CC In Scale: Cruising Across 49th Street – Customs & Customs

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– Posted on October 3, 2024

Last time we looked at pre-1948 modified cars. Let’s cross 49th St. (to use the late Pat Ganahl’s phrase) and see how far we get…

This brings us firmly into the era of the custom. That’s not to say earlier cars weren’t built as customs, but the emphasis tended to be on increased performance. From the late forties, there seems to have been more of a trend to make body changes; engine swaps sometimes seem to have been secondary. Possibly this may be a result of newer tech making for more powerful engines, combined with increasingly overdone factory chromework some of which just begged to be simplified.

I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail about mild customs, semi-customs, radical customs and all that. While distinctions were made for show classes, I suspect most custom builders just had a vision in their minds and went for it. Unless you were building something specifically as a show car.

‘Peaches’ is a Revell 1949 Mercury that comes with a chopped roof, and a choice of grilles, bumpers and taillights. The paintwork here is one of my happy accidents, a bright yellowy-gold topped with different tinted clears.

The AMT ’51 Chevy Fleetline kit could be built stock or custom, unusually for a 1979 kit. This is using the kit’s custom parts grille and bumpers. The original kit spawned hardtop and convertible variants.

This one was somebody else’s unfinished project. Here I’ve used a mixture of leftover Fleetline parts and random things from the spare box to make up for what was missing.

I’ve shown this Ford before. Based on the convertible kit, I turned the up-top into an approximation of the Victoria hardtop, and used an assortment of custom bits and pieces.

Last time the comment was made that anything with wheels is welcome at the Woodward Cruise. Fifties cars are so cool, and the decade seems to be regarded as something of a Golden Age nowadays – mostly I suspect by younger folk who didn’t live through that era. But I’ve always loved fifties American cars for the sheer design exuberance and lack of restraint. This Hudson’s not a custom apart from the paint. I wanted to two-tone it, without resorting to overused colour schemes. Lilac and grey works for me. Took me ages to figure out the pairing.

Many mods going on here in this ’53 Chevy. I chopped the top of the old late-seventies Monogram kit, lowering it a scale 6” then recontoured the hood and trunk lid to look more like the real thing (they were much too square), and reshaped the front fenders to lower the headlights.

A cool car in stock form, and I’ve built a few that way. For this one I kept the body stock but changed the wheels, lowered the front end, and fitted a twin-supercharger setup for the Stude V8 out of AMT’s Avanti kit.

The ’53 also comes with parts to make a custom version. A simple tasteful one. So…

Tri-five Chevys aren’t a favourite of mine; we only got four door sedans in 210 trim with the six and manual. Pretty boring, so long as we didn’t look at how you guys could spec them. Fords were commoner where I grew up; V8 only, and you could get the Fordomatic. But of course I’ve built a few Chevys.

Okay? Moving on…

This is AMT’s 1956 Ford kit in custom trim. I think the custom parts were based on a period show car. Some kit manufacturers got ‘name’ custom builders to design their parts, others just improvised, with sometimes unfortunate results.

This car’s a copy of one I saw on the street. We only got the Ford in Customline four-door trim, but quite a few US Fairlanes have made their way here. Might write a feature about this particular kit sometime; I’ve built enough.

Another one of my brushed paint jobs, two coats of the old Humbrol enamel.

This is AMT’s 1957 Ford Fairlane 500, changed to a base Fairlane, with less-thrusting headlights and custom taillights.

Here’s one in purple, with less chrome. Normally I don’t like the idea of painting over trim, but I wanted to retain the trim’s contours. Another of my ‘experiments’.

1974 Aussie Ford Copper Bronze, with pearl white interior.

’58 Impala in Pearl White over Mica Red. These were Tamiya hobby paints.

Wire wheels on a ’58 Plymouth? Why not!

Let’s round this off with a ’59 Caddy. Has to be pink.

That ends our Woodward Cruise in scale. Not quite sure what we’ll see next time, but it won’t be sixties. I don’t want to be predictable, can’t have that….