Show Rod Model Kits. Scotty Gosson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Show Rod Rally website. Raz and company put in a mountain of overtime on this project, for your benefit and mine. These guys did the majority of the heavy lifting out of pure passion for the subject matter. They are much more than merely the keepers of the flame. They burn white hot themselves. A. J. Ciccarelli even compiled a list of kit numbers for this project. Note that Dave’s Show Rod Rally has no “Off” switch . . .

      Wildcat scratch-builders Tim Kolankiewicz, Charles May, Mike Schnur, Chuck Darnell, and Daniel Foster seemingly came out of nowhere. I’m so glad these master artists blew their anonymity for our sake. It’s an honor to share their skills here.

      John Greczula at Round 2 still carries a burning passion for these cars, expressed with untold hours of fact-checking. When Tom Daniel couldn’t write the foreword, he designated John to be his worthy replacement. That worked out very well for everyone, except John, who did the deed in the midst of an intercontinental home relocation, in the dead of winter! Heroic, indeed. John was very helpful throughout this entire project.

      Former MPC Vice President Sam Bushula provided behind-the-scenes remembrances from his storied experience. Sam is also the consummate gentleman modeler! Our veritable poster boy.

      Howard Cohen in Toronto supplied myriad facts and photos from his lifetime in the hobby. He not only eagerly answered every request, but volunteered to contribute to the cause, repeatedly. This guy knows no boundaries when it comes to promoting and protecting the hobby. The scale show rod sergeant at arms.

      John Bacon, son-in-law of AMT founder West Gallogly, generously relayed some of West’s insightful quips and quotes to us research drones toiling in the post-industrial era, lest our umbilical cord to the golden age be severed and lost in space.

      Lou and Royel Glazer at Revell had the foresight to share their intriguing stories with various authors who passed them on via the printed word. Special thanks to Hot Rod Model Kits author Terry Jessee for exposing these tales to the world. His book was a valuable resource during this project and is highly recommended!

      Steve Scott not only supplied a first-person account of scaling a show rod (his Uncertain-T) down to size, but put the entire industry into timely perspective in the process. Behind the scenes, Steve pushed when I was weary, pulled when I was resistant, and played along when I danced in the groove. Because that’s what friends do.

      Special thanks to scale show rod crazies Dave Marek, Ron Will, Paul Canney, and Luca Roveda for sharing their special gifts with us.

      Saint Shellski—Finder of Lost Minds and Keeper of Reason—somehow endured yet another book project with me. It’s never easy and seems to get worse each time. But this is definitely the last one, Honey, I swear! Well . . .

INTRODUCTION

       Scaled-Down Show Rods for a Scaled-Down Economy

      The dive-in-and-see-what-happens ethos of the beatnik gearheads who designed and built the 1:1 show rods seems to have infected everyone associated with them and the resulting comedy is hereby delivered for your amusement. May it educate, entertain, and inspire you . . .

      It was invaluable training: Mowing lawns and washing cars to earn a weekly allowance garnered us several intrinsic life lessons, including time and money management. Other than tricking out our bicycles, our mechanical creative outlets were mostly limited to building models from kits, financed with said allowance.

      Who could have guessed that we’d somehow survive countless hours of spray paint and glue huffing only to face an economy decades later demanding the same skill set we developed to finagle $2 model kits with 20 hours of hard labor? Sweet irony, reflected in our ultimate model of choice: the show rod.

      In hindsight, we can see (with corrective lenses) that our childhood preferences were informed by a media in cahoots with manufacturers and marketing departments. But we can’t deny how deeply the hook was set. Wild show rod imagery continues to haunt the subconscious until it ultimately can’t be repressed any longer. At that point, we must lay out a show rod chassis design on the garage floor and begin flinging sparks, start collecting the show rod models of our dreams, or both. There’s no other way to continue on without going incurably insane. That’s just how it is. Alas, economics dictate which path to pursue, and many of us find ourselves on the short end of the dollar. So, which way to the hobby shop?

      Luckily, we now live in an era of aging hoarders, reproduction entrepreneurs, and instant worldwide communication with both camps. The models are out there, and this book will hopefully save you some time and money in your quest to sniff them out. An informed hunter is more likely to succeed than not. And the education is actually a pretty fun ride! If there’s anything as wacky and amusing as a full-on show rod, it has to be the stories behind how they came to be chosen and modeled. Those adventures even carry over to the manufacturing and marketing of the model kits themselves.

       Model cars continue to transport torches from one generation to the next. And that torch power propels them across all borders. Custom car historian Rik Hoving and eight-year-old son Abe get down to the details in the Netherlands on Ed Roth’s Revell Outlaw kit. (Esther de Charon Photo, Courtesy Rik Hoving)

      Alas, history has not been kind to us researchers, as little documentation remains regarding full-scale show rods and models of the time. Manufacturer catalogs seem to have vanished with the years, leaving model kit release dates to be repeatedly shuffled to suit the agenda du jour. Many of the principals involved have passed on. And most of the survivors readily admit to memory loss. Regardless, I sleuthed on, with a little help from my friends . . . and this endeavor required enough of them to fill an entire Acknowledgments page!

      MANUFACTURER CATALOGS SEEM TO HAVE

      VANISHED

      WITH THE YEARS

      Another wrench in the works is the confounding definition of a “show rod.” In 1:1 scale, show rods are generally defined as completely scratch-built cars, intended for indoor car show display. “Scratch-built” has its own ambiguity, but is recognized in the chassis fabrication arena as referencing a totally custom-built frame, chassis, and body. There is plenty of gray area to go around, as some of the wildest show rods (Chuck Miller’s Fire Truck and Red Baron and the Bell and Trantham’s Outhouse, for example) sat on standard T-bucket chassis (which were non-stock yet still aftermarket production-line creations, often in kit form, further confusing the issue). In fact, Fire Truck even employed a production-style body (although it was scratch-built. Where do these loopholes end?).

      So while show rod parameters are somewhat elastic, publishing space limitations dictate sticking to some semblance of guidelines. For the purposes of this book, the publisher and I have agreed to abide by the rules of the model kit collecting domain, where the show rod term generally pertains to scale copies of actual show rods or original concepts that could be actual show rods. Caveat: I am prone to throwing rule books out of windows. You’ve been warned.

CHAPTER ONE

       СКАЧАТЬ