Price: $60,000

On my model I made all the suspension work. Take the radius rods, the heim joints have a working ball joint with a hole machined into the ball and ring soldered in place to hold it. When I work this big, I tend to make the details finer.

I originally made the frame out of rough plywood (MDX) used as sub flooring for houses. I actually got two cars out of this effort. I used some of these parts in the #32 car. I did remake the sub flooring frame in half-inch acrylic material.

- Back to the Red car. I made the new frame with angle aluminum and inset channel aluminum on the two side pieces. All the cross pieces are hand-formed and the the pieces riveted toge Back to the Red car. I made the new frame with angle aluminum and inset channel aluminum on the two side pither to make the frame. I made the body by using blue insulation foam, carving and filing to shape. Then I fiberglassed the whole thing (epoxy), and when it cured, I cut all the foam away and had a good fiberglass shell remaining.

The radiator and hood were next. The radiator was going to be chromed so it needed to be copper or brass. Copper is easiest to form so I made a wood buck to hammer the copper over and a molded female shape to help form the copper.

I then bent the side pieces over a pipe and soldered the top to the sides and the flat bottom piece. I made a simple bent screen, and the grill was made with bent rods soldered to a flat piece made to frame the rods.

The steering wheel was cut from a flat aluminum sheet. I cut six pieces of mahogany on both sides to work as a ring on both sides of the wheel. I epoxied each piece of wood to the wheel and each other and clamped the pieces with clothes pins. When it all cured I marked out the rivet holes, then drilled them out and epoxied brass rods in their place. After it cured I cut the ends off and filed and sanded it all smooth.

Later I used the same epoxy to finish the wheel. All of this is easy stuff if you can go one step at a time. Remember, there is no deadline. This is entertaining your mind, and fun, so enjoy the work as if it is play. Otherwise, there's no reason to do it.

The engine is a combination of concepts from several magazines and books. It's a cross between Miller and Offenhouse stuff I found for this project. All it had to do was answer any question I had at the moment - again this is my entertainment. If I decide later I don't like it, I'll change it. Other than that, it's done and I'll go on to the next thing to do.

Overall, this was fourteen years from start to finish. I didn't work on it for years at a time, then I got a call from Marshall Buck. He was curating an exhibit at the Stamford Museum for car models, primarily Scratch Built models. I knew Marshall for a few years and he wanted to show what cars I had on hand finished. At that time this car was about half done and my little company was making models and prototypes for a bunch of people. The show scheduled wasn't for several months. So for the two months my crew skipped back and forth from customer work to car modelling.

The car finally got done on the eve of the show. Unfortunately I missed the cocktail party for the model builders - I slept for the next few days! I would have loved meeting people who do what I do.

Off and on again I estimate this model has about two thousand hours. It's just a guess-over a fourteen year period who knows?

- Will Neely, October 2008