As the basement toy room becomes my refuge from the summer heat, I was recently looking around for something to take my mind off some rather unpleasant recent events, and I found just the thing!
Around a year ago or so I bought a whole mess of these Model Motoring ’69 GTO Judge bodies from one of my favorite vendors who was running low on them. I got them for nothing other than “posterity,” knowing that someday they will be a lot harder to come by and a lot more expensive than they are now. I think I got 5 or 6 of them in various colors and I happened upon them and thought it would be fun to build another member of The Road Crew, since I had only 1 such car in The Crew, the bright red one with the red 5 lug wheels.
I also had this orange T-Jet chassis lying around. I originally bought it as a experiment to use on the orange ’67 Malibu, but after putting it all together, I decided I didn’t like the way it looked, and replaced it with a black T-Dash chassis instead, so this orange chassis has been sitting around unused. I had no idea what I would ever do with it, so I thought, well, why not mount one these ’69 Judge’s on it and see how it looks?
Of the colors I had in stock, I picked the lime green, since I have only 2 cars in the Road Crew in this hue (another ’67 Malibu and a ’69 Charger). A set of axles and a set of chrome Vincent 5-lugs and a pair of new Jel Claws on the rear all came together pretty quick, and after searching for the right sized screws and working them very carefully into the virgin screw posts with no stress marks or cracking, I was pretty happy with the results.
Like all T-Dash chassis, this one needed quite a bit of oil to quiet it down and it’s hard to control with the vintage original Aurora speed controllers I use on the HO Highway; micro-movements of the rheostat are required to get it to move at a speed quick enough to be fun but not enough to launch it off the track. I’ve gotten used to this, though, and pretty soon I had it dialed in well enough that I decided to use it as a “drone” to race against that very orange ’67 Malibu I referenced earlier, with me manually driving the orange car on the more challenging Lane 1 while the new lime GTO was driven by “The Phantom Racer.”
There was no need to build this car; I was just looking for something to occupy my mind, and for that purpose, it worked out very well! As you can see, though, I’m running out of parking space for The Road Crew! If I add just a couple more cars, I’m going to have to start doing some major rearranging! I’m sure I can figure something out, though…I mean, more cars is always good, right? 😉
More cars is always good and these are some neat and fun additions to the crew!