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HobieMarty HobieMarty is online now
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Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: Opelika, Alabama
Posts: 4,870
Model Car Restoration

A co-worker of mine, who is in his 60s, built a model of a 1972 Roadrunner back when he was 12 years old and still had the model although it was in pretty rough shape. We got to talking about model cars one day and I offered to restore the model car for him. He told me it was in pretty bad shape, sent a few pictures of it and brought it to work for me to see it. Yeah, it was pretty rough but I was wanting to restore it for him, he had suffered from a stroke earlier last year and being that he still had the model after all these years, I figured it must've been pretty special to him. So, I got the model sometime last July or August and finished it last week. The model had several places where it had been broken and repaired over the years and I learned how to repair things and fill in missing plastic and shape edges using contour putty, I have never done an extensive restoration on a model car before so, I learned a lot during the process. The model was missing the engine, had mismatched wheels, broken chassis, really yellowed and cracked windshield and back window, and the brushed on paint had been peeling.
Paint had to be stripped, cracks had to be filled in and smoothed out and fortunately we found a kit on ebay that had all the parts I needed to build the car. It was a long process and I wanted to put a lot of detail into the build and my friend told me that he didn't care how long it took to build it so I took my time. In the meantime, he actually found some of his model cars that he built when he was much older and cleaned them up, repainted and rebuilt them. I think it helped him to be able to focus on something like building a model after the stroke. By the way, he is fine and made a complete recovery and was housebound for only a couple of months. So, here are pictures of the build. It turns out that this was a pretty rare model, 1972 Roadrunner by MPC.
It is now back at it's home and he has put it in a display case.
I had a lot of fun building this car, I hope y'all like it. Cheers!

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Old 04-03-2021, 04:59 PM
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