The Road Crew XL-erates!

Well, another weekend and another weekend working! Yet again, I had to spend half my Saturday in the office playing catch-up on stuff I couldn’t get done during the week due to various extended troubleshooting sessions and other types of issues that always arise in an engineer’s life, leaving only Sunday for chores and house maintenance. That’s left little time for the hobby, but I’ll drop at least one post this weekend showing an update to The Road Crew that I think is worth presenting!

Restoring old damaged Thunderjets can be a tricky business: you always have to wonder how far you should go with it. As I’ve mentioned several times, I have become quite proficient at fabricating replacement screw posts-something I was once convinced couldn’t even be done. Since then, I’ve learned a few other tricks, but most of those require the use of “donor cars.” The problem with that is that the donor cars themselves are difficult to come by, because the things on that are usually damaged – meaning the A and B pillars or the rear wheel wells­ – are exactly the kind of things that turn a body into a parts car in the first place. I mean, if you had a ‘69 Charger with the rear wheel wells carved out and then you found another one with good wheel wells that you could theoretically use to cut up to repair the wheel wells on the other car, then the question arises: why wouldn’t you just save the parts car?

Every case is different, of course: sometimes there’s an exceptionally rare color that you’re trying to preserve, and you might take parts from a more common color, although then you’re painting those replacement parts….which de-values your original. In other cases, you might get really lucky and find a car in a junk bin that is pretty much destroyed, but still has the part that you need: as in, good wheel wells, but with the top torn off of it or something. But this is a rare situation; I have found that, often, it might be best to leave a slightly damaged car in the condition that you find it in after doing the appropriate cleanup and working as best you can with what you have.

That was the route that I decided to take with this pair of ‘67 Ford Galaxie XL 500 fastback coupes. I found these for sale as a pair at what I thought was a pretty reasonable price, but as you can see, they are both suffering from the common A/B pillar damage. Using extreme care and patience, I was able to tweak what remained of those posts back into place as well as possible. They are still obviously bent, but the rooflines on both cars now look right, and a replacement window insert for one of them solved the broken glass problem. The other car was missing a rear bumper, which I was also able to obtain as a correct reproduction part.

Since both of these were delivered without chassis, the combination of providing my own, plus a couple of replacement parts, bumped up the price of these quite a bit, but I still think I’m ahead, and this is a body that I needed more of in my collection, because 2 of the previous 3 that I have are both imposters in a manner of speaking, although in different ways

The orange car is from the 2nd haul from Performance Slots and Hobbies in 2021. It is a reproduction made by a very skilled craftsman. I’m not sure who made it, but it looks almost exactly like the real thing other than being molded in a color that the original was never made in. The blue one is an Aurora original, but not a Thunderjet: I did an extensive and detailed post on that car here.

In contrast, this red and tan pair were both original Thunderjet slotties that needed no trick modification to the screw posts, or anything else, to mount just fine on an original chassis.

Both of these bodies needed a lot of polishing to remove surface scratches – the tan one far more than the red one – and both needed a little touching up to the chrome on the sides. For the tan car, I wound up using my last available closed rivet chassis, which is not a great runner, but it does OK even if it’s slow. The red one got a newer open rivet chassis that is much “perkier” on the track, and as a result, it got a set of JelClaws for the rear, since this car’s long tail gives it a tendency to slide out copiously in the turns. Since the tan car was the more distressed of the pair, I elected to leave the somewhat delaminated wheels on the chassis-at least for now-to embrace that “old beater” look. I may revisit this decision later, but for now, it stays.

Lined up beside my other stock original, a nearly pristine yellow version, this makes a nice color rainbow in the section of the Road crew parking lot shaded by the corkscrew!

So there’s the update from Drag City for this weekend, but I’m happy to say that a long Whale Hunt has just been ended successfully, and I’m about to add a rare one to The Crew next… I’ll show you that one too after a little bit of cleanup, coming up soon!