Building the "Vista Roof" Lincoln

The donor model for this make-believe was the Greenlight 1965 Continental, and I should say right away that I had finished the build and was researching paint colours online before I re-discovered an old Forum post saying that the roofline on this model was a little low. Yes, I always thought it looked rather “flattened” in relation to its length, but for better or worse I just accepted it as it was. Too late to do anything about that now.

I had worked out the basic measurements and angles before it dawned on me that this was a ’65 car and my doodle was done on a ’61, which is slightly shorter and has slightly different roof pillar angles. So some fairly minor adjustments were required.

The first potential show-stopper came when I dismantled the model and found that instead of being a sturdy one-piece diecast, it had a separate plastic roof – and quite flimsy at that. Mercifully the windows were all separate pieces. If the roof and glazing had been a single piece of painted plastic it would have made life difficult. (The windows could have been masked during the build, but damage is always a possibility).

As it was, by the time I had carefully sawed out the area where the raised roof would go I was left with a rather delicate plastic roof remnant, which was quickly glued to the lower body as solidly as possible.

My usual trick of making a wagon roof by glueing a brass strip into the forward roof section, projecting back to the required length, then hanging everything off that, obviously wasn’t going to work here. To help me work through the construction process and keep everything straight and level, I built a jig. The two vertical grey pieces marked the approximate height, width, length and curvature of the raised roof section.

Two brass rear pillars were cut, with large tabs at their base to glue on to small plastic blocks set into the lower body.

These were then linked with a brass “hoop” to form the rear edge of the roof. The roof window openings were sawn out of a piece of thin brass sheet which was then bent to shape and bridged between the rear hoop and the top edge of the original C pillars.

The roof window openings looked kind of “raw”, so they were framed with thin brass wire. A fiddly job, to put it mildly, but a nice little challenge to keep life interesting. And the full-depth tailgate opening looked excessive, so shaped brass inserts at top and bottom cut it down to a more reasonable size.

The forward roof window was heat-formed from a balsa mould. The main side window and roof side window on each side were formed as a single piece of glazing, to reduce the number of tricky glueing operations later. The plastic glazing was temporarily attached to a simple mould with double-sided tape, softened by heating then stroked over the curved top of the mould with a piece of wood and held for 20-30 seconds until set.

A very simple rear load floor was built on to the floor unit, with photo-etch ribbing to give a bit of detail. At the last minute I added a couple of occasional rear seats.

For the paint job, I had two or three possible colours “in stock” but the spray cans were at least 10 years old and there was a risk that they would produce a spluttery, lumpy mess, so rather resentfully I had to invest in a quite pricey can of authentic Madison Grey, which I thought was metallic grey-blue but turned out to be pretty much a plain metallic grey. Ho hum. Should have gone for the powder blue, which was more the image I had in mind.

The paintwork also turned out to be frighteningly delicate. I’ve used car aerosols for years and after 2-3 days they are usually safe to handle, but 2 weeks after spraying the clear lacquer coat was still easily marked. After holding a piece of glazing in place for a couple of minutes while the glue set, I was left with a small fingerprint impression on the body. Not glue, not sweat, it was actually imprinted. I tried smoothing it with a tiny drop of ordinary car polish on a cotton bud and the gloss started to come off the paint, so I had to back off and just hope it wouldn’t be visible.

BMF was also unusually reluctant to stay attached without repeated firm burnishing (all of which threatened further marking of the paint.)  So final assembly was unusually slow and delicate, with the fear of wrecking the finish with every move. Blood pressure peaked at 265/190 during this process. Good grief, I can do without this. I may sometimes talk like a 12 year old but I’m not a young man, you know.

Anyway, it got done in the end. Ignore the little rough bits (part of my trademark modelling style) and put it on the shelf and view it from a sensible distance and it looks OK.