RANDOM RAMBLER RAMBLINGS

Just a little filler piece I put together while reorganizing some old pics.

People have commented on the forums from time to time that Ramblers are under-represented in 1:43. We’ve been given some very nice ones over the years but there are a lot of others that haven’t been done. Granted, not all of them were what you would call excitingly styled, and people may not exactly be desperate for models of them, but you never know.

Anyway, back in the day, when Dinky decided to give us a ’56 Rambler, they made it a wagon. Maybe the roofline intrigued them?

But I wanted a sedan, so the roof was sawn off a Dinky 173 and a boot/trunk lid added in brass.

 I hadn’t yet came up with my trick for heat-moulding windows so it was a fiddly business cutting a piece of very thin flat clear plastic, forcing it into a curve and making it stay in place. Not sure why I decided to add a continental kit. I must have seen a pic of the real car like that and decided it added a bit of visual interest.

Then Dinky did a 1960, and once again they chose the wagon version.

So it was the same process all over again. Chop the roof, add a trunk lid and force a bit of glazing into the rear aperture. In this case I made no attempt to improve the wheels and tyres or to do any “super-detailing”, just left it as Dinky might have made it, so it turned out looking quite plain, but it filled a gap in the collection.

A bit later I thought I’d try something a bit trickier. A 1959 Ambassador.

While touting the virtues of their compact cars, Rambler decided to add a “bigger” car to their range. Well, it WAS bigger because they stretched the front end to accommodate a bigger engine, but I think the passenger compartment stayed the same so it wasn’t a real “big car”, and the proportions definitely weren’t an improvement. But I thought it might make an interesting subject.

The ’58-’59 cars had new lower body sheet metal but retained the earlier roof structure with its vertical front pillars. The solution was to take the white-and-yellow Dinky 193 estate, slice the lower body ahead of the front doors and add a 6mm insert, then cut off the entire roof and replace it with the roof and pillars of Dinky 173 - perfect for width but a couple of millimetres too short, so a second plug went in midway along the roof, and the centre pillars were removed to make a pillarless hardtop.

New quarter-lights were added (bits of medium-duty staples). The boot/trunk lid is brass. The old canted fins were ground off. The new ones are aluminium, and you’ll notice the deliberate mistake – I made them severely vertical whereas they really should angle outwards towards the top. (I realised this far too late to do anything about it.)

The Dinky grille was too shallow, and the the bumpers were too thin and sat too high. Unfortunately the original grille and bumper were a one-piece fitting held by a steel pin which defied all attempts to cut or remove it, so the only remedy was to saw and grind out the whole front unit, leaving just the headlamp housings, and build a new  grille surround. The grille centrepiece is plastic, with aluminium tubing and small plastic lenses for the spotlights. New bumpers had to be fabricated, with the basic shape being bent from brass then coated with putty and shaped before adding scrap plastic overriders.

Once again I added a continental kit, moving the rear bumper back with a couple of brass inserts glued to the rear of the body, with a gap in the middle for the spare to drop in.

The seats and dash are not even remotely prototypical, and came from the parts box. They are just there to create an impression of an interior.

 The new side trim was done with pieces of guitar string and the infill is aluminium paint, because BMF looked a bit too bright and unrealistic. The paintwork is Volvo California White over Ford Coral Red.

There were some later AMC cars that would have made interesting projects but there were no suitable donor models that could be converted, so I rambled no more. Here’s hoping some will eventually be done in resin. (The notion of DeAgostini doing a series of “Nostalgic Ramblers” seems far-fetched).