Then and (sort of) Now
Spanning more than 50 years

This is a mix of two widely separated portions of my life.

I grew up wicked poor, so nobody could afford to buy a bike for me when I was a kid... but one day my parents entered a drawing for a door prize and accidentally won. The prize was a Huffy Dragster buzzbike in metallic green, and it became the joy of my life. I rode it for fantastic long distances, mostly unaccompanied, in the many years I had it.

So... one day I found a model kit (the '29 Ford Woody) that included a buzzbike, and doggone if it wasn't structurally the same as my Huffy Dragster. I leave the rest to your imagination. 😎

Oh, and the other part. Lest I forget.

I've always had a special fondness for Jeeps. I even worked as a mechanic in a VW-Porsche-Audi-AMC-Jeep dealership for a while. I currently own three elderly Jeeps: a 1973 CJ5 w/232 or 258, a 1974 CJ5 Renegade w/304 and snowplow, and a 1986 CJ7 w/258. I especially like the Renegade, which arrived at my house only one step away from the grave... but I worked long and hard to restore it.

The Jeep part of this model replicates my own Renegade fairly closely. It's an MPC, so the details were all muddy and the fit was all questionable and of course MPC tries to pawn off their pre-1972 CJ5 as nearly everything else including a CJ7. It ships with the little inline 4-cylinder engine that was typical of pre-1972 CJ5s, and its roll bar came out of somebody's scream dream, not similar to the roll bar in any year or model Jeep.

So... I dug up a snowplow from a GMC pickup model and an AMC V8 (all AMC V8s shared one block) from a Revell Honcho model and reconstructed a 1974 period-correct roll bar from styrene stock. I had to make my own oil filler tube, since the Honcho's V8 lacked a decent one. Oh, and... the Honcho's V8 came with an A727 Chrysler automagic transmission, which was in no way compatible with any CJ5... so I sawed the bell housing and transmission off the model's original I4 engine and sawed the A727 transmission off the V8 and stitched the I4's manual transmission and the V8 together to very closely replicate a CJ5 Renegade's drivetrain. I barely had enough room to shoehorn it into place, but I got it there.

So... this Jeep is a close copy of a full-sized Jeep that I own today. Someday I'll find some small-scale tread plate and make rear corner armor for it... and I'll also try very hard to make a set of matching Renegade decals for the sides of the hood.

After I built this, I discovered that MPC at one time made a "Universal Dune Buggy" kit that included the Buick V6 and a ... snowplow. Truly odd combination, but what? Me worry? I could have passed off the V6 as an AMC V8, I think, maybe... but I don't think that kit had any windshield, so I'd have needed to scratchbuild one. I also don't feel very comfortable shelling out really tall dollars for an MPC Jeep model kit. So here's this. It gave my brains some decent exercise anyway. 😎

NOTE: ScaleMates doesn't support PNG cover images? I tried uploading this cover as a PNG but was told that only JPG, JPEG, and PNG (?!?) were supported. But it WAS a PNG. It was also only 1.2 meg in size.