The late sixties and early seventies is where two major motorsports began to grow into their own little spectacular bubble of progress. One that got popped in 1973 but before that, you had for instance NASCAR hitting a new peak with the “Aero Warrior” era; the ’69 Ford Torino Talladega, Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II, Dodge Charger Daytona and the final one, the ’70 Plymouth Superbird. The other sport? Trans-Am. It too had it’s golden age around 1968 that lasted to about 1973 and it made for a more competitive scene cause it had a lot more variety in contestant’s cars, plus it had two plain categories: Under 2.0L and Over 2.0L.
This was cause of the pony car popularity explosion, so you had factory-backed teams sprouting out every where you’d see, you had AMC Javelins, Chevrolet Camaros(even a sole Nova), Ford Mustangs, Pontiac Firebirds, Dodge Challengers and of course, the one featured here; Plymouth ‘Cudas. And all these teams had some proper talent behind the wheel, for instance AMC had Team Penske, Chaparral drove Camaro Z/28s(famous for the Chaparral Cars), Bud Moore Engineering drove Mustang BOSS’s(NASCAR champions) and the talent just goes on. Plymouth hired All American Racers(famous Indy 500 and Formula 1 racers), specifically Dan Gurney and “Swede” Savage(whom died in ’73, which was famous for sitting alive in a pool of burning fuel and survived the ordeal, just to pass away allegedly from hepatitis-B in hospice care after the accident) and they gave ’em ‘Cudas to roll with.
Though, what makes the car so unique is two parts amazing, one part sadness. Obviously, the rules were similar to NASCARs in which all participating cars needed homologation special versions with over thousand produced so Plymouth made a one year only version of the AAR ‘Cuda, slapped a 383ci V8 Six Pack in there, gave it the special bits like the front air spoilers and the ducktail rear wing and the now iconic strobe stripes and blacked out hood and fender tops, it was as close as you could get to a powerful Trans-Am car without actually sitting in the race. The thing that makes it a bit sad is that the AAR Team quickly quit with Trans-Am racing after coming in dead last overall in the 1970 season together with Dodge, both getting under 20 points and being 20 points behind third place.
But despite that, the car grew a legacy. It looked awesome, it was a ‘Cuda and it had a bit of a humble yet obvious team sponsorship badge on it, like you could still easily see it was a factory stock car but still unique simply cause of the strobe stripes. Hell, even in kit form it is unique.
This is the only 1970 ‘Cuda that exists in 1/24th scale form. It saw its first release in 1995, based on the Monogram 1971 Cuda and in part spliced together with the Monogram 1970 Challenger T/A kit(a similar car, in style as well as features), it still has some pieces of the Challenger on some sprues and a couple of HEMI ‘Cuda bits here and there but mostly Challenger. Hell, the entire rear fascia is on one of them, go figure. The re-release of the kit from 2007 is miles better than this original as Revell had time to improve, for instance what this kit lacks is a decal sheet with useful extras like side marker lights, ‘Cuda logos and such and the ’07 kit has them all. Downside? The ’07 kit is nigh impossible to find used, let alone new.
Luckily, I had some spares from the 1970 ‘Cuda kit that I replaced with the awesome decals from Keith Marks, so the sidemarker lights and such weren’t a issue, but they would’ve been nice if they had been included. Speaking of which, there’s some glaring differences between the all new tool and infinitely awesome 2013 new tool – it’s got some shape issues for the most part. For instance, the grille is totally unique to this kit which is awesome but it has a far too exaggerated curvature to it and the same goes for the tail end. But that’s actually kind of it for the downsides! Other than the over-exaggerated features, the kit is freakin’ wonderful. It all goes together like a dream and the engine bay despite it being a Monogram kit by birth with Revell touches is actually less of a slab infested bore-fest and looks a lot more like the real thing.
The only thing I’d say is that, with it being a Monogram kit, it’s simplistic as sin. The engine block is five pieces all in all, the whole front grille is one piece just missing the lights and chrome bumper. But what the hell, if the simplicity was the reason that it goes together as well as it does, then fine, it’s totally forgiven.
I didn’t do a whole lot to the kit’s color aside from the obvious black front end and whatnot, the car is colored in the Go-Go Green Plymouth color and it has this nice high glossy sheen to it so I left it alone entirely, it was the color I wanted to begin with(even bought a can of spray paint to mimic the color!). The only things I truly did differently to it were the wheels, the BF Goodrich Radial T/As and the Magnum 500 wheels were pretty much the sole change. That and wiring the engine, but that doesn’t really count as a change.
Good grief this kit is nice, I ended up buying three of ’em. Why? Well it meshes fantastically with a few ideas I got, like a 1971 340 ‘Cuda and making a little home improved 1970 426 HEMI AAR ‘Cuda. It’s wonderful that the ’70 and ’71 kits share so much!
’70 Plymouth AAR ‘Cuda 340-6 specifications:
Kit: #85-7601
Skill Level: 2
Parts: 76
Molded in: Go-Go Green
Scale: 1/24
Oh yeah, now this is a unique one, ain’t it. Every once in a while I enjoy building kits of supposed “great” cars, which ended up being failures or legendary for their unreliability, or in this case of the wonderful front wheel drive Chrysler K and L-platform era; “dull“. MPC made a fair few of these little kits in the early eighties, which included the L-platform Dodge Charger, the Dodge Omni/024(the predecessor) and the eventual Shelby Charger GLHS(Goes Like Hell S’more) that Carroll Shelby took a interest to and actually turned into formidable race and drag cars.
This, though, is not a Shelby Charger. This is a ’81 Omni. There’s no mincing words about the quality of the car, especially this one which came with the legendarily slow 1.7L Volkwagen inline four(the ’81 onwards 2.2L I4 from Chrysler improved the ride and speeds significantly), but it was a direct answer to the second fuel crisis in 1979 when yet again the signs came out and burbling V6’s and V8’s roared around on gas station lots waiting in line. Along with the Dodge Omni Miser, Dodge Aries and Dodge Colt, the Omni 024 was meant to be European under the hood but American on the road. Fitting pretty much the entire idea of Detroit’s mentality at the time of “just buy an American car, it’ll be as good as a European or Asian car“.
Forgive me for the history lesson, but with these little cars and the respective kits, this day and age, it helps to get some of the context on how these things came to be and how they’re actually really unique, if not a reminder of a dark time in automotive history.
To an extend I did wanna show the kit some extra love cause it’s actually a really, really decent kit coming from the MPC guys so I for instance gave it a set of nicer wheels. A set of Foresight Ventures Indy 500 mags from 
On top of that, I used some decals from the 
The quadfecta’s complete. Or at least, for the time being until I manage to shrink down the ’11 40th Anniversary decals I’m cooking up in Photoshop lately. But what we got here is arguably the first proper anniversary edition Camaro. Back in ’97, car manufacturers were quite desperately clinging onto brand names and former glory cause give or take ten years before they more or less placed the gun barrel against the muscle car and gently pulled the trigger.
Now the fourth generation wasn’t particularly popular, I mean the cars still sold and they were actually quite reliable and decent on the speed department too, but a lot of people argue its the ugliest generation of the Camaro legacy, with elongated Neo Storm/Ford Probe like looks(inspired by the Pontiac Banshee concept, which is both a pro and a con at once) but before it got its facelift, 
And serious points to AMT Ertl for nailing those details in this kit, honestly! The 1990s were great for AMT for as long as they used their own tooling and not MPC’s, you get kits like the 
So I scrapped the entire rear and front suspension to make room for the wheels cause they otherwise stick out a good fifth of a inch, which is… just not right. I used some tooth picks and epoxy(did a similar thing on the 
Ahh MPC, how rocky a relationship we have. I talked about how MPC’s model kits have this odd, cheap and unfinished feeling to ’em and how it damn near ruined the hobby for me in the 
For instance, is it so damn hard to mold some clear headlights instead of making ’em all chrome pieces? Revell, Monogram and AMT have been doing it since the seventies, what the absolute hell is keeping MPC from doing it? Oh right, simplicity and short-cuts.
I kept the red paint job the box showed for the 2-in-1 option, the car was available in several colors and honestly the black suits it but I figured I’d go with a more subdued red. To make it a little nicer, I used some leftover Road Runner decals from the 1974 kit which I honestly prefer over the giant eighties ones and kept the T-tops “painted” on, the kit does offer separate T-tops and cutting the ones out of the body is very easy but just doesn’t look pretty when they’re out, the removable tops are just as solid as they were in the first place and it just looks janky and it really still shows that its a D.I.Y. job.
Monogram haven’t made many Buick kits, only a couple of ’em across the board. I wrote something on the 
And boy this kit shows that just like the car itself, it was peak turbocharger hype, V6 engines that produced equal power to big block V8s and the end of the muscle car era all at the same time. The Regal was one of the few late eighties cars that could preform all the while being a good car and the engine itself was nothing short of a masterpiece(its direct competitors were the Cutlass, Grand Prix, Thunderbird and Monte Carlo and… that was about it). Well, okay, it was also falling back onto old habits cause man, it sure as hell wasn’t fuel efficient. But Buick did try to innovate, there’s no faulting them there. They took the Buick 231 V6 from ’78 and took it on a tour of duty through the eighties, slapping a gargantuan turbocharger onto it and giving it the appropriate name “Turbo Regal”.
Though unlike the real car, this kit does have a few woes that linger. Despite the fact that this kit is one of those late eighties new tools from Monogram that trumped all expectations with crisp as all hell molding, beyond high quality engine bay and engine itself and a good eye for quality on the body, there are moments where it goes together like shoving a round peg in a square hole. For instance, while the superb detail is there, the side marker lights for the headlights are a God damn nightmare to get in place. They hardly fit and when they do, they “float” on nothing but the backing.
Revell, just like AMT Ertl and MPC, has a bit of a history of making some really interesting models that were relics of a era where the US vehicle industry was on the verge of bankruptcy and throwing out vehicles left, right and center to attempt to re-capture the US domestic market all the while laying off so many people that it broke records. Chrysler had the K body cars, GM had the “brilliant” all-new X-body Chevrolet Citation.
The downfall of the Citation was swift, within five years the car’s sales had dropped nearly 90% as recalls for faulty brakes, radiator hoses leaking that could lead to fires, rust issues, interior bits just popping off randomly and general lack of quality tore apart what actually was a functional little car that could’ve saved GM a giant amount of financial woes. The saying “too little, too late” stuck ’em hard though, as the Citation was the proverbial drop that filled the bucket past its rim: after the Chevrolet Vega was well underway of becoming GM’s last ‘blunder’, the Citation quickly proved that it could get worse.
Though luckily, a theme of the lowrider kit series is that it’s always a 2-in-1 kit with plenty of options and thanks to that, this is the best version of this kit you can possibly get. It has the options for the X-11, the 2.8L V6 and the lowrider version, with Goodyear Polysteel Radial decals, two sets of X-11 decals and a whole stripe set for the custom 2.8L Turbo version. And to get it outta the way quickly; the lowrider version is hilariously ugly. The decals for it are low-res, the woman for the hood decal is vague at best(I think its a topless blonde? Honestly cannot tell) and it has the same ugly-as-sin outwards wheels that are on every lowrider kit from Revell during this time. (The ’92 Thunderbird, ’92 Mustang, ’84 Coupe Deville, so on, all have the same whitewall tires and wire rims and such, which are awesome quality and seriously well cast but just… ugly).
It all goes together really well, too. Which is hardly surprising from a Monogram kit, they always had the tendency to go together supremely well, the only downside was that they were also super basic thanks to said simplicity, though that really isn’t the case here. Hell, even the instructions are crystal clear with reference pictures to get some of the more complicated set-ups done right from several angles.
Chrysler Corp sure knew how to pick names for their cars over the years… Granted, many of ’em were catchy because Ford Motor Company came up with really “manly”, if not animalistic sounding names for their cars like Mustang, Thunderbird, Cougar, so on. Chrysler on the other hand? Charger, Challenger, Barracuda, Demon, Ram and such… And among them was the “Ramcharger”. The direct Dodge competitor to the Chevy Blazer and Ford Bronco, though those were around since ’66 and ’69 respectively(which were responses to the International Harvester Scout I).
It has kept some legacy pieces from its two iterations since 1981, for instance the ’81 release had a giant light bar on the roof, while the lightbar’s gone, the headlamps for it still are on the glass sprue. In ’91 it was re-released as the “Gone Fishing” set with a giant motorboat on a trailer, though this version was actually the first Ramcharger that looked somewhat like a factory stock vehicle. The only changes besides that were more decals and a new set of wheels and tires to reflect it becoming somewhat more grounded in reality. And now cue 2016, suddenly Revell re-releases it under the “Trucks” line, kind of out of the blue.
But like I said earlier, it is also a quintessential Monogram release. Pretty awesomely detailed on the body, great engine, pretty alright interior and meh engine bay. But there’s some things I kind of wished they had bothered with. Like for instance, clear tail lights would’ve made a huge difference and some more detail on the 400 cubic inch V8 engine would also have brought out the engine detail some more. I should actually take back the “meh engine bay” comment for this model as actually this one has some significant engine bay detail but less on the actual engine. I didn’t bother wiring up the engine cause I just found it a tad bit too simple looking to go through the effort on but meh, that could also just mean I’m a lazy ass.
By the late sixties, the definitive muscle car was the Mustang. It invented the term “pony car”; long hood, big engine, short rear and low price. And by 1968 every single large car manufacturer had a variety of the pony car. GM by then had the Firebird, Camaro and Barracuda, Ford re-invented it by going deeper with the Mustang(fastback and coupe) and let Mercury in on the fun with the Cougar and AMC came with the Javelin. Late entries to the fun were Chrysler with the Challenger and the updated ‘Cuda in 1970.
And kit manufacturers have been really generous with the original muscle car. Every single generation’s had every single edition covered, some better than others. Monogram brought out the 1970 Mustang kit way back in 1981 and has since been improving upon it. It’s been re-released around twelve times since, every time in a different jacket; some were the Boss 302, some were the Boss 429, some were both, hell some even came as the famous Mach 1 and in 2007 Revell released them in the same box under their excellent “Special Edition” line. Which comes down to the mold being a lot more crisp and more detailed, a much much better decal sheet and of course having all the bits to go fully one way or the other.
The legendary 5.0L engine that Ford Mustangs are still asciociated with to this day, the 302, is replicated fantastically. Down to the little Ford emblems on the rocker covers, the little breathers on them, so on. The decals help, a lot. But it helps that Revell put effort into making it crisp, just like the Charger engine molds, these will look good for a long, long time to come, though sadly its 1/24th scale likely means the engine won’t see a lot of use cross-kits from here on out. But still, it’s a fantastically molded engine block. The “custom” bits, like the so called “Cross Boss” intake manifold(fantastic Trans-Am goodie made by Autolite back in 1969, rarely if ever seen on a stock 302), is fantastically done for this kit and is a nice legacy piece.
Last year I built the wonderful 
I built the 426 HEMI in apple green and left it for what it was, nothing extra about it. Since then I’ve been pining to make it a soft-top 440-6 cubic inch equipped zinc yellow(or “lemon twist” if you wanna go by brochure names) ‘Cuda that I once saw at a car show in Germany. I also had the awesome opportunity since to work on a 1973 ‘Cuda since then, with the very same 440 Six Barrel engine underneath so it’s only been growing on me to get started on this kit. Sadly, the kit only comes with the HEMI engine for either option, the only part dedicated to something different is two different air cleaners.
But despite it having the wrong engine for what I wanted, I figured I was gonna use the extra customizability of the vehicle and not glue the air cleaner stuck to the model cause the ‘Cuda 440 also had the choice of a Shaker or a simple air-cleaner. Instead I was gonna glue the carburetors to their cleaners and be able to swap on the fly if I so desired. The kit definitely allows this and thank God for it cause making my mind up was hard, I love the shaker hoods on the early seventies Chrysler cars and the twin ram-air hood is fancy and all but nothing beats the brutal look of a loose shaker on a engine poking through. Hell, shakers are loved so much that it even saw a comeback on the modern Challenger as a popular aftermarket part. But, since the hood for the Shaker was warped some, for the sake of pictures and looking cleaner, I for now got the ram air hood on there.
Thanks to Keith Marks, I got my hands on the final piece that allows this kit to be a 440-6 instead of a HEMI on the outside at least: the iconic hockey stick stripes. Handily, the decal sheet also covers higher quality side marker lights, logos and so forth but the 440 decal is what completes the picture. And it helps to have some spare air cleaner decals for the future!
Ohhh yeah, the eighties. The TV shows during that period were and still are some of the wackiest, best and craziest by a far stretch. It was a era of masculinity(which sadly came with a fair bit of misogyny), filled with guys blowing crap up left, right and center. Every big action star had a trademark car to go along with and a theme tune to ride to. I mean, movies had their car stars but on TV series they stuck with their cars for nearly a decade in some cases.
Based on a mix of previous Chevy G-Series vans from the late seventies and early eighties, this kit has a giant parts amount. And when I say giant, I mean you can theoretically make this into whatever freaking version of the G-Series you want: a GMC Vandura, a Chevy G-series with stock features, the G-Series with deep wheels and custom options like side-pipes, giant headers and exhaust manifolds, it goes on and on.
Though like I said, might be for the builder’s sake of having a complete model and not just a empty hole where the engine would be like most Japanese curbside kits. There’s some other things about this I thoroughly enjoyed and wish was more common in the designs; the sprues have # through # sorting which makes life a helluvalot easier given this kit’s got over 200 parts easily and you get a good six or seven parts to increase the stability of the chassis with thick chunks of plastic(or crossbeams in the real world counterpart), which in the end just makes the van’s weight feel more balanced and a hell of a lot more stable.
