'57 Chevy 210 Sport Sedan in Proposed Two-Tone Trim
(not produced)
"Two-Ten" Sport Sedan
Lesson 1: Gathering Reference Material
The first step in attempting a significant conversion project like this is to decide exactly what it is that you are going to build, and whether you have sufficient reference material to build it. The best way to do this is to spend a while collecting reference material that is related to the general idea of the project, and spend some time reading through it and thinking about what would be involved in creating each different version. Depending on how esoteric the subject is, this process can take quite a long time, and often the best approach is to simply ignore the subject for a while but keep an eye out for any information that you might run across. Often, the decision of what car to build will be decided by what car you can find good reference material on. On the 1957 Chevrolet, we are lucky that there is far more information easily accessible than we can possibly use, and so finding enough reference material is not a problem. In particular, there is an excellent web site at http://www.classicchevy.com/Showroom/index.htm which has vast quantities of original factory information and quite a few photos. Web searches using search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and Altavista will obtain many more pages that are good food for thought.
For this particular project, I have settled on doing what Chevrolet called a "Two-Ten" Sport Sedan, which is what is generally referred to as a four-door hardtop. I had originally planned to do a two-door post sedan, but there are several reasons not to do this. First, Art Anderson has an excellent resin body of a "One Fifty" two-door post sedan, and it doesn't seem fruitful to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Second, Revell-Monogram is planning to produce a '56 Del-Ray 2-Door Sedan sometime next year, and using the roof from this would most likely produce a more accurate model with less work than anything that can be done today. In the meantime, the Sport Sedan caught my eye as a very nice looking car. I will probably do my buildup in the prototype two-tone trim shown below, just to be a little different from all the rest.
'57 Chevy 210 Sport Sedan in Proposed Two-Tone Trim
(not produced)
The next step is to determine exactly what changes are needed to produce this particular car. The roof and door lines are significantly different from the ones on the AMT kit, and so these will need to be completely redone. Additionally, the interior upholstery is notably different on the 210 than that provided on the Bel-Air. To reproduce these accurately, we will need accurate dimensions for them. In this case, I got very lucky. The "Classic Chevy" website that I mentioned earlier has scans of documentation photographs from the General Motors Proving Grounds. These documentation photos were taken from a directly side-on position and a long distance away, so that perspective effects are completely eliminated from the photograph. Thus, I could simply enlarge the image until the wheelbase of the car in the picture was 1/25th of the wheelbase of an actual '57 Chevy (115 inches), and then measure off the roof and door dimensions directly from the printout!
It gets even better. Apparently in some documents on the car, GM included scale drawings of the interior side panels as well, and scans of these are also included on the "Classic Chevy" web site. By measuring the distance from the back of the windshield post to the front of the "C" pillar on the exterior photo, and comparing this to the distance on the interior drawing, I was able to enlarge this to 1/25 scale as well. Using an image processing program, I placed both of these images on a single sheet of paper, and added some other useful pictures of the seat patterns. The result is the image below, which will be exactly 1/25 scale if you print it out at 10.5 inches wide and 8 inches high. You can click on the image to download a much higher resolution version (160kb) that will produce a better printout.
(Click for 150dpi high resolution version.
Print at 10.5in by 8in for exact 1/25 scale)
This is rather an unusual case, as it's rare to be able to easily find pictures of this nature online. However, in many cases factory shop manuals will have useful information. (Check to see what your local library has - often they have a random sampling that includes some interesting cars.) Also, if you know someone who has a similar car, ask them what reference material they have. Often, the best option is to find an actual version of the vehicle that you want to model. Take lots of photographs, and try to take some that are as directly side-on and end-on as possible, so that you can use them for measuring distances off of. It's always a good idea to make lots of physical measurements directly on the vehicle if you can, but there will always be one measurement that you forgot to take, and if you have a good photograph you can measure it later. A cheap scanner and decent image processing software is also useful, as it will allow you to scan in images from shop manuals or photographs, and adjust them to the scale of the model that you are building. Also, when you have three dozen small images scattered throughout a thousand-page shop manual, it is very helpful to scan them all in, collect them onto a few pages, and print them all out. Sometimes you will notice things by having two images side by side that you wouldn't notice if you had to flip pages to look at them both.
So, in this lesson, I have decided what type of '57 Chevy sedan to build, determined what reference material I will need, and collected that material into a picture that can be printed out to use as an exact 1/25 scale template for building the model. Next time, I will start modifications on the kit body, and show you how to find parts in your scrap bin to use in creating shapes you need. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions or post comments on the message board!
Finally, all the pictures on this page are edited versions of images
from the http://www.classicchevy.com/Showroom/index.htm
web site. Many thanks to these people for making this kind of information
easily available!� There's lots more information there that will be
useful to anyone doing a model of a '55 to '57 Chevy.
