A chopping retrospective (part 4)

Today is Edsel day. This famous automotive brand (famous for all the wrong reasons) has provided me with a number of interesting modelling opportunities, so it gets a chapter all to itself here.

The Edsel was officially introduced to the public on 4 September 1957, so I must apologise for being 3 days late with this commemoration.

This was the official brand logo:

It was specially designed to create an amusing optical illusion and copies were given away free (on a 6" x 6" full-colour card) to potential Edsel buyers and their children.  If you held it up about 10­­‑12 inches in front of your eye and circled it around either clockwise or anticlockwise you would experience the same sensation of nausea and vertigo as when cornering at 30-35 mph in an actual Edsel. I got one of these years ago at a car show in California and still play with it regularly, although these days I have to be a bit careful about falling over.

But I digress.

Like many people, I had mixed feelings about the Edsel. The styling, with its distinctive "face", was bold and original in its own way, but polarised opinion and unfortunately the whole brand image ended up as a joke - not to mention a financial disaster on a grand scale. The cars themselves were decent enough in many ways (being basically Fords or Mercurys beneath the skin) but were let down by indifferent build quality and confused marketing by their Ford parent, who also had seriously conflicted feelings about the whole Edsel enterprise.

Nonetheless, model producers found the original '58 cars worthy of attention, and over the years a fair number of models became available. There was less interest in the sadly watered-down 1969 and 1960 cars, and it was a few years before Brooklin did a '60 convertible and even longer before Western Models produced a '59 sedan. So, in a fit of (relatively) youthful bravado I decided to make my own. Both of these fairly radical chops were started on the same day. I can still remember making the very first saw cut, about 2-3 millimetres back from the front edge of the roof of the Brooklin '58 to create the "wrap-over" at the top of the windscreen. One small move for a man, but it was a start. About 6 months later  - well, I was working full-time and reading bedtime stories to 2 daughters - the results were revealed to a largely indifferent world. In all modesty I thought I made a reasonable job of them (and looking back, I can hardly believe I made that '58 grille from little snippings of photo-etch metal strip and guitar string. Wouldn't want to try it now.)

Over time I added a few more Edsels, some real, some fictitious. They never actually did a pickup, but various backyard mechanics knocked together their own versions and I duly followed suit.

At a much later date I came across pictures of the styling prototypes for the ill-fated 1960 models, which intrigued me. A last-ditch attempt to retain the distinctive Edsel "face". The production version abandoned that idea altogether in favour of a more thinly disguised Ford body, but if you happen to like the 1960 full-size Ford styling (which I do), the badge-engineered Edsel version is quite attractive. Some people seem to be curiously annoyed by the "torpedo tubes" leading to the rear lights but I thought they were a neat styling touch, although they were damned difficult to reproduce in 1:43.

Then a Florida enthusiast undertook an expensive conversion of a Ford Crown Victoria to produce a "50th anniversary Edsel" for 2008, on the reasonable assumption that if the Edsel had survived it would still be a re-skinned big Ford. Needless to say, I couldn't resist following his example to add a final touch to my personal Edsel collection.

Tomorrow is Grand Finale day. Stay tuned.