By Special Request - Model cars I recently built...

Hope you like these and be sure to click on all the photos, some twice, to get a better look at the detail. Thanks to my friend Steve Miller, and my friend Kevin Rouse, who passed away just 3 years ago at a very young age, I have a renewed interest in building model cars as I had done many years ago. I rarely work on my full size hot rods in the winter anymore as my time is taken up with this blog site as well as building model cars and playing some music. The first two here are this years completed projects. These are all 1:25th scale, so to compare, a quarter would be the diameter of one of the back wheels.

....1941 Ford Woodie with scale surfboards, a local newspaper, guitars and car mags inside.

Here is a vintage kit that I finally had done. It is a Revell kit, chopped and channeled with a few of my favourite LP's on the seat. It sports an Ardun V8 from a '50 Ford truck kit.


Here is a 1932 Ford 3-window coupe that I sectioned. The second picture shows the slice that was taken out of the centre of the body. I'm not sure where I got the double blown Hemi from, but Kevin showed me how to wire engines. I have a big lighted 8" diameter magnifying glass for the fine work. You will also notice that everything has wide whitewalls except for the race car below.


The left top here is the actual vintage modified that I built restored and raced. I sold it a number of years ago because all the local tracks closed here in Thunder Bay. The model started out with a 1960's vintage AMT black plastic body, to which I added the body modifications. I then used a chassis from an AMT Gremlin dirt track kit. I made my own decals from photos I had taken of the original car to make it more authentic.

Here is a pair of my favourite projects. Here we have two primered Ford hot rods which I did about 3 years ago. The chopped '32 Ford coupe has a removable top to view the records on the seat.

Here is the Happy Days roadster pickup that Ritchie and Ralph cruised around in during the early seasons of "Happy Days". I have always wanted to model this but never had a picture until I had seen an old TV guide with the car on it to help with the colour scheme etc. As stated above, the tire size is about the size of a quarter. None of these models are out of the box builds. Parts are robbed from many different kits to make the models more unique. Its called kit-bashing. Thanks for looking.....D.

The Holy Grail of Model Cars...

Talking about Hot Rods and Jalopies, I would be amiss not mentioning the AMT model cars that we all built when we were young. If you are about my age you will remember going to Lil's Hobby Lobby to pick up one of the $1.49(note 1.49 shown on the box ends) Trophy Series 3 in 1 models shown here. These debuted in 1960 to rave reviews, and started a model building phenomena unrivaled until the dawn of the die cast models of today. The first one is the 1932 Ford 5-window coupe...my all-time favourite, and next is the 1932 Ford Model B Sport Roadster. I scanned these from my own model collection. The bottom two photos are not mine but show you how cool it was especially if you were too young to buy a real hot rod, how to properly build a 1:25th scale beauty. These guys built them to exact box specifications.

I had always built model cars but the hobby went astray somewhat when I started building the real things at 1:1 scale. Thanks to my good friend Steve Miller(a pristine model car builder and award winner), and my other good friend Kevin Rouse(who had sadly passed away just a few years ago), who got me back into the hobby full tilt. The cold winter months here in Thunder Bay offer tons of time to dedicate to the building of these wonderful model cars.

There have been many re-releases of these models and more are being released each year. Many stock car jalopy models have also been built using these kits and others of the 3 in 1 series.

We had also used many of the bodies of these kits for slot car racing back in the late 60s.

The Revell company has just released an all new 32 Ford 5-window coupe kit and will be re-releasing the 1925 Ford Model T two kits in one(the vintage one shown above) this fall in a wonderfully decorated tin box just like the original.

Thanks so much to Dave Darby for the incredible box art replicas in the last 2 photos and also for the use of his great photos. Click on the comments below to read Dave Darby's comments. Click on photos to enlarge.