tim boyd]

1976 MPC Modeling Championship - 2nd Nationwide Winner

This is the car that won 2nd Nationwide in the 1976 MPC National Model Car Customizing Contest.

The yearly contest series ran from 1969 through 1979 and took place in about 20 of the largest ISCA hot rod shows around the country each year. Winning "Best of Show" at one of those regional contests qualified you for the annual National Championship, conducted at the ISCA Omaha (Nebraska) show back then.

This model won "Best of Show" at the 1976 Cincinnati ISCA show, going on to win 2nd Nationwide in the finals. At the time you were allowed to improve or change your "Best of Show" winner for the National Championship, so I built a 2nd body, same as the first one other than adding opening doors and taking extra precautions to avoid sinking putty, and placed it atop the chassis/engine/interior of the Cincy car. In the photos below with two cars, the 2nd black car is the original body (later placed atop a more basic chassis/engine). As you can see, I used the same paint scheme on the national winner, but reversed the masking for the flames.

By the way, the paint on the national winner was all Testors and Pactra enamels; no automotive paint was used. Also, per MPC Contest rules at the time, no resin body casting and less than 10% brass (in this case, used to reinforce the door frames) was used in the construction of the model.

The interior incorporated a wraparound instrument panel and four bucket seats, with the front passenger seat turned rearward like the old 1966 Imperial "Business Director" production seating option. The "carpeting" was real pink turkey feathers, salvaged from the basement of the original Rider's Hobby store in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Yeah, I know what you're thinking....you can't make this stuff up; it must be true, and it was!)

The engine was conceived as a very strong poke in the eye of the automotive emissions legislative environment back then, via a front-supercharged 426 Hemi with precision fuel metering intended to pass all emissions tests while setting new levels of street-driven horsepower. Note that we were still using black thread pulled through beeswax for ignition wiring at the time!

The model had been built with an interior floorboard configuration intended to accommodate a Lotus-like central backbone chassis, but I ran out of time (I was a full time college student and working 30 hours a week at the time). The MPC National judges noted the discrepancy between the chassis frame and the floorboard in their judging, and correctly so. (Tom Woodruff was able to finesse and bring my central backbone chassis idea to reality with his Pearl White chopped Merc model a year later, It also became a top 5 MPC National Championship winner in 1977. Those of you at the NNL Nats #40 and Reunion may have seen Tom's display where he showed the letters we had to each other with drawings of this and other ideas for Chopped Merc models).

This is the first time that details of this car have been shown in color. Look closely at all the details, and enjoy! Thanks for looking...TIM

17 additional detail and overall photos here.....

 

Thanks for looking.....TIM 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 27, 2019 by tim boyd

[cobraman]

That's wild !

[TarheelRick]

An excellent example of what we used to build in our younger days.  Congratulations on your honors.  One question, is that a tool box on top of the engine?  It resembles the one found in the 53 Ford pick-up kit.

[tim boyd]

37 minutes ago, TarheelRick said:

An excellent example of what we used to build in our younger days.  Congratulations on your honors.  One question, is that a tool box on top of the engine?  It resembles the one found in the 53 Ford pick-up kit.

Ricky,.....excellent question and I will admit 43 years later that I don't have any remembrance of what or where that "intake box" came from.   But I suspect that you have a pretty good guess right there.....thanks for your inquiry.....TIM 

[Koellefornia Kid]

Awesome!

[ChrisBcritter]

Man, that is somethin' else! Another part ID, please: Where did the side exhausts come from?

[ewetwo]

Really nice customs. Paint is beautiful!

[tkzwolf]

Amazing!  

[tim boyd]

21 hours ago, ChrisBcritter said:

Man, that is somethin' else! Another part ID, please: Where did the side exhausts come from?

Chris....I believe they were from a 1970 MPC Pontiac Grand Prix kit.  Those side exhausts may have been carried over to some of the later hosed-up derivatives of this tool...like the SweatHogs machine or some such - don't have the time to double check right now so don't quote me on this latter point.....TIM