1/64th NASCAR Models by Lou Colyer!!

2 Fred Lorenzen Rides

Quote from Lou:
"...The #28 car pictured on the right was an attempt at building Lorenzen's 1962 Galaxie Starlift car as raced at Atlanta. This car and commentary about it and the Atlanta race have already been posted in another segment (Click here - Mr N.) so I would refer you there for more details. This project was my first attempt at making a 1962 Galaxie from one of the available 1961 Galaxie police cars in my project box. As I noted in the other posting there are similarities in the 1961 and 1962 cars. The hood, front fenders, front doors, and windshields are the same. The grilles differ, as do the rear fenders, trunk lid, and rear taillight panel.

To begin turning this 1:64th scale diecast '61 Ford into a '62 I started by removing enough of the '61 grille metal to allow a flat, thin strip of metal to be glued between the headlight bezels. The '62 Galaxie grille is flat and this gave me a surface upon which to place a decal looking like a '62 Galaxie grille.

This build posed the additional complication of replacing the 1961 4-door roof with a fastback 2-door roof from another donor car. At this point let me say that there is little honor among 1:64th scale car manufacturers. There must be literally hundreds of different size 1:64th scale cars. The 1960 Galaxie car which provided the fastback roof for this project was slightly larger than the 1961 body I was converting. Add to that the fact that one does not often find 1:64th scale cars suitable for NASCAR modeling, especially when they are needed. If this project was going to get done I was going to be using the pieces I had. The donor roof consisted of the roof and both front and rear windows molded as one plastic piece.

I cut the metal roof from the 1961 body just behind the top of the windshield and removed the plastic windshield from the donor roof the same way. The donor roof was wider and longer than the metal roof it was replacing but the rear window would fit into the 1961 body if the opening were enlarged. Then began a long careful process of opening up the diecast body to accept the slightly huskier fastback rear window. I was happy with the end fit I got. I then marked where to cut off the excess roof length, then contoured the roof to mate against the cutoff over the windshield. Next followed more filing to taper the slightly wide roof to meet smoothly with the ends of the windshield. By this time I had come too far to abandon the project so I pressed on.

Moving to the body, the '61 body fins needed to be filed off being careful to leave a nicely rounded rear fender surface when finished. Then filler was applied to the rear fenders starting just ahead of the rear wheel arch to fill all the sunken 1961 contours. A 1962 Galaxie rear fender has more of a slab side look than the 1961. Filler was applied into all the sunken areas of the 1961 trunk. The '62 Galaxie trunk is almost flat across all the way to the rear panel. When the filler hardened I reshaped the rear of the car, fenders and trunk, often checking pictures of a '62 car to make sure I was getting the right contours. The top of the taillight panel of a '62 Galaxie is angled toward the front of the car, so starting at the top of the rear bumper I filed away at the taillight panel to reshape that contour. And then came the fussy nibblybits of sanding, primering, checking, and painting. The body was painted first, then the roof was glued into place. After smoothing out the windshield/roof seam the roof section was hand painted.

The graphics scheme on my Starlift car does not look like that of the raced car. The graphics I used were based on several 1962 pictures I found online of the car as it's new roof configuration was being tested, and at the time they were the only pictures of the car I had. There is a web site, raresportsfilms.com, which sells a video of the 1962 Atlanta race which has footage of the Starlift cars in the race."

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