'51 lead sled: Getting the stance right

Given this will have no engine, the chassis doesn't really matter either. So I grabbed the first thing that fit, which turned out to be the resin chassis from the '68 Plymouth. Hey, why waste a decent chassis on a curbside build?



Picking wheels and tires took some doing. In the rear it was whatever fit, because it won't show. But the front was important to get right. In the absence of completely smooth dished wheels, this one will do.



The stance took some work but it is now nice and low without being ground-scraping. After taking this picture, I lowered the tail a bit more as these always looked good as tail-draggers.



Next steps will be bumpers, tail lights and a grille. The grille will be the biggest issue; I have an assortment of bumpers and have already picked something out for both front and rear. 



Interior will be pretty basic, as it mostly won't be visible through the mailbox slits that pass for windows, and will also lean on the parts bin as a source. Stay tuned!

Highlights after six years of blogging....

... of course I've been building for much longer, but much of it was before the advent of the InterWeb. And coming out of the closet was a big step. So if you'll allow me to wallow in self-indulgent reminiscences, I'll share some of the highlights here.

In six years I've pursued all the oddball stuff I wanted when I was a kid. D-Type Jags, 917 and 908 Porsches, Cheetahs and Cobras, the list goes on. Mostly what I have learned has been better detailing, especially under the hood where arguably a lot of the beauty resides. This also led me to resin and multi-media kits from a range of small producers, since a lot of this stuff is not available in styrene from the major producers.

The first Model Factory Hiro I kit completed was this Abarth OT 1300 Periscopio. MFH makes devilishly complex kits of gorgeous, obscure and otherwise unavailable cars. They should be tackled with this in mind. This obscure Abarth was one of their simpler builds.



I worked on these Alfa Giulias as a mechanic in the 1980s. Gorgeous little cars, even if they did tend to smoke a bit, and second gear synchro did not suffer fools gladly. The Fujimi plastic was good enough to polish, not paint needed.



Alfa TZ1: racing precursor to the Giulia. The MFH kit is very nice.



Dino 206S from Pierpaolo Pintarelli, available through his Facebook page. Sadly this kit has no engine, but we'll forgive him because the car is gorgeous. A quick build given the lack of mechanical detail.

 

I drooled over the 166 MM Berlinetta and Barchetta as a kid. Long nose, short deck, and a 2-litre V12: what more could you want? All in a package the size of an MG Midget. The MFH wheels are sublime. The Barchetta is in the stash. 



Cheetah! This superb kit, now unavailable, is from Historic Racing Miniatures.



OK, seems it's all been red so far. Here's a green Ferrari, one of the most beautiful cars ever made: the 250 GT Lusso from MFH.



Engine detail in the 908/03 from Model Factory Hiro includes 16 plug wires. It's a flat-8 but follows the trend at the time of twin-plug heads.




What a beast of a kit! I also have the MFH kit of the 917K in the stash, but this one is the much easier Fujimi kit.



Jaguar D-Type and Aston Martin DBR1, both from Profil 24.



Some fellow named Shelby drove the Aston to a win at Le Mans in 1959. No one remembers his co-driver, a Brit named Roy Salvadori.



Finally some road cars: The 300 SL was on my wish list as a kid; and the DS19 won me an award.






A bunch of barges, all of them lightly hot-rodded. The top-chop on the Hudson was particularly fun.



The custom exhaust making a coy appearance under the passenger door is a clue to the hotted-up Twin H-Power six.





I've also gotten better at scratch building what-if stuff. In particular I've discovered that military 1/35 scale kits can serve as interesting components of a what-if 1/24 device, starting with the supercharged sidewalk plow based on a 1/35 Japanese light tank kit.



The Russian MAZ heavy hauler is a monster, even at 1/35. The Hitachi digger is also 1/35, but the engine and White cab are 1/24 bits.







While the blog is called 24th-scale, I've wandered a bit into 1/43 and 1/12.

The 1/43 kits are brutally small. I am particularly pleased with the MFH BRM H16, even if it is in the shop with a broken upper A-arm arising from excessive handling.



The engine is smaller than the images in the printed instruction sheet.



The Rover 2000 TC from K&R replicas is a lot less detailed, and some of the bits are cheesy. But since the first car I owned was a Rover 2000 TC, and given this is the only kit I've ever seen of this oddball, I had to have it.

 

Finally in the 1/24 scale world, I tackled the lovely but enormous De Havilland Mosquito. With a wingspan of 27 inches, it's going to hang from the ceiling, assuming I ever get it done, because it sure doesn't fit in any of my display cases.



The Rolls-Royce Merlins are well detailed and part of the attraction. My interest is also piqued by the fact the fuselage and wing are made of plywood with a doped fabric covering for waterproofing.



It's been a fun ride, and I hope you are enjoying it. There are about 100 decent builds on the shelf but there's more to come given the 200 or so kits in the stash. And feel free to post questions; most of this also winds up on various Facebook feeds, but the full story and detail is always here.



Stay tuned!

'51 Leadsled: initial planning and bodywork

This Jimmy Flintstone body, meant to sit (I think) on a '51 Belair chassis, has been in the stash for some time now.



I know I painted it with Duplicolor primer in January 2015 as I wrestled with mold release agents on the Aston Martin BBR1 (click here). And it had probably been in the stash for some time before that.



Coincidentally I acquired a '60 Vette kit, which is problematic as the actual car in the kit has single headlights, not dual. Also the rest of the kit is pretty bad. So it went on to the donor shelf.



And finally this one turned up on the Frankencars and Stuff Facebook page (click here). So what more reasonable than cutting up the '56/'57 Vette to fiddle with looks of the leadsled?

 


So I cleaned up the old primer and started thinking about how to go about the surgery. I also trimmed off the character line running above the front wheel arches horizontally into the doors.



First step was to cut the coves out of the Vette using the back of a new #11 X-Acto blade.



These were used to make templates out of 0.030" styrene sheet.



The templates were used to guide the back of the #11 blade as the resin body sides are cut out. This was time consuming due to the thick casting.



The coves were put in place with lots of 5-minute epoxy, then Duplicolor Primer Sealer applied. (I prefer this to the plain black primer used earlier). Next was white Tamiya primer to give something for an eventual Tamiya topcoat to grab onto. Some minor putty remains to do but I'll wait until I know what else is needed; in particular the grille and rollpans could require some more hacking and slicing.



Next will be to build up a simple chassis. I'll use something from the parts bin and won't bother with detailed chassis or motor. Rear wheels don't matter as they will be invisible but fronts will be a big part of the end result.

Stay tuned!

'68 Fury wagon: Complete (#4 for 2020)

Fred, having made one too many comments about Doris's constant putdowns, found himself relegated to the '68 Fury wagon, which was upsetting until he discovered that the pair of Holleys on the 318, when combined with the four on the floor and absolutely no weight over the rear wheels, meant he could pull donuts in the J.C. Penney parking lot all night, at least until the night guard got fed up and called the cops, who turned up driving Furys with the 440 and the handling package, so there was no hope of outrunning them out County Road 53.







The Mopar wagons of this era were actually not all that bad looking. The big Town and Country, based on the brutish 300, was the cream of the crop, but the Fury wasn't completely out-classed even if it the base model had brown vinyl bench seats. (Lots of class, but all low class, I hear some of you muttering, but I'll pass on rising to that bait.)





The resin kit from Motor City Resins was one of the better ones, just needing some minor straightening out in warm water.




A bevy of barges at the used car lot. Only driven on Sundays! Mind you, all of them have been hotted up somewhat, so maybe Sundays were spent at the track.

Stay tuned! There's more in the pipeline.

'68 Fury wagon: Paint and final assembly

Moving right along. Tamiya white primer went on over the Duplicolor primer-sealer; I've always felt this was a better approach than trying to put Tamiya TS paints directly on the Duplicolor primer.



The wheels have been painted and attached to the spindles with lots of 5-minute epoxy. This saves a lot of fiddling trying to drill out wheel backs to exactly the right size; as it was I needed to sleeve the spindles to take the wheels which came from the parts box. 



Adjustments to the body and chassis were made so the body can sit as low as possible on the chassis while still allowing the hood to just clear the carb intake funnels. The stance is pretty decent, in my humble opinion: low enough to be noticeable but not so low it won't clear cracks in the pavement.


After some repeated putty and sandpaper episodes to eliminate traces of the old door panel lines, primer went on, followed by Tamiya TS 68 Wooden Deck Tan. This is probably the most inoffensive colour in the entire Tamiya line-up and fits perfectly with the slightly warmed-over beater/sleeper concept.



The approach outlined in the Fairlane tutorial (click here) was used. Overall the colour is quite flat and it may need some semi-gloss clear to finish up. It hardly looks different from the primer.

Meanwhile back to the chassis which needs a couple of final touches. Stay tuned!

'68 Fury Wagon: Interior and body

The Fury is coming along slowly. The interior is looking decent if not perfect. The basic brown is meant to fit the theme of a beater that has had some performance upgrades (carbs, tires) but stays with the basic bench seat due to lack of finances.



The exterior will probably be beige or tan to match the interior. No one deliberately paints a hot rod beige, so it will be a bit of a sleeper.



The resin body needed some straightening in hot water; I've also converted it to a 2-door configuration given there will be no rear seat. The new B pillars are styrene sheet cut and glued in place; the pre-existing B and C pillars were then cut out.



The chassis was lowered in front by making new uprights and pinning the stub axles at a higher level, as seen in the photo below (left side of the car, right side of the picture). In the rear I simply filed the leaf spring mounts down. The stance looks decent and is helped by tall tires in back, lower profile tires in front. The steel wheels will probably be painted black.



Still lots to do but it's coming along.



Stay tuned!