Sh*t Kits- Lindberg 1948 Lincoln Continental
Imagine being a Lincoln aficionado and a modeler. Now imagine you prefer 1:24 and 1:25 scale. This means your choice in kit selection is rather narrow. And that's even if you factor in the AMT annual kits offered from 1958 to 1969. I mean, there are marques with even less scale kit coverage than Lincoln, and some with no kits at all, but the selection of Lincoln kits isn't terribly wide. The most recent kit of a Lincoln is Revell's highly inaccurate MKVII Pro Street from 1990. And I don't mean it's highly inaccurate because it isn't stock, I mean Revell shrunk the MKVII body proportions to fit an existing Thunderbird Pro Street chassis, so even if you conjured up a stock chassis and interior, the body would still need some pretty extensive rework to look right. A lot of people point out that kit's oversized wheel openings as it's biggest flaw. It's not that. The wheel openings are actually pretty good, they just look too large because the body has been shortened.
Okay, depending on how you want to look at it, the Polar Lights 1966 Batmobile would be the newest Lincoln kit, having been released in 2011. (Remember, the original TV Batmobile began life as the 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car.) But come on. There are three different Escalade kits from two different manufacturers, but not a single Navigator. See what I'm getting at? Being a model maven and a Lincoln lover can be rough when you try to combine the two interests. There are lots of nice resin kits and conversions, but those can get pricey, and some of them are nearly impossible to find. And some of them are of iffy quality and/or inaccurate. So when I see a Lincoln in kit form, I'm immediately interested... and automatically bracing myself for disappointment.
Now imagine you're going on 18 years old. It's 2000, and for the first time you are seeing a particular kit on the shelf. Let's say you only have dial-up internet, so you don't really do much researching of model kits online, and you won't even be aware of Scale Auto or Model Cars Magazine for another few years. But you are a Lincoln fan and a modeler, and there you behold a new Lindberg kit... a 1948 Continental. You have built a number of the newer Lindberg kits, like the 1967 4-4-2 and the 1997 F-150 Flareside, along with a couple of the 1:20 kits, and were impressed. So, you plunk down the cash for this "new" kit, with visions of something along the quality lines of the aforementioned kits and head home, looking forward to building a lovely V12-powered ragtop for your ever-expanding collection. Well, I learned a valuable lesson on that day.
This was the first (and so far only) time I've ever been so disappointed upon opening a model kit box that I cursed out loud. I seriously thought it was some kind of sick joke. Had someone at Lindberg lost their mind? Who the hell approved this thing? Did I say "disappointed"? More like "shocked".
At first I thought that Lindberg was cutting corners. I knew they were the small fry in the domestic kit market, trailing pretty far behind AMT and Revell-Monogram. As I looked at the faintly engraved parts, blob-like chrome engine, and hubcaps that looked like women's sun hats, for the first time in my history of the hobby, I felt royally screwed. Why did they even bother with something this compromised. The kit got stuck on a closet shelf and disappeared sometime in the mid to late 2000's.
Of course there was an awful lot I didn't know at the time. I didn't realize that this "new" kit was, in fact, a very old Pyro kit which dated back to the early 1950's. Originally it didn't even come with chrome plated parts. Back then, iffy detail, weird proportions, and simplified subassemblies were standard industry practice. Same goes for the multi-piece body. I'm sure a kid who slapped together one of those Pyro kits in the 1950's thought it was "keen" or "wizard" or whatever kids said in the early '50s. But the Pyro kit was pretty much obsolete by the standards of the mid 1950's. Compare this to an early AMT annual and it's like night and day. Be that as it may, the molds somehow ended up in the hands of Lindberg who, for no reason I can discern, saw fit to reissue it in a box with no pictures of the kit. To this day, I'm still a little sketchy when I see a kit box which has pictures of the actual car on it and no pictures of the model. Well, unless it's a Tamiya or Hasegawa kit. And that trepidation all dates back to me buying this kit two decades ago.
This kit is interesting in the regard that it really illustrates how far the model car kit hobby evolved from the early 1950's, to the first "golden era" of the mid to late '60's. Consider that the Monogram 1941 Continental kit came out in 1967, and is still excellent even by modern standards. I don't know how well that kit does in reissues, but it seems to reappear every two decades or so. It's overdue for a new reissue, to be honest. I think we're way past the point of ever seeing a good full-detail '48 Continental, even if it has one significant trait in that it was the final American car to be powered by a V-12 engine. But if you must have a Continental of this period, go with the Monogram kit. The '41 is a more attractive design anyway. And to hell with the fact it's 1:24 scale. If you're going to split hairs over something not being 1:25... I really don't know what to tell you. That's the one gripe I always hear about the Monogram kit. You're only dealing with a difference of .30 of an inch or so... and that's before you factor in any discrepancies which may or may not exist in the kit. They're essentially the same damned scale. But if you insist, hey... at least the Lindberg kit is the "right" scale, I guess? And if you're up for a challenge, this is surely it.
So, want to see this nightmare? No? Well, too bad. Here it is!
Across the top, left to right, we have the front seat cushion, engine bay, cowl, rear seat cushion, and the front and rear springs. Beneath those, you will find the tops of the front fenders, the hood, rear seat cushion, and tulip panel.
Moving on we find the inner wheel halves, battery, radiator, and lower front fender halves, along with the chassis plate. Yes, there is an engine. Kind of.
Here we have the frame brace/muffler combination, rear interior panels, and the sides of the body. The front radius arm/tie rod combination and front axle are also included on this sprue.
No boot is provided, only an up top. Honestly it's about the only convincing part of the entire kit. We also have the rear fenders, rear radius arm, steering wheel, spring mounts, firewall, and rear bodywork. The rear axle and torque tube are also present and accounted for.
Here we have the front seatbacks, which broke loose of the sprue and rattled around in the box.
70
Seventy years ago, the kit had no chromed parts. At some point the tooling was reworked so that a sprue could be plated. Here we see the grille, which has the right basic shape but looks like it was carved from balsa. It's probably the one "nice" exterior part on the chorome tree. That weird thing in the bottom left corner is supposed to be the engine.
The kit originally had one-piece wheel/tire castings, but later it was retooled to use skinny no-name bias belt tires, and treated to center caps that look like chrome plated sun hats.
The dashboard looks almost decent, but you'll need to strip the chrome. To the right you see the one-piece headlight bezel, with a smooth lens molded into place. The bumpers look good but suffer from some unsightly mold seam lines.
I don't know if the kit always included clear parts, but the Lindberg version does. The one in this it is scraped up a bit. This was still the era where the chrome and clear parts... you know, the most vulnerable parts... were not bagged.
The small decal sheet has the gauges, horn button, scripts for the hood sides and hub caps, and a small Lincoln crest. The crest is a bit simplified but it'll do for it's intended purpose. The now-familiar Lincoln "star" logo was still about a decade away in 1948.
So... what does this mess of a kit look like when built? Well, I don't have a box-stock example. But I do have a four-door Zephyr conversion I bought some time ago. The conversion is a little crude and the putty is breaking down, and it's somewhat inaccurate (split windshield on a Lincoln of this era?), but it was such an interesting ugly duckling I had to plunk down five bucks for it.
It certainly resembles a 1948 Lincoln but.. yeah...
Also, take note of the wheels and tires. This is an earlier version of the kit with the one-piece wheel/tire castings. Though still crude they look just a bit more convincing that what the Lindberg version supplies.
The roof appears to be from a '37-40 Ford kit. In this photo you can see the impression where the continental spare used to be. It's a rather crude conversion, but given the state of the base kit, that's somewhat fitting.
The 1948 Continental was ungainly looking compared to the earlier models, particularly the swoopy '41. The '41 is loved by street rodders and classic car buffs alike, and even inspired the grille designs on new Lincolns in the early 2010's. Lincoln didn't stick with the "egg crate" motif for too long. It blows my mind how well-defined the tiny Lincoln lettering is on the hood badge. Especially when you consider how crude the other parts tend to be.
This one was molded in what appears to be two shades of green plastic. Or possibly this chassis was cobbled up from parts of two different its. That was the other interesting thing about this model when I got it... it appeared to have been Frankenstein'd out of five or six different kits.
So what is the plan for these? I'd like to freshen up the Zephyr a bit and maybe make a few improvements. Or it might end up as a junkyard hulk. Or maybe I'll do some combination of both those ideas. The unbuilt kit will end up as a period full custom. Wringing out a nice stock '48 Continental would likely be more work than it's worth (to me), and just beyond the range of my current set of skills. But I thin I could wring a decent early lead sled out of it. Stay tuned...
