An oldie - 1962 Oldsmobile Starfire in 1:43

Patrons of The Lounge have been singing the praises of the 1962 Oldsmobile, so I thought it couldn’t do any harm to offer a retrospective on my build of a 1:43 version of the Starfire. Some of you may remember this “chop” from times past, but not everyone on the Forums was a reader of the old print version of Model Auto Review, so I make no apologies for offering this account of the build in the hope it may be of interest.

I liked the clean, crisp look of GM’s 1961 cars, including the Oldsmobile, but I thought the grille looked a little weak and apparently some folks at Oldsmobile agreed because they came up with a much bolder front end treatment for ’62. The central part of the nose appearing to be “free-floating” between the front fenders was an intriguing styling touch. Arguably they made the rear end of the car less interesting, although not everyone shares my liking for the pointy back end on the ’61.

Anyway, I thought the ’62 Starfire a particularly handsome piece of styling and wanted one in my collection, and the Conquest model didn’t yet exist (although I see I can get one now on eBay for a mere $400 or thereabouts) so converting the Corgi model of a ’61 Olds was the only option.

Sawing off the roof was easy enough, and with a sturdy diecast model there were no worries about the remaining slim windshield frame being dangerously fragile. But then there were a few major problems to tackle. First, the amount of serious hacking required at front and rear to create space for adding new detailing. Second, I wanted a convertible, but as on many Corgi models of that period the seating/dash unit was a shallow, almost featureless vac-form which wasn’t really fit to be exposed to view.

The first problem just took a lot of work with various grinding and reaming bits. Then the new central nose and front fender edges were built up with pieces of shaped brass, plastic and filler and a plastic backing piece was fitted to the cavity in the nose to take the grille and headlamps, and a shaped brass panel was added to the rear. Once that was done, body trim lines were marked out with strips of photo-etch brass (courtesy of ScaleLink). The raised trim feature on the bonnet/hood was cut from brass and is distinctly over-scale, but I am a rustic handyman, not a Swiss watchmaker, so it’s the best I could do.

Getting some kind of plausible representation of the grille was another problem. I was very lucky to find a man at a swapmeet selling strips of P/E ventilation grillwork intended for model locos which could be trimmed to give what I thought was a passable impression of the Olds grille pattern. The clear headlamps are bought-in items, and their chrome surrounds are very thin slices of 4mm aluminium tubing.

The only real answer for the interior was scratch-building. The base plate of the Corgi has various raised stiffening ribs and mountings for the suspension springs, so I had to engineer a flat floor and transmission tunnel. I did find some very basic seats in the parts bin, but all the rest of the interior trimmings were assembled from plain and ribbed plastic card, brass strip and various bits and pieces from the spares box. Rather than just try and paint the two-tone seats, I did the ribbed sections as separate pieces of very thin ribbed plastic. Could have turned out very untidy but it kind of worked out OK.

The dashboard instruments were composed in PowerPoint and printed to chrome foil. I tried the same trick for the rear lights but not surprisingly the finished transfers had a flat 2-dimensional look that wasn't very convincing, so in a fit of madness I somehow managed to assemble one taillight (5 mm wide by 2.5 mm high) from seven tiny pieces of brass superglued together, then took a silicone mould and made several copies in resin. They don’t stand up all that well to really close inspection, but to be fair the same is true of lots of small details on 1:43 handbuilts. The window winders were made from pieces of watch hands and pin heads.

Then it was just a matter of spraying, followed by the fiddly job of fitting in all those interior bits and applying lashings of BMF.

And here is the finished product, all painted and foiled. I don’t remember where I got the wheels and tyres from, but they were a reasonable match for the wheel patterns I found on some photos of the Starfire.

Quite a bit of insane effort on pieces of interior detailing that I wanted to include just for the fun of it, but I thought it turned out OK. My homage to a very attractive car.