24 Hour Build - Miss Deal Funny Car

[Tom Geiger]

I have been watching the 24 Hour Build for years and this year I was in a position of being able to dedicate a weekend so I went for it. This goes from noon on Saturday until noon on Sunday so you have the rest of Sunday to re-cooperate!

I decided to give the old Revell Miss Deal Funny Car a go since I know guys who base a lot of their drag builds off this chassis. Plus it looked like a fairly simple build.... wrong! It's from that Revell era of over complicated kits with poor molding, poorly fitting parts and vague instructions.

I started at noon, but I had taken all the parts off the trees on Friday and cleaned up the mold lines etc a bit. I stripped the bad chrome off a lot of the parts. I started to get frustrated that several hours into the project, I still didn't have anything assembled. By 2 am I had the chassis pretty much done and on wheels. I had spent way too much time doing this two tone on the chassis, carefully masking off the gray frame with BMF. Next quick build I won't do that! When time is short, simple is better!

Another 2 am photo. Roof was masked off for the two tone. I planned it all out with Duplicolor because it dried very quick. I managed to do this body with primer red, then primer gray and then color coats over that all within a few hours.

Part of the deal was working smart. I had two of the kit open and while the chassis was drying, I was mocking up the roll cage on the second kit's chassis. I also was mocking up the second kit's body onto my near finished chassis while the paint on my project's body dried.

If a part in my main kit sucked, I just tossed it and grabbed one from the second kit. I had a mishap with the rear axle while painting. The toothpick I had in one axle end to hold it up wouldn't come out and I wound up breaking that axle shaft side. So out came the second kit's axle.

I also had some supply issues. My Alclad spray can ran dry as I was touching up the chrome front suspension. I grabbed for my Metalizer Aluminum and it was empty too! I had the engine painted red and I used a red prewired distributer with blue wires... why? Because that was the one I had!

Next post down will be 5am.

[Tom Geiger]

And here's where we were by 5 am. This being a quick project gave me license to make snap decisions. Paint colors? Just because I had them! That's the metallic green I used on my new Camaro. Also that's about the same green my father had on his '54 Studebaker.

Endurance... the day from noon onward went quickly. Every time I looked up another hour had passed. I was getting tired around dinner time and broke for tacos and a beer. I went back upstairs after an hour and the evening again went quick. Once I started to see real progress... like finished sub-assemblies. I got new energy.

But by 5am there was no further good to be done. Everything I touched upset something that wasn't quite dry yet. As tired as I was I started fumbling parts and dropped the finished body, breaking both A pillars. So I gave in and went to bed at 6:30.

I never did muster up the energy to get it finished. It's essentially a car at this point, still needing to assemble some minor stuff like steering gear and other chassis details. I got back up at 10am and was so tired I felt like I had a hang over. So I ate breakfast, checked the boards for the other builder's progress and laid down from 1-4 pm. That got me feeling normal again!

So as soon as I can muster up the energy, I'll finish 'er off. I wanted to add some rust to the body corners etc as is my trademark. It was fun pushing the limits and getting about a month's work done in 18 hours!

I'll post in this thread when I get back to it this week.

[Johnny1973]

I know still you have to finisher her up by adding your trademark rust on her but she still looks good Tom.

[Dave Mikrut]

An amazing twist on this car that, turns out I really like! This car looks more belieivable, built this way than any I've ever seen! Beautiful work Tom!

[Dogfish_7]

Great Job!

[rmvw guy]

Interesting build, I like it a lot. I think what you accomplished in 24 hours is amazing.