Motion Corvette Spyder

[Superbird McMonte]

I always have a lot of Motion projects in the works. Some of them have gotten pushed back quite a bit. Working on the Eckler‘s Can-Am Corvettes recently brought these two Corvette projects to the surface.

In 1993 Joel Rosen gave me three pictures of a red Can-Am Corvette built by Motion. I had never seen these types of Motion cars before, but I knew I had to build one. AMT had just released the Eckler‘s Corvette kit, so I grabbed a couple.

Started over 25 years ago, as evidenced by the squadron green putty. (I haven’t use that stuff, since at least that long ago!) If it hasn’t cracked by now, I guess it won’t! One was molded in red plastic and the other in white. So it was a no-brainer to do the candy cane car using the red plastic model. I finished up the bodywork and put the car in primer. A couple little tweaks here and there, and it was ready for paint.

I decided to use Tamiya Italian red on this car. Since Joel was always fascinated with Italian style sports cars, I figured it was a good choice. The plan was to draw the decals in my artwork program and print them out with my special ghost printer cartridge. It’s a white toner, LaserJet cartridge, that you have to fool the printer into thinking you’re printing black. Works pretty well!

I had a couple rolls of automotive pinstripe hanging around and thought I might give that a try. Cutting it to the correct widths and getting it on the car wasn’t too much trouble. But in the end, they did not look right. They kept popping up in corners and you could see the scale thickness was out of whack. So I carefully peeled it all off and set about my original plan, drawing the decals.  
 

After a couple test prints on standard paper, I was where I wanted to be. I ran the Decal film through the printer and was on to Decal application. Some of the decals are quite delicate, especially about the back window. That was put on in one piece. I didn’t want any seams between any of the decals. I did, however, end up with three seams on the car. I’m happy with the way. It turned out this time around.
Joel Rosen has officially pulled himself out of the automotive industry. At 83 years old, he’s had enough. He was recently in the hospital, so I had a mutual friend of ours, pass these pictures along to him. As for the real car, last I saw it was in the Dan McMichael‘s collection. It may have gone to auction in 2012.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Superbird McMonte

[Scott8950]

Wow that looks great, looks like you nailed it. Nice work 

[KWT]

That's looking good

[TransAmMike]

Looking cool Dominik, impressive job on the striping!!  Prrrty red too.

[cobraman]

Very sharp !

[DumpyDan]

Love it!  Looks fantastic!

 

[Can-Con]

Pretty sweet. The paint and decals look spot-on. 

I did the yellow car back around '80 or '81. Hand painted the whole thing including the strips and hood spider. Still have it around here intact somewhere.

 

[ea0863]

Just beautiful, and what a bit of disco era coolness!  

[Bills72sj]

You appear to be successful in your vision.

[Modlbldr]

Wow! Very nice work. Those decals must have caused a few grey hairs.

Later-

[afx]

Great looking project.

[Superbird McMonte]

Bouncing back and forth between the red car and yellow car, I noticed something about these Motion cars that I hadn’t noticed 30 years ago. These Motion cars are a bit wider than the Eckler cars. The inner most taillights are not that close to the license plate cut out. And the hatchback opening is over the middle taillights.?
 

I marked off my cut lines on the bumper cover.

And then I started piecing it back together, spacing everything out and adding an extra quarter inch.

The hatchback opening is not going to line up exactly where it should with the tail lights, but the extra width does help bring the widebody fenders out enough to almost go straight back. There’s still a slight hourglass back in towards the bumper cover, just not as dramatic as it was out of the box.

I hope to do some test fitting tomorrow.

[ismaelg]

Cool projects!

As wild today as it was back then.

Thanks,
Ismael

[Stingray wes]

Spot on with this! Fantastic work!