Yep another chopped AMT 49 Merc

[lo51merc]

After I finished the "Red Sled" I mentioned perhaps building another one, so I'm doing some things I either never did before, or just wanted to do again. Sam Barris's 49 Merc was inspiration from the start in the full fadeaway on the body sides, I used strips of .040 X .125, cut the contour to fit in the doors and glued them in place. They have been blended in but no putty yet. Of course the body sides have been dechromed. I really found out how much work has been done to the molds while doing this. The areas above and below the trim are sunken in. There's a lot of mold shift on the front too, the area below the headlight and front fender corner/grille shell especially. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna use the stock grille (for the first time) , french the headlights as usual, and have already rounded the front and rear hood corners. The forward trunk corners are next, but I don't know if I'll be doing the lower ones. I did the chop using that old "Scale Auto" article as a guide for the vertical posts. I found more difficulties there in that the top plastic is now very thin and I'm pretty sure the roof shape isn't what it used to be years ago. This version of the kit is the "Rides Magazine" iteration. The chassis I'll be using is one I built for my Red Sled, but it wasn't low enough so I saved it and built another one for the Red Sled. Gary
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Getting the hood mods drawn in, 2 hoods were used for this change.
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Getting going on the chop. I used 3 layers of masking tape for the guide for the razor saw.
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I made the skirts out of .030 sheet using the AMT 49 Ford kit custom skirts as my guide and added .125 to their height.
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You can see the mold shift under the headlight in this view. The skirts are bubbled out slightly so there's no interference with the tires.
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And finally, where it'll sit under the already finished chassis not used for the Red Sled.
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