Further car whiffery (or: PW doesn't just think about corvettes!)

[puddingwrestler]

SInce I'm not using the stock 53 F100 grille on the F Bucket, I have a spare F100 grille... I always thought they looked a little dull, but then I started looking at them as the whole grille on the front of a car, rather than just a bar of trim across the front of a very hefty pickup. And they start to look really sleek, almost studebaker-ish.
Anyway, I'm thinking of using it as the grille on a wild custom. Trying to decide what sort of car it'd work with. I want a 50s body, I know that, but there are two important options.
Option One is to remove whatever headlights the car has, and restyle the fenders to slope down to the grille with it's built in lights. This requires a car with a sloping hood, and not too much headlight tube shape to the top of the fender. Something like an early Thunderbird might work.
Option Two (which I am favouring more becasue it's easier) is to simply replace the stock grille with that of the F100, so that the car ends up with stacked twin headlights. For this the fender shape is not important, however the front needs to be fairly flat as the F100 grille is dead straight. A 53 ford would work for this, and I know it'd fit a 57 Ford (I have a 57 Ford model and I held the parts up tot check - but I think the rest of a 57 ford is to heavy to pull this off, it needs a simpler, less ornate body).
Anyone got any ideas for a good body for this grille? I did think of Corvette, but I've only jsut done one
I'm a bi limited by the available kits of course, so don't go suggesting it'd look magnificent grafted to the nose of a Tucker Torpedo or Kaiser manhattan or something like that

Fig 1: F100.

Fig 2: 53 Ford Crestline:

Fig 3: 57 Ford

[puddingwrestler]

And lo; PW didst have strange ideas again, and didst raise the thread from the dead.

Okay, so I was thinking car whiffs again. I got thinking about an old idea again:
What If the US had a law or tax bracket similar to the UK which encouraged building three wheelers. I've been planning a US three wheeler for a while, probably based on a 39/40 Ford. However I might end up using a 41 Plymouth (since I have one) or a 39 Chevy. Basically, the idea involves removing the front fenders, so the car can come to a point with a single wheel in the nose. Obviously the real version would need a lot of engineering work, so I think I'll just go curb side.

The second idea is this:
What If Ford introduced the Thunderbird earlier? I was thinking about grafting a 55 T Bird grille and some styling to a 49 Ford body... move the cabin back to allow a much longer bonnet, make it a two seater, move the doors etc, graft on the T Bird grille and bumper... I think it could well work.

[sequoiaranger]

Good Ideas, puddingwrestler (is that like mudwrestling, only tastier?), both the "early T-bird" and three-wheelers.

With your '49 Ford T-bird, would you make the back seat the "front" seat, and extend the hood back to it (maybe tandem flathead V-8 engines?) Or position the "front" seat just slightly back, extending both the hood and trunk to meet it? Either way it would make a good "show car" or "concept car". Did Ford ever have a "Motorama" like GM did? "Autorama"? Maybe call it "Ford-o-rama?

You might consider three-wheelers like some of the modern "motorcycles" with the two wheels at normal track in FRONT (where, on most cars, the engine is and the space is needed), and the third, single wheel in back! Though, I suppose to EMPHASIZE the engine, a single wheel in front with twin radiators on the sides might work.

[PR19_Kit]

One US car that would really suit being '3 wheeled' would be the Plymouth Prowler, just don't add the front suspension. 

The only problem is there'd be nowhere to put the front number plate, but some States don't require them as I recall.



Hm, I have a couple of the AMT clip together Prowlers somewhere, in glorious purple! 

[sequoiaranger]

>The only problem is there'd be nowhere to put the front number plate, but some States don't require them as I recall.<

California REQUIRES a front license plate. Still, even a single-front-wheel Prowler would have to have a bumper (best to be full-width, too, to protect the rest of the car), maybe "handlebar moustache" style, and the plate could still go there.

[Weaver]

Dynamically, reverse 3-wheeler cars (i.e. two wheels at the front) are inherently more stable that tricycle ones, which have a tendancy to roll. If the drive is through the front wheels (Lomax) then they are safe but boring. If the drive is via the back wheel however (Morgan/JZR) then the car can pick up it's inside wheel in corners, which is hair-raising but makes for very fast cornering!

I don't know how it worked in the past, but at the moment, there's no special category for 3-wheel cars of trikes in the UK: if it's under a certain weight, then it's a motorcycle and motorcycle rules apply and if it's over that weight then it's a car and car rules apply. However the average traffic cop doesn't know jack about any of it, so in practice, you can get away with all sorts of stuff....

[PR19_Kit]

In my time in the motor industry I once had to drive a Bond 875 around for a few days. The 875 was essentially a Reliant single front wheel assembly bolted onto a Hillman Imp rear engine, gearbox and axle with a pretty ugly fibreglass body grafted on top of it. At the time my own car was itself an Imp, with four wheels of course, so I knew the way that engine and rear suspension worked pretty well.



As the 875 was very light it out-performed the Imp by quite a margin, but the word 'performed' here is used in its widest possible sense as the 0-60 time was well over 20 seconds! I preferred to drive to work and back on the country lanes instead of via the dual carriageways around Oxford so I followed the same route in the 875. Slinging it into a couple of the S bends as usual on the way home produced a feeling of 'Oooer...' in the first half of the bends and then a feeling of 'Oh NO!' in the second half as the inboard rear wheel lifted right off the ground! 

With rear wheel drive and a standard differential the car lost drive right away of course and the wheel dropped back down again leaving me just enough space NOT to drive into the ditch, but from then on I treated the 875 with some trepidation. The later production versions used the low compression and less powerful Imp Van engine, and with 4 passengers aboard it wouldn't go fast enough to get into trouble all that much. Good thing too really. 

[puddingwrestler]

With your '49 Ford T-bird, would you make the back seat the "front" seat, and extend the hood back to it (maybe tandem flathead V-8 engines?) Or position the "front" seat just slightly back, extending both the hood and trunk to meet it? Either way it would make

Ford didn't really have a Motorama equivalent, although they did have the Ford Caravan of Cars (Or Caravan of Custom Cars, or Caravan of Stars - lots of names) a bit later.
I was thinking of extending the hood back, but not all the way t the back seat, that'd be undrivably long. More likely move it a bit, and then shorten the back of the car.

[Old Wombat]

I like the modern two-front one-rear arrangement, it seems to be more stable & agile.

[McColm]

Have you ever thought of slicing off the front end of a Mustang (up to the windscreen) and adding it to an estate model instead? I've been thinking along those lines for a Dodge Charger estate/station wagon. I've got the Airfix 1/24 'General Lee' and a Revell 1/24 Chevy Impala estate.

[puddingwrestler]

For me, much of the mustang's appeal is the sculptured side body. It's also fairly hard to get station wagon kits, and means spending twice as much on two donor kits. I'm inherently cheap enough to prefer to just buy one kit, and use plasticard for the new roof.

As to three wheelers, I like the two wheel front in modern three wheelers, especially three wheel bikes, but for the kind of 'Reliant Robin's Big Brother' look that I want to use I'm going with single front wheel.

[puddingwrestler]

I have aquired a monogram 39 Chevy from ebay with a nice pointy single wheeler nose. Perhaps Ford will make them with twin front wheels and single rear wheel... I have a 48 Ford which might work for that (with a little narrowing around the bum!)

[Daryl J.]

I picked up a Tamiya old-style Fiat 500 to turn into a desert off roader.      Haven't approached 1/24 scale for decades.   

[McColm]

 I'm trying to build a 1/24 Ford (Mercury) Capri MKII convertible from an Airfix/AMT kit. So far the roof has been sliced off and a boot lid/trunk lid made from a piece of plasticard has been cut but not glued. The wide tyres supplied in the kit have chrome alloys and side exhuast pipes. The side pipes will be replaced by a twin box. The windscreen  surround has been snapped too many times, which has lead me to an idea of placing the car in a garage scene and having the car on a set of jacks. The whinch from a 1/72 RNLI life boat could be used to crane the engine in place. This would be taken from another 1/24 Airfix kit, the 'General Lee' (Dodge Charger). I know this doesn't fit the Capri, but it looks the part.
The quad lights and the American chunky bumpers give the appearance of the European Capri MKIII. A thin slice of plasticard will be glued to the front bumper, painted amber to represent the indicators.
Just need to find the garage fittings or scratch build them.

[puddingwrestler]

Why not replace the windshield with a frame-less roadster style unit?
Not sure if any production cars had them, but George Barris loved to fit them to customs.

That's the Dodge Daroo btw, built from a Dodge Dart, 1968 model I believe.