Índice para December 2017 em Scale Auto

Where’s the fire? I started fighting fires in high school when I got a summer job working for New York State as – wait for it – a Wildland Fire Control Technician. Mom was so proud. I worked for the State Forest Rangers fighting forest fires. Back when I enlisted in the U.S. Navy, firefighting was an all-hands evolution because at sea, there is no fire department. Ultimately though I ended up spending 23 years in a fire department, more than half of that time as an officer with an engine company. I retired recently. What started all this madness? It was a 1970s TV program, Emergency, chronicling the adventures of Johnny Gage and Roy Desoto; two firefighter paramedics with the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Every Friday night, a…

> 1963 SHELBY COBRA I created this box-stock 1/43 Marsh kit of the ‘63 Cobra with the 289 in it, a few years ago for a challenge our RPM club had. The theme was to build anything that Carroll Shelby had designed or driven. It’s the car Dan Gurney drove in the 1963 12 Hours of Sebring. The finish is Tamiya black. This Minnesota musician notes, “it’s a great time to be a builder!” I’m a composer and musician living in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Like a lot of modelers, I built everything as a kid, but I especially loved race cars. Growing up reading magazines like Sports Car Graphic and Road and Track, I was drawn to European racing, though Indy and NASCAR stayed on my radar. After the…

I’d venture that nearly every reader of Scale Auto has heard of both AMT and AMT/Ertl model kits. But kits from Ertl before it bought the assets and brand name of AMT in the early 1980s? That’s a different story, and it’s the one I’ll explore in this look at the 40 “8000 series” kits introduced by Ertl once the firm decided to join the 1/25 scale assembly business in 1973, and up until the beginning of the AMT/Ertl era. In the early 1970s, Ertl was already a successful subsidiary of Victor Comptometer Corp. and best known for its highly detailed die-cast farm tractors, implements and heavy equipment. With AMT’s new lineup of 1/25 scale semi-truck kits flying off the shelves, Ertl saw an opportunity to enter and compete successfully…

THIS IS THE LATEST RELEASE of a kit first offered between 1988-89. It builds a sleek 1969 Yenko Corvette. The Yenko dealership was known for its impressive performance modifications of GM cars. Yenko sold many high horsepower Corvettes that apart from tweaking and performance tuning, were otherwise mostly factory stock. An eight-page instruction guide takes you through the 23-step assembly. Parts and colors are called out by numbers and letters respectively. These correspond to a paint and part description chart. The 427 cid V8 engine can be built either as a 390 horsepower, four-carb L36 or a 435 hp, tri-power L71. The L36 version is probably meant to mimic the 1:1’s L88/ZL1 engine but the kit lacks the high-rise manifold and correct-spec hood. The two-piece block has a 4-speed transmission…

DON PRUDHOMME’S Hot Wheels “Yellow Feather” top fuel dragster campaigned against its great rival, Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen during the 1972 racing season. Shortly after, MPC released this 97-piece kit. The dragster’s rear engine is well detailed, being made of 30 pieces, including the mounting plate, blow shield assembly, and drive shaft. While the majority of the pieces fit well, I had a problem affixing the intake manifold to the engine block. The solution? Remove the locator pins. Other parts like the blower belt and pulleys, also were tricky to line up properly. Despite having difficulty with a few of these pieces, assembling the engine was my favorite part of this build. A total of 40 pieces make up the main chassis, including the engine, rear-end housing, front axle, front…

Our prized tip comes from Lorne Salm, who sent in a way-cool technique for making a realistic shifter boot for a floor shifter. Small details such as this, go a long way in bringing a model to life. Lorne sent a photo of his results and I have to say his shifter boot looks terrific, and, it’s a relatively easy way to add a nice finishing touch to your interior. Here’s how he did it: First, mark the location on the floor or console where the shifter will be installed. Next, drill a small pilot hole in the center of that location. Determine how much room you want around the shifter and enlarge the pilot hole with a corresponding bit. If you want a square, oval or rectangular opening for…

The greater idea of this project was to create a convertible version of Revell’s 1967 Chevy Camaro hardtop release. But in order to make this happen, precision craft work and planning had to take place first. I also had hopes to give this drop-top a bit of a touring vibe by upgrading the engine to an LSX 454 V8 crate motor matched to GM’s 4L60-E automatic transmission. Once the convertible took form, I capped it off by upgrading the wheels and suspension with more aggressive springs, roll bars and shocks.…

1949 Mercury/1959 Cadillac I call this my “1949 Merc/1959 Caddy,” and it’s a wild, completely custom build. Years ago there was an upcoming George Barris model car contest. I wanted to build something he might enjoy and as I knew George was a fan of Mercurys, I drafted this idea. Turns out he really liked it and chose my model as his best of show winner! I was very happy. The genetics of this build combine a Revell 1949 Mercury up front with an AMT 1959 Ghostbusters Cadillac Ambulance at the rear. — John Teresi ABOUT JOHN TERESI I’m from Van Nuys, Calif. and started building model cars and motorcycles at a very young age, mostly Revell and Monogram drag cars. I grew up around drag racing, watching them race…

THE GALANT VR-4 was an interesting all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, DOHC turbocharged showcase of technology for Mitsubishi. This kit of the sixth-generation car is a reissue that builds into a curbside with only 52 pieces plus a set of well-rendered Pirelli tires and four poly caps to mount the wheels. You can only build this VR-4 as a right-hand drive version. Even though it is a relatively simple kit, it shapes into a nice representation of the subject. Overall fit is very good but there are some issues with flash on a few of the pieces. The mold lines on the body take a significant amount of time to fully clean which I think is mostly due to the age of the tooling. Another issue is that the molded black…

True fact, the model and diecast car hobby is alive and surging in popularity overseas. Shigeki Matsumoto is from Kagawa, Japan, and writes for numerous Japanese hobby publications including a model car magazine, Model Cars. While he’s very much into building kits of his dream cars from the 1950s and muscle cars from the 1960s, he also likes to dabble in model airplane building. Shigeki recently published his own book, How to Make Vintage Car Model Kits. For the past 20 years, he’s also owned a 1:1 Nassau blue 1965 Chevrolet Corvette, glorious side pipe exhausts and all. It’s been sitting under a blue sheet “sleeping” in his garage the past few years, so he’s made a compromise-build, a 1/25 model of a 1963 Vette in similar color and trim.…

Vic Elford’s Porsche 911 rally car Porsche’s iconic 911 started winning races almost as soon as its introduction in 1963. Factorysponsored cars raced in European rally events, attracting new drivers to Porsche, including one of its most famous, Vic Elford. “Quick Vic,” as he was nicknamed, drove Porsche to many victories in its 907, 908 and 917 racers, but he started with the 911. While the 911 placed well in European rallies starting in 1965, once Vic took the wheel in 1967, the 911 quickly entered the winners circle. The culmination was an overall win at the 1968 Rallye Monte Carlo. In true Elford style, records were set at quite a few stages. Let’s build Vic’s 1968 Rallye Monte Carlo winner. The basis for this is Revell’s 911 street car…

The tedious task of cleaning up mold lines is isn’t all that complicated. However, there are some lines that simply are more challenging. These run along most fenders and rooflines. However, at least they are easily accessible. One particular spot that continues to be troublesome during builds is where the fender meets the A-pillar. Often there is additional detail such as window trim, drip rail moldings, and door lines that require extra work. Here are my coping tips.…

Revell recently reissued its 1979 Mazda RX-7. This kit was first issued in factory stock form by Monogram and molded in red plastic. In 1981 they issued a Cafe Racer variant of the original kit in Racing Beat livery and molded in light blue plastic; the two early kit stock numbers and molded colors still exist on this latest reissue, engraved inside the roof. The stock version was available as a limited SSP (Selected Subjects Program) reissue in 1996 using nearly the same box art as the original kit. The new 2 ‘n 1 kit has both stock and race parts in the same box for the first time, molded in white plastic with a fresh new set of decals. It’s a representation of an early production 1979 RX-7, built…

I SHOULD’VE known by the mischievous grin on former editor Jim Haught’s face that this was no ordinary going away present. He popped into my office with a giant box, and the first thing I caught was the Tamiya logo. He knows I’m a sucker for imported car models, so I wondered what it could be. The picture on the box just wasn’t registering as any kind of car, and I didn’t expect a motorcycle. But motorcycle it was, a 1/6 scale model of a Honda’s CRF1000L, also known as the “Africa Twin.” The Africa Twin name has quite a reputation among rally racing fans. The original Africa Twin, released in 1988, was a replica of the racer Honda developed to win the Paris-Dakar Rally. The consumer model, the XRV650,…

I COULDN’T wait for Revell to release this kit, since I was the one slotted to review it. When I paged through the instructions, I was surprised to see the initial two sections dedicated to building the engine first, then followed by the body construction. Hmm, that’s a bit different. So I thought about this and how it might affect a new or inexperienced builder. This kit is aimed at folks ages 12 + with a level 4 skill ability. Would 124 total pieces, be too much? I decided to build it as if it was my first model. The detailed engine has 15 pieces including the two block halves, oil pan with starter and oil filter molded to it (which makes painting tricky), heads, fan belt with pulleys, and…