Harvey Aluminum Special

[mattb]

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I have kind of finished this one. Still may solder some tubing to the lower rear edge of the frame to replicate the exhaust header on the real car. It ran an Olds V8 motor with standard 4 in 1 headers turned backwards and run out under the car. I need to take the chassis apart to do the soldering, but I am in no hurry to take it all apart again. This was Mickey Thompsons car in the '62 "500". It was driven by Gurney. It could use some suspension, but I am satisfied with it as is. The paint is better than the picture shows. It is so metallic that it doesn't look very slick. The decals are from Indycals and are on the new tougher paper he is using. That paper was tough and made it easy to lay down the one piece front decal without any tearing. Let them dry 2-3 days and covered them with Testors lacquer.

I got a curbside body from Calvin Sallee and used it to make s slush cast mold. Calvin is one of the Indy car modeling forum guys and an all arround good guy, who also is into hydoplanes and airplanes and takes outstanding pictures of both.

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[BIG E]

Ahh... the old Harvey Aluminum Special. I have the one that I painted (by hand with brushes) using Testor's Fire Orange TLC paint back in the late sixties. The color is very similar to the paint that was used on the later STP Indy Cars. The body is butyrate, not Lexan, and does have one big crack along one of the side pods, which I repaired with liquid plastic model cement. I had cut down one of my old Phase III Raceway (now Crawley Distributing) inline brass rail sports car chassis, drop arm type, and mounted the Harvey body on that. I haven't run it in quite a while, but if I remember correctly it's currently powered by either a Mura Wasp or early Parma 16D. I love running it at Buzz-A-Rama in Brooklyn, NY, especially on the American King track. That track, along with all the others in the raceway, is still the original configuration, without all the extra banking that modern copies of those designs invariably have. What FUN to slide that baby around on a true 12 volts, without wads of tire glue everywhere!
Nicely detailed vintage racer you've got there, especially with those wheels and tires. Cool paint and decals, too. Thanks for the look... and the reminder. Enjoy! -- Ernie :>)

[mattb]

These new King tracks, since the 70's I guess are really high speed and not really drivers tracks like the early commercial tracks were. I don't think a lot of the guys I race with could run on a flatter track!

The STP color is hard to pin down. I think they used 2-3 different shades and it varied from a hot orange to a red over the years. One of the good modelers here built the turbine car with a resin body I got him and he researched and looked at lots of pictures before he finally decided on a color and it was more red than orange.Not sure what year car it was 67, maybe 68, it was the wide car with the motor on side of the driver.

I like them all!

[Pappy]

[HomeRacingWorld]

Super effort.