Jo-Han's 1965 Cadillac scale model, A miniature masterpiece of an automotive masterpiece!

I have always admired the styling of the 1965 Cadillac ever since it was introduced in October of 1964 as a seven year old boy. Back then, I asked my dad if he could buy me a toy model of the thing, but money was tight, and he either could not, or he would not. I knew that they made already built up promotional models in 1/25 scale plastic, and that is what I wanted more than anything, but to no avail at that time. I was too young to know how to build model kits at that time, so that was out of the question, too. My dad did get me a Japanese tin litho friction toy of a gold 1966 de Ville the following year, but the detail was not there, and I did not like it. I ended up trashing the toy.

I was finally able to get a Jo-Han annual model kit with my allowance money in the fall of 1966 of the redesigned again 1967 Cadillac Coupe de Ville at my local hobby shop, "Smitty's Hobbies" in the Manor Shopping Center in Lancaster, PA. That shop is long gone, now. I still really wanted the 1965, though.

As I grew into a teenager in the early to mid 1970's I started building and collecting model cars and kits of cars, thereof in earnest. Model kit companies started to re issue models and kits from the 1950's and 1960's of all different kinds of cars. Then Jo-Han Models got into the act in around 1974 with their re-issues of some of their stuff from the early '60's through the early 1970's in their "USA Oldies series line, which included their re-issue of their 1964 Cadillac coupe and convertible kits. A year off, but close.

At the time, I was going 1959 Cadillac crazy, and I had my driver's licence, and I had a chance to buy a REAL 1959 Caddy, but my dad would not let me, so I wrote to Jo-Han Models and asked them if they would re-issue their plastic model they did of their '59 Cadillac. Their response was that they sent me a comprehensive survey, asking me, as a collector, what models that I would be interested in seeing re-issued. That survey list had EVERY car model that they ever  made, going all the way back to 1955, and all the way up to the then new for 1977 model year cars. I was very excited to say the least.

That survey list included the 1965 Cadillac, and of course, I checked that one off, along with about half the cars they had listed there, including a 1956 De Soto Fireflite 4 door sedan, as well as others. The result of that survey was the formation of Ex-el Products, a division of Jo-Han Models. That company proceeded to re-issue their old dealer promotional models in a choice of different colors, in the amount of four different cars at a time in very limited quantities. I was  hoping they would re issue the 1965 Cadillac, but that never happened. So I put it out of my mind....

 That is, until 1983. That was the year I was able to fulfill my dream of buying, owning and driving a 1965 Cadillac. It was a very weather worn Hampton Blue Metallic Calais 2 door hardtop that I bought for $500.00, fixed it up, and had repainted in the original color. I had already started going to car shows and swap meets, looking for nice parts for this car. I  thought, why not look for original promotional models and/or kits of '65 Cadillacs, there. In the spring of 1984, at the big Carlisle meet, I found my first one. an old scratched up blue plastic one with a friction motor, but it was intact. I paid $35.00 for it.

 In the fall of '84, I went to the big Hershey AACA car show, and swap meet. There, I found at a vendor called "Grandpa's Attic", an off white, mint, still boxed 1965 Cadillac Coupe de Ville in absolutely perfect shape. That is the very model you see in these pictures here, right now. When I got it home, I tore it completely apart, spray painted it light metallic blue, and super detail painted the body and interior.

I had my real 1965 Cadillac for almost 25  years, and I enjoyed owning it very much,(We used it in our wedding in 1989) and once I was able to afford to buy my REAL dream car, a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air sport sedan, I sold the Cadillac to make room for the Chevy.

I still own this 1/25 scale Jo-Han model that I did up of my car, today, as it is one of my favorite models that I have in my collection.

In my opinion, of all the subsequent models that have been issued of this car by different companies, this Jo-Han model stands out as the most accurate in scale proportions, and the nicest in appearance.

In around 2008, I was finally able to fulfill my childhood dream of finding the original annual 1965 Cadillac model kit issued by Jo-Han models in 1964. It is only missing one stock clear red taillight insert and the custom clear red taillight inserts.But otherwise, it is all there, and in good buildable condition. A not too common kit that I found on eBay . Since these were only issued during the original model year run in 1964-'65, these kits and dealer promo models can command some crazy prices, as they are in high demand, today, where they are found in decent condition.

Jim.

1957 Chevy Bel Air 4 door Sports Sedan Hardtop 1/25 scale model-Revisited!

Beings that since I posted about this model back in 2010,  it has become my most popular post.  I thought I would revisit it with better, brand new digital photos of this model, that I just took, today. Now you can see this 1984 built AMT/Jo-Han scale model in somewhat more detail. It is a little over 8" long in 1/25 scale.

For these photos, I took the clear cover off the display box, and took the model outside to photograph it.

For a model that I built 28 years ago, I think it came out nice, and it still is very presentable! It is far from perfect but scale model kit builds of this body style of '57 Bel Air 4 door hardtops are practically non-existent.

 That is why I combined an AMT 1957 Chevy Bel Air 2 door hardtop kit with a Jo-Han/Ex-El products 1956 Pontiac Star Chief 4 door Catalina hardtop reproduction dealer promotional model to make this model.

Door lines on the body needed to be filled in and rescribed. Door handles needed to be shaved off and rebuilt in different spots.

The interior cavity opening in the body needed lengthened to accommodate the longer interior box and 4 door hardtop roof.  The back half of the interior box needed to be totally cut away, including the complete removal of the coupe rear arm rests, reconstructed, as well as lengthened, including rebuilding the package shelf, new rear door panels, new arm rests, as well as extending the width of the back seat, and making the coupe split back front seat into a sedan type solid back front seat. The window assembly came from a junked AMT original AMT 1957 Pontiac Star Chief Catalina 4 door hardtop friction promotional model. It fit my body shell without my having to modify it. I also added a turn signal lever to the steering column, as this is missing from the AMT kit. In that time period 1956 and 1957, Pontiac and Chevrolet shared the same hardtop roof sheet metal.

  The AMT '57 Chevy kit has the hood bar molded in as an integral part of the bumper grille assembly.

  

For this model, I cut the piece free from this assembly and attached it to the front of the hood as per the actual car.

A close up shot of this detail

This model is a replica of a yellow and white '57 Bel Air 4 door hardtop that I owned from 1980 through 1983. My dad made me sell it because he said that it was junk, and it would never be worth anything. I had alot of misgivings about this, but I was still "just a kid that did not know anything". so I did not really have a choice.The choices I did have were, either sell the car, or my dad would have booted me out of the house. There was no way that I could afford that, so I sold the car at a tremendous loss. My building this model was a consolation to me.

I thought you might enjoy seeing these images of this what I consider to be a nicer body style than the two door hardtop. I tried to open the hood to photograph the fully painted and detailed engine compartmet, but it was stuck shut. I have not opened it in about 15 years, and I was afraid if I would have used too much force, that I would have damaged the model. So I let it go.

                        So enjoy the images that I was able to take of this one of a kind model car.

Grille, and Chevrolet coat of arms on grille bar.

Let's zoom up on this view!

                                                 Oh, them cool '57 taillights!!

Here is the original post from 2010.

http://jayveejayaresjunk.blogspot.com/2010/11/1957-chevy-bel-air-4-door-sports-sedan.html

Jim.

"Buick '59." (As in the AMT 1/25 scale type!)

Here is an old model junkyard salvage job, that I got at the big AACA car show flea market area in the fall of 1984 for about $30.00. When I got it from the vendor, it had scars on it from having long custom fenderskirts that were glued onto the quarter panels. It also had some other holes in it from having the usual spotlights, antennae, and other useless  late 1950's era customizing garbage mounted on the thing. One roof pillar was cracked, and about ready to fall out. All and all, for an original 1959 3'n'1 kit, it was in darn good shape. Other than being missing one wheel cover, and the taillights, this model did not need all that much body filler work to bring it up to factory stock condition. I made my own wheel cover mold out of  Elmer's type glue, using one of the original wheel covers to make the mold. After the glue totally dried in about a day, I pulled the hubcap off the glue, and it left a perfect impression of the part in all it's fine detail. After the  glue mold was totally cured, in about a day, I filled it up with a casein type two part glue, and left this cure for about 3 days.  I was able to pop the new wheelcover out of the mold intact, and,"Walla!!", I had my fourth wheel cover, made out of all things, solidified casein glue. Just a note. Casein two part glue was an industrial electronically cured adhesive that was used in the woodworking industry up to the mid to late 1980's, when it was ruled illegal to make, sell, or use anymore in the United States, as one of it's main ingredients was formaldahyde, which according to our government has been proven hazardous to our health. So this type of glue is no longer available in the U.S. .

 Orthographic 3/4 driver's side front view.

  Passenger side view, showing right rear wheel cover that is made out of  casein glue that is normally electronically cured, but it was capable of air curing in about 3 days.

  Driver's side view.

 The chrome on this thing was,(is) in kind of crappy shape, so I just touched it up as best I could, back in 1984, when I got this model. It was not painted when I got it, so that made it easier for me to pretty much paint it whatever color I wanted, so  I used Testors light blue on it, and a dark flat blue for the interior. I hand painted on the exterior "chrome" trim using Testors silver. I had to black out the entire grille opening, first as the original chrome plating was really weak there. After the flat black was dry there,I went over,and repainted the grille "squares" silver, one at a time, very carefully, with a really small detail paint brush. I detailed this model the best I could at the time, considering that by that time, I did not have very much access as to how the interior of a 1959 Buick Invicta is supposed to be colored. I still think I did okay. I think I could probably do a better job today.

  This kit was only issued by AMT three times. The first time, of course was when it was issued new in the fall of 1958, for the new 1959 car model year. It was issued again, I was told, in 1963, as part of their "Craftsman Series" of kits of select cars. The final issue of this kit was as part of a Mexican road race series of cars they issued in 1969. It was able to be built stock. This  kit is what would be called a "curbside model" as it has no engine, or an opening hood, as was customary for the early  annual model car kits of American cars issued in the late 1950's. After this kit was issued in 1969, as the "Boondock Bomber" it has not been reissued since, as it is believed the molds for this kit were either lost or destroyed.

  I found the missing taillights I needed for this model, from my model car parts stash bin.

  Gotta love that GRILLE!!

  Dashboard detail.

 Just like the old Doowop song by the Medallions, "....Gonna get me a Buick '59!!"

Jim.

My 1978 Monte Carlo ; A Retrospective.

Here is a car that I owned for almost a whole generation. It had everything. Great looks, good handling as well as performance. I owned this car from August 26, 1988 until this past Friday, December 23, 2011. I had to basically get rid of it as we really did not have anymore outdoor storage space for it, as my kids are getting their driver's licenses,and I need more room for their cars. I basically was forced to sell it for scrap, even though I did not want to, as it has been sitting outside for so long, it was beginning to return to the Earth from which it came. When I bought it, it had 64,000 miles on it. When the 305-2 BBL carburater V-8 engine blew in the beginning of 1998, it had 166,000 miles on it. That's 102,000 miles I put on the thing in about the 9-1/2 years I drove it. It was the most reliable car I drove up to that point.

In 1989, we used this car on our honeymoon up to Mystic, Connecticut, about a 1200 mile round trip. The car performed flawlessly.

As the car would age, I did have things repaired on it as they wore out, but the car basically kept on "plugging" away! In 1990, I had new rocker panels, inner and outer welded into the car. In 1993, the engine got a new timing chain and gears. Around 1996 or 1997, I fabricated new quarter panel bottom ends , in between the rear wheel openings and back bumper. By the end of 1997, I noticed the rear bumper was begining to droop on the thing. Here, the rear frame rails were all but totally rotted away, from behind the rear axle mounts, to the back bumper. The body mounts were bad, too. So my mechanic sent the car to a welding shop, and they fabricated new rear frame rails, new rear body mounts, as well as new mounts for the gas tank. This made the understructure of the car good as new, and kept me from scrapping the car right then and there.

Then one month after I had the car inspected and back on the road, on the first day of work of the new year, 1998, the camshaft let go in the thing, basically destroying the engine. After all the work I put in the thing, I was heartbroken. Needless to say, I had to find a replacement car for it quick, and I found a maroon 1984 LTD Crown Victoria electronic fuel injected sedan. You, know the kind of car that the police used as interceptors. That's another story, though.
Here is one of the first good pictures I took of the car in 1990, after I replaced the vinyl mylar chrome coated bumper strips.

These two pictures were taken at the Lancaster, PA Airport, also in 1990.
This picture here, with my wife in the car was taken in 1992, on our newly purchased home lot, before we built on it. We were there that day to see how far the well drillers got in drilling our well. Three years after our place was built, we had our first child. I needed a car with more doors, so I bought, and fixed up a 1980 Chevy Malibu Classic station wagon, and I left the Monte sit for two years. After those two years the rear frame went bad on this wagon to the point where it could not be repaired, because the frame on it had rotted out all the way back to the rear doors, threatening the stability of the whole rear axle assembly. The only way to save that car would have been to get a whole new frame for it, and that would have cost more to do than the car was worth, so it was scrapped in the end of '97. That is why I tried to revive the Monte Carlo. But a month later, the engine destroyed itself.

After the engine let go in 1998, I was bound and determined to keep this car, and replace the engine in the thing, when I got the money to do so. I stored the car , outdoors on our property in the meantime.

In 2002, we added an addition to our house so that my son could have his own room. Because of all the construction that was going on, I needed to move the car off property for safe storage. My mother in law offered free garage space at her farmette that she was still living at, even though all my brother in laws married, and had moved out.

Running on 5 cylinders, bless its "heart", the car ran good enough, albeit horribly the 5 mile drive to her place, under its own power. It put out a vapor "contrail" like a jet plane does like you would not have believe. It got there. That was the last time I drove it. I was able to keep it at her place until 2009, when she had to auction off her place, and all her stuff, because she had to move to an assisted living community, as she was getting well into her mid seventies, and having some memory problems. So I had to have the car "rollbacked" back here to my place.
This is where it spent the remainder of it's days, rusting away, and sinking into the earth. I was never able to get it repaired. The money, when I got some extra, always had to go somewhere else. Kids braces, our newer cars needed repair, property maintenance repairs, etc. Sadly for me I was never able to ressurect this car.
In the above picture, which I took last year, 2010, you can see that I removed the header panel ornament, and all the car's emblems to keep them from getting stolen. I also removed the hubcaps, (wheelcovers). A couple of years before that , I removed the vinyl top, and it's surrounding trim pieces because the vinyl on the roof had deteriorated to the point where all it was doing was trapping water between the vinyl and the metal roof, making it rust faster than the rest of the car. So to keep it from totally rotting through, I removed it, and put the trim pieces in the car's trunk.
Back to 1991. Around this time, I found an original issue MPC promotional model of the car already painted up in the "Camel Metallic" brown that my car was painted. So I tore this model apart, and detail painted it up to make the exterior look exactly like my car. Because I still had the car in great shape, the real one, that is, I was able to get the exterior of this thing to looking really close to the way my actual car looked. The only difference is this scale model came with the optional enclosed full wheelcovers, where my actual car has the " Open finned" wheelcovers to simulate that this is an alloy wheel, but it was actually just a hubcap over a regular stamped steel 14" wheel.
The MPC models did not come with hood ornaments, so I made one out of pieces of scrap chrome plated plastic "flash", shaped as needed with an X-acto knife, touched up the edges with silver paint, and glued it onto the header panel of the model.
The whitewall stripes were painted on the tires, which I believe I got from another model car kit, because the original MPC blackwall tires that came with it were to scale much too tall, and fat.

The red taillight lenses were removed from the model, as well, and I hand painted the silver frames, as well as the white backup lights on them, then after the rest of the body was done, I re-installed them back on the model. Sidemarker lights were also painted on by hand, both the amber on the front chrome headlight/parking/sidemarker assembly pieces, and the red back quarter panel markers, as well.
The vinyl top mouldings were made from some very narrow cut pieces of lightweight posterboard strips, then glued in the appropriate places for the Landau top, then all the area, including the moulding was painted with the same flat beige paint that I used on the interior as well. The door side impact mouldings were made in the same way. The moulding that separates the vinyl area from the painted area that runs over the top of the roof was painted silver as on the actual car.
The wide lower body bright mouldings were simulated using aluminum tape cut to fit, on the model.
The outside mirrors came from a 1980 MPC "Class Action" 1980 Monte Carlo kit. Could not find a paint to match the metallic brown exactly, so I just used a gloss brown paint on them.
The body was clear coated, and buffed before I applied any trim, or trim paint.
Some overhead shots of this reworked MPC promo.
Even though this does not have near the in depth technical detail as the recently released Trumpeter kit, it is still possible to detail out these MPC promo's very nicely.
Here, you can see the detail silver paint work I did to the back end of this model to make it more realistic looking.
Dashboard and steering wheel shot. Although you cannot see it in any of these images, my car had a bench seat in it whereas this model has bucket seats with a center console, and automatic floor shifter. My actual car had a very nice beige cloth interior in it. When I got rid of the car, the seats were STILL in supple, and PERFECT shape, I might add.

In my eyes, the styling of the third generation Monte Carlo was the best it ever got, even though the original factory build quality of the body, and substructures of the car were crappy. I still wanted a scale model to remember it by, and I have it in this little 1/25 scale model!

Jim.