69 Charger 500--Finished at Last!!!

At Last!! It's time to wrap up the "MPC Charger 500" Vintage Build! It defies belief that what should have been a simple 2-3 week project turned into 5 months of spills, accidents, and glue blobs! This was the most jinked build I have ever done....wrecking the paint with the wrong clearcoat turned out to just be the beginning of my problems....




One of the main issues was that the front grille simply didn't fit into the body provided--the body was too wide for the "Coronet" grille. When I was trying to repair this I carelessly glooped some G-S Hypo Cement on to drivers side front fender. Out came the isopropyl to remove it right? BAD IDEA! The alcohol ate through a bit of the Future Floor Polish clearcoat! Now one of the front fenders is less shiny then the other....and you can see the yucky shim I ended up putting next to the front grill/bumper to hold it to the body. There are other drips and runs here and there with the clearcoat if you look carefully. I guess I didn't have the energy to spend more weeks on getting the clearcoat and polish just right. Oh well.



I am going to display this build "hood up" since the engine compartment ended up looking pretty good. But the engine had its fair share of issues as well. For instance, I had a heck of a time getting the "426 Hemi" decal onto the air cleaner. I ended up buying 4 sets from Keith Marks Graphics and that's a good thing, because it took 4 of the Hemi decals to get the air cleaner looking OK. And I learned something else: when applying decals on engine parts, put the decal on when the part AFTER it is in place, not before. Doh! I ended up doing a good job getting decal #3 onto the air cleaner, only to destoy it when I put the aircleaner on the engine.

As long as we're talking engines--I spent a fair amount of time trying to "modernize" the old-school tooling of the hemi, and, the air cleaner was treated with Alclad to make it look chrome. Turns out none of this was necessary--Revell has a much better tooled Dodge Hemi (with a great looking Hemi-style chrome air cleaner) in the 67 Dodge Charger 426 Kit, # 85-7669. Lesson learned: before spending a lot of time on modifying something, make I need make sure it isn't already out there in "box stock" form! As it is the air cleaner looks like it is a plastic bit painted silver!!!



The rear bumper didn't fit either--I ended up having to carve out the rear valance, push the bumper in place(no glue needed; it was a tight squeeze) and then touch up aroud the bumper with hemi orange MCW paint....I know I've said this before, but I need to spend more time test fitting before I paint. I assumed the rear bumper would fit--it looked like it would...but "when you assume".....




In spite of all the issues I had with this build, it's not a bad looking build, and IMO the MPC tooling of the body looks more "long and lean" than some more current offerings, like the "Revell Muscle!" Dodge Charger from Revell #85-2824.

So I am thinking, what next?





I am tempted to jettison the whole "muscle car accurate build" thing and go back to hot rods, which can pretty much be built anyway I want. But there is a lot to be learned from builds like this, so I think a few more are in store, soon.

69 Charger 500--MCW Lacquer Finish, Back to Square One

One thing about a hobby Blog, you can tell how long you've been working on a project by when you started the first Blog entry about it. For this given build, it's been way, way too long. What I naively thought would be a few weeks on an almost box stock "vintage" build has turned into more than five months (!!!) of hard work and much fear and loathing. Part of it because of travel, part because of the holidays, part because of a destroyed paint job....



Ah yes, destroyed paint. As I said a few weeks ago, due to an incompatible clearcoat, my MCW lacquer paint job was ruined; the 69 Charger body had to be stripped of paint using EasyOff Oven Cleaner, and I had to start over with the paint and body prep from square one. After several days in a Tupperware tub the old paint finally came off, but I also found that some of the putty repairs I made to sinkmarks and whatnot came off too and had to be redone, like on the hood.



It almost got me to abandon the project--all the careful work I did filling this and that casting imperfection were gone along with the paint. So I did the putty work over, as well as the Keith Marks decals, the Bare Metal Foil, the MCW paint.



Did I do as good a job the 2nd time? Nope.



MCW clearcoat was what I was going to use to seal up the lacquer color but I didn't like the way it looked after a few coats--it didn't go on smooth, in fact quite the opposite, and was not shiny at all. Not sure what happened--what I did wrong--wrong settings in my airbrush? Wrong pressure on my new compressor? Don't know....I ended up sanding it down, putting on a few more color coats of MCW Hemi Orange and calling it a day for color coats.



I was going to use Tamiya TS13 lacquer clearcoat, but after much reading online about Tamiya clearcoats, I figured there was a chance the lacquer on lacquer could destroy the decals (maybe), crack and craze and split after 6 months of drying(maybe) and even react adversely with the MCW lacquer color coats (maybe). In the end I resorted to "Future Floor Polish" Acrylic covering, which is a trusty standby that I have used a few times for other builds such as the Texas Old School Rod.

I have never seen it react badly with any paint, provided the color coat was really, really dry. I brushed on a thick coat (Brushing looks better to me than airbrushing--it's self levelling and brushing gets a nice heavy coat) and after 8 hours put on a second coat. Now I can see the end of the tunnel on this build! But I said that before!



So here's what I have so far. Have I been here before? Yes. has it all been worth it? Maybe. I do this to relax and get my mind off of other things. But that doesn't account for my wife yelling at me for getting EasyOff on the lawn, or having to buy paint and decals (again) and redoing the body prep work (again) and priming and painting (again) and clearcoating (again). But is it fun? Does it make me happy? Yes, building these silly bits out of plastic and metal, that mean so little in the grand scheme of things, still does that.

69 Charger 500--Still Being Stripped--So in the Meantime....Starbird Chevy!!!

I've been on the road again and the bad news is that the 69 Charger body, whose lacquer paint was destroyed by using an incompatible clearcoat, still isn't stripped. I've now applied 3 coats of Easy-Off, and for the most part the stripper is working. What started as a relatively easy almost box stock build has turned into the project that won't end.

Like everything else on the Charger 500 build, the paint stripping is going slowly! Nothing much happened after the first 2 coats of Easy Off. After coat 3, to my surprise, the paint didn't flake off; instead the Easy Off seemed to attack whatever binds the paint to the plastic. About 90% of the paint peeled off like a skin off a grape. Whatever works I guess. But there is still 10% that refuses to come off, so I just started Easy Off coat 4 last night.

So as not to sit around and "watch paint dry" (actually, watch paint be removed) it's on to another project I had shelved. As I said last time, one of the backburner projects I'm working on now is an attempt to marry a 55 Chevy with a Bubble Top custom, in the hopes to come up with some sort of scale Darryl Starbird type custom.

The 55 Chevy donor is an AMT body that "lost out" to the Revell 55 Chevy in the 55 Chevy Gasser build. I didn't like the roofline on the AMT body so it seemed like a good candidate for a roof conversion.



The bubbletop donor kit is the AMT Silhouette #38450. This is a kit that I built at least 3 times as a kid--always liked it.




I didn't do the greatest job marrying the plastic together, and there were big holes that I filled with strip styrene and CA glue/baking soda. Next I went against common wisdom--that you should use as little putty as possible--and covered the whole thing with Evercoat Eurosoft. So as you can see, the body is lousy with putty--putty on nearly every surface--putty everywhere.



Eurosoft is great stuff for what we do. I think it was made for filling plastic bumpers on 1:1 cars, but it's great heavy-duty putty for scale applications as well: it mixes up fast, dries fast, sticks to plastic like no one's business, and is easily filed and sanded without chipping off.

Next I attacked the putty-laden body with 150 grit sandpaper and a 200 grit Dremel wheel, to get the really big chunks off. Then I sanded using 400 grit wet and dry and the "foam block technique". This left some pits and ruts--using 400 grit on putty seems to usually do this.



To fill in the ruts I applied Tamiya basic putty and, once on the body, painted over the putty blobs with Testor's liquid cement. Like the Eurosoft putty application, this totally stunk up the house, and I imagine is toxic as all get out, so I wore a respirator when applying this, and you should too, if you ever work with these materials.



The last secret weapon in this is Duplicolor Filler-Primer. This is sort of like super thin putty you can spray all over the body, filling in minor scratches and whatnot. I wouldn't spray it on a body with details that need to be preserved, but for this sort of project it's perfect. After the putty and liquid cement was sanded out, I put on a heavy coat, to the point where it ran. It's OK, it needs to be sanded anyway.






So here's what I have so far. This is after 1 round of Evercoat, 1 round of putty and 1 really thick coat of Duplicolor filler, with plenty of 150 and 400 grit sanding between and after. I have a custom body that's not looking too bad. It's not done obviously, but at this point it looks to me like the body is going to make it to a chassis someday. It was so rough looking after the initial Evercoat application I wasn't sure if it was going to make it this far!

69 Charger 500--Still on Hold

I have been out of town for the past 2 weeks on business....I thought I could visit some cool hobby shops while on the East Coast but no dice. In the meantime, the 69 Charger project was languishing back here in California.



As I said last time, a clearcoat disaster means I have to strip the paint off the 69 Charger 500 and start over. After a bit of research I have found that Easy Off Oven Cleaner is supposed to be a good bet....but does it remove lacquer? Maybe and maybe not, but I'm on day 3 and the 3rd application of this stinky stuff and so far not a lot of paint has come off. I have also heard dot-3 brake fluid (Dot-2 is best but isn't made anymore) works as well. If the Easy Off continues to be Not-So-Easy-Off I may need to resort to Brake Fluid next.




So while the Charger body is sitting in Tupperware getting stink-i-fied by Easy Off, I figured it'd be a good time to take an inventory of other projects I've been working on that are on hold now. First up is a 5 window 32 Ford that was chopped; the rear section is from a 36 Ford 1/24th scale; and the headlights are from the AMT Wagon Rod #30087 which I bought off Ebay for something like $3. I chopped the headlights right off the Wagon Rod's fenders and epoxied them to what you see here. I have a chassis already built for it, and am debating a using a Buick Nailhead engine versus something kitbashed from various Revell Packs. Sanding it was taking forever, so I shelved it, but now that I've learned the trick of making a sanding block out of foam rubber I'm back in business.



Second up is a project inspired by the cool stuff done by Bill Stillwagon; a 51 Chevy curbside that's been made into a hardtop. If you want to see an awesome builder, go to his site--his stuff is the coolest! Anyway, the 51 Chevy was shelved because I wasn't sure how get the sanding done. A chassis/wheel setup is already built for this; I was going to put some sort of cool engine in but couldn't get the hinged hood to sit right so it's going to be a curbside.



My most ambitious project to date--this is pretty experimental for me--is a marriage between an AMT 55 Chevy body and the AMT Silhouette #38450. This is a sort of oil-and-water amalgam of different kits and as you can see is made up of way too much Evercoat polyester putty. No idea if it will ever come out, but I thought it'd be good practice to see how far I can stretch the polyester putty thing.





Finally the 6" chop on a 32 Ford Sedan. This is the "Orange Crate" look. I have already finished a 32 Sedan chopped dragster, but I thought it'd be fun to revisit the Orange Crate idea for a street car or maybe a salt flats racer. Not sure where this is going yet, and the chop is a bit fragile, so this one will be a lot of work to finish up.

It's tempting to jettison the 69 charger since the loss of the paint, but, I want to stay focused. The 69 Charger has made me realize that I like customizing a lot more than making knock offs of "showroom model" type cars, even though I love old Mopars. But there is only so much time, and many ideas to chase down--I was going to build 3 stock Mopars--the Charger 500, a Roadrunner, and a '71 Charger R/T, but at this point that seems unlikely. The next build will probably be another custom of some sort.

69 Charger 500--Disaster Strikes!

I was counting the days before the 69 Charger "Vintage MPC" build was done--but no longer. It's been one of the saddest days during the brief rebirth of this stupid hobby, and the bad news is that I've lost the otherwise great paint to some sort of issue with the clearcoat process.



As I said last time I was painting the body with MCW Hemi Orange, and it was looking good--in fact, the smoothest and most orange-peel free paint job I had yet done. There were a few chips in the engine compartment from the hood being test fitted, but otherwise, it was looking very good.




The problems began when I applied about the fourth coat of Krylon Crystal Clear. It's acrylic coating, so the label says, and I would assume that that means there should be little or no interaction with the underlying lacquer paint. Adding to this false sense of security: I have this used same clear coat over many Duplicolor Lacquer finishes without incident. And it was OK for the first 3 coats. So it should be OK to use over MCW lacquer every time, right?

Wrong. During clear coat pass number four a huge series of bubbles and orange peel welts welled up on the passenger side roof.



I tried to wet sand the bad spot with 2000 sandpaper--figuring maybe the extreme orange peel could be fixed with polish somehow. To make a long story short the entire paint job, all the way down to the primer and beyond, came up when I tried to sand it. So I had a catastrophic failure of paint adhesion here. What you see here is what's left--the paint literally got stripped down to the raw plastic.



I have no idea what happened or why, but I had already applied the bare metal foil--which came out pretty well, the Keith Marks decals (didn't do a perfect job, but it was going to be good enough) and painted in the side turn signals. In other words, in addition to the paint itself, there was a lot of time and effort put into this part of the build before disaster struck.

This is a major setback--I am now thinking I am going to have to strip the paint and start the entire paint process over--I can't see any other way to save this thing.

One thing for sure: I am going to do more research as to what sort of clearcoat works best over MCW paints and not assume every acrylic will be inert over every lacquer.

'69 Charger 500--MCW Paint

After a few weeks of humid and wet weather things are finally clearing up. I figured I could try the paint on the 69 Charger 500 model without too much fear of the humidity causing the paint to "cloud over".



As I said last time, after some online research it seems that an outfit called Model Car World is where all the serious builders go to get their factory-perfect colors. Their website has an almost bewildering choice of paints....I played it safe and chose Hemi Orange since most of the 1:1 photos I have are of a red/orange Charger 500, so I figure this color to be accurate.

It took a few weeks to get the paint, but when the bottles arrived I was happy....the Hemi Orange looked perfect when compared to photos of 1:1 69 Chargers.



My standard rig for painting bodies is a Testors "Clear Blue" compressor, which is on loan from a friend, and a Badger Model 200 airbrush. I have to give the loaner back so I bought an expensive compressor but it hasn't arrived yet--next paint job though we'll see if the added advantage of a moisture trap and adjustable output help.

The Badger Model 200 is single action, so it's not a good choice for anything tricky, but for painting bodies it gets the job done, and is relatively easy to use and clean compared to my double action airbrush.



I was surprised that the MCW paint is hobby lacquer--I assumed it was acrylic based but it isn't. It is prethinned, and for me the paint went on perfectly without any sort of thinning or futzing necessary--just load up the brush and shoot. After each coat I ran a bowl of lacquer thinner (Ace's cheapo high-test lacquer thinner--I have read that I need "quality" lacquer thinners for good results, but so far I haven't seen any difference--and besides, I am just using it to clean things, not to thin the paint). After 2 color coats I broke down the airbrush for a quick clean, then reassembled and kept spraying. I had no issues with clogging, which I attribute to the paint being correctly thinned and repetitive cleaning of the brush.


I applied 6 color coats--the MCW site says not to use mist coats, so I didn't. I let each color coat dry for about 10 minutes then lightly sanded out any imperfections with dry 1200 grit sandpaper. It's always a bit scary to scratch a freshly applied coat, but I have found that lightly dry sanding between lacquer color coats doesn't hurt anything. The paint has surprisingly small amounts of orange peel, compared to say Duplicolor or even Tamiya lacquer, and it self-healed surprising well, spreading itself around and "deblotching" to a certain degree. Another thing I learned (or "re-learned"--I already discovered this but had already forgotten....): that for ALL spray painting, ALWAYS start the spray stroke while NOT pointing the can or airbrush directly at the subject you're painting! This seems rudimentary--since that first shot almost always leaves runs and blobs of paint--but somehow I always find myself forgotting this simple rule.

In spite of some minor issues along the way, the result is, so far, the best/smoothest paint job I've done yet. Some of the paint in the engine compartment chipped a bit when I test fitted the hood, but I can probably touch this up without too much trouble. And the orange does look like the right orange. Yes indeed--MCW rules!

69 Charger 500--More from the Mopar Basement

The wife has been out of town for 5 weeks so that should make a perfect month to build, right? But for some reason I can't drag myself down the basement very often. Maybe I'm missing her too much?




So when I do make it to the basement I have been working prepping the body of an MPC "Vintage" 69 Charger 500....and it turns out the body needs a lot of work. Along with the older tooling comes sink marks, mold lines, and various bugaboos that need repair and TLC. Newer kits have these problems too, in my limited experience, but not as much as I am seeing here. Fixing up minor sink marks isn't hard but is time consuming. To get rid of the sink marks I used Tamiya Basic putty, followed by wet sanding with 600 grit, then a second coat of putty followed by 1200 grit. That seems to leave things flat and pit-free.



Only after dropping on the primer can I start too see more little problems. There are still a couple of sink marks on the hood that I missed the first time around, and of the 3 Ertl Charger kits I got for this project this hood was the best one! I glooped on a bit more putty after I grafted on the hood mounting "hardware" from the Revell Daytona Kit #85-2824. To thin out the putty a bit--making it flow better into the sink marks--I applied Testors Liquid cement right over the freshly applied putty. Right now the hood opens fine without having to alter the already modified interior/firewall/dashboard. I got lucky on this, since I decided I would put the hinges into place and prime them, and only then figure out how to make the hood swing open. This sort of pre-planning is critical usually; I just went for it and it worked.

I still have to put in some support towards the front of the hood so it doesn't sag, but that shouldn't be too difficult.



I wanted to find some "dog dish" wheels for this build, since they look great on the 1:1 reference photos, but I couldn't find any online so I gave up and went back to the kit's wheels.



I don't know if I like these older kits better than the new ones. On older kits there are far fewer parts, which makes assembly easier but painting harder. The exhaust/differential/springs has to be masked and painted with different metallics and flats to give me the look I want....



It will be body-paint-time before too long....after some research, it seems that MCW is the place to go to get good matches for 1:1 manufacturer's paint. Their prices are reasonable--$12 for 2 fl ounces of Hemi Orange seems like a fair price to me and to my eyes the color looks perfect.

The last problem is decals. Turns out the decals supplied with the MPC kit aren't correct--the 1:1 stripe goes over the rear side lights and what MPC supplied doesn't. This left me in a quandry--do I try to make "correct" decals myself? Do I use the MPC decals that look OK but that I know are almost certainly "wrong"? Making the replacement decals myself is beyond what I am skilled enough to do, probably, and if I use "wrong" ones it will bother me every time I see the finished model. So what to do?

Turns out there is a guy named Keith Marks who makes an aftermarket decal set for the Charger 500 that looks perfect. I dropped him an email to see if he can sell me some and haven't heard back yet. I hope he's still out there!!!