1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee 440 Six Pack – MPC

The 1970 Coronet is one of those cars that is truly unique all the while remaining close to its roots, specifically with the styling, or at least from the ’65 Coronet on wards. It carried over the square shape, it carried over the grille increasing in size towards the headlamps, it carried the long hood and trunk design, it kept the very basic nature of its previous iterations and yet somehow manages to look the most alien, the most unique and honestly, in my opinion at least, the most beautifully wacky muscle car of all time. What makes it more unique is that unlike very, very many cars – it was only like this for a single year.

First time I ever saw the car was as a fleet of police cars in 1974’s Gone in Sixty Seconds, though that was the regular four door without the chrome tail bezel, the one I truly fell in love with was the ’70 Super Bee version, the same one I built here. Though in a moment I’ll go into detail about the misery this kit can cause, for now I’m gonna focus some more on the car itself. You see, this was Chrysler’s magnum opus era. 1970 was peak good-ness for Chrysler, especially in design. The 1970 Charger lived, their best year in NASCAR began late this year, Plymouth’s newly updated Barracuda came to life, the 6-pack(2bbl x3) carburetor set-up gained maximum popularity, the list goes on. 1970, not a bad year! Well, it was a bad year for fuel reserves as it was also the year that big block engines truly gave no fucks about even attempting to hit 10MpG/4.2KpL(6-Pack and HEMI engines did frickin’ 7MpG/2.9KpL on average) and of course good ol’ fashioned tetraethyl additives.

The designers on their cars had freaking field days, damn near every car for the 1970 model year were gorgeous, even the boring ones. It truly was the era of the muscle car, but it was just as well just the finest era for cars in general, besides the obvious problems. And MPC was on top of this shit back in the day, with dealer promo’s leaving the production line in high demand and focusing their work on that, following it all up with glue kits based on the dealer promo’s some time later.

This is how this edition of the 1970 Coronet Super Bee began its life. In 1968, the dealer promo for the 1968 Coronet was turned into a proper glue kit. They revamped the parts and the body for the 1969 release and updated it once more for 1970, as per usual of the time. So fast forward to 1989, Ertl had combined MPC and AMT to co-exist under the same roof and they fashioned a version of the ’70 Coronet Super Bee with a “Pro Street” package attached to it, which quickly led to demand of a re-release of the Super Bee without the idiotic large rear tires and gargantuan velocity stack engine and intake manifold, which came in 1992. They improved upon it in various ways, for instance they re-hashed the entire frame to be “better” and brought in stock parts to turn it into a 440 Six Pack along with bucket seats and standard exhaust pipes.

Now fast forward to 2008, two sub re-releases later(same parts, different day) with MPC bringing the Coronet Super Bee back like it was in 1992, just better. For instance, it now had a much, much improved decal sheet with both the C-shape decals as well as the tail trunk stripes, proper engine badging and finally some decent Super Bee emblems to boot. Skip time to 2017, and yes I hear you going “what about the Dirty Donny editions?” and I raise you a “What about ’em?”. They were based on the Pro Street version and actually had less going for them than the ’08 MPC release, so screw ’em. This version on the other hand has all of the stuff going for it since AMT’s update in the early nineties and the only thing it lacks is the pro street tires, despite the wheels still being there.

Actually, about tires. Allow me to ramble on about Round 2’s wheels one more time, by quoting… a quote. This kit proudly presents itself on the side of the box to contain pad printed Goodyear Polyglas GT tires. Now the quote I’m gonna, well, quote, originally is from the 1976 Dodge Dart kit, which I then quoted on the ’79 Chevrolet Nova article, and it’s about the loveliness of the pad printed tires from Round 2;

And again, just like usual, the fucking rim doesn’t match the tire. I love the enthusiasm for pad printed tires, especially from AMT who is the only one who has them printed on the rubber and not just included on a decal sheet but they are not a one-size fits all kind of tire. I’ve been going over this complaint on every single kit AMT has re-released since 2011 – the ’70 Chevelle, the ’80 Volaré, the ’68 El Camino and both ’69 Oldsmobiles I’ve built. They just don’t fit on legacy kits.

So, yeah, they’ve been clowning around with those again. And like I said, I love them but they just don’t match the rim and no effort has been put into actually remotely attempting them to fit. They could go the Revell Monogram route of just adjusting every rim to the tire size they have in stock, or they could do the more difficult Japanese way of literally fashioning a ton of different tires – either way Round 2 has to put in effort and like hell they’re doing that.

But y’know what, we’ll roll with it. They are what they are, nightmare or not, nicely pad printed tires and I hope one day Revell begins to include tire letter decals again like they did a few times in the nineties. Though at the same time, Fireball Modelworks deserves every single purchase cause of how unbelievably awesome and nice those white letter decals are.

I’ve been wanting this kit for a few years now and there were a couple of reasons not to get it thus far, and the reasons came beaming on through as I was putting it together. When I said “misery” in the second paragraph, I meant it. You see, like I said earlier, this kit is a bash-together of MPC’s old tooling and AMT Ertl’s new tooling. The engine bits are super high quality and very well produced, the interior tub, not so much. The whole thing did get a revamp but it’s all inherited parts in a sense, like for instance the instructions have two interesting bits to ’em;

It’ll tell you to take a sixteenth of a inch from the bottom of the side windows on the windshield and it’ll tell you to saw off the front of the front side of the frame under the radiator. Why? Cause it’s a mish-mash in the end, the interior tub will collide with the windshield and basically kill any form of getting the whole thing getting together and the front lip has to be sawed off the frame otherwise the bottom bit of the body with the indicators will simply not fit.

Despite that, it still won’t fit. The whole build reeks of MPC shoddiness to me, with the bumpers floating about, the wheel assembly being a fucking, terrible, horror show of a mess. Hell, lemme elaborate. The front wheels especially, they’re attached to steerable prongs you force between the frame and the inner-engine bay wall, however the holes aren’t the same size and it requires force to put them on. You know how this works, as in that it doesn’t. The weight of the wheel will eventually begin tearing the innards of the wheel out so the wheels become stuck at this awful odd angle.

But I digress. What isn’t MPC shoddiness is AMT Ertl perfection; the 440 Six Pack engine is… something else. The 340 V8 and the 440 Magnum from the Duster and Charger kits respectively are awesome and come up to about Revell level in terms of detail and how good they look in the end, and this 440 Six Pack is uniquely different in how you build it, but it’s no less amazing. Not to mention, the whole chassis was improved by AMT Ertl so despite the issues, once it comes together, it comes together. And while it comes with a whole second 426 HEMI with the velocity stacks(ala Dodge Dart), it has no option of the other, third option on the real Super Bee – the 383 Magnum.

And like I said, the decal sheet is the biggest winner here all in all. The choice and quality of it is just immense and it makes me so super happy that for once a Round 2 kit doesn’t have a puny decal sheet. And in the end, what matters is that Round 2 did improve this kit from it’s terrible roots into a semi-modernized kit that goes a lot better together thanks to it, it’s just a shame it isn’t all the way there yet. Hell, it’s actually one of those kits where I got too frustrated with trying to make it look good and was just happy it was done.

Screw you, crooked wheels and ill fitting tires.