AMAZING FORD SKYLINER CONVERTIBLE

Those wonderful 1950s-era US cars sometimes had more than wings and chrome to set them apart from common or garden designs from other countries.

FORD’S SKYLINER GAVE YOU THAT '93 MILLION MILE HEADROOM' FEELING

1958 Ford Skyliner Retractible Hardtop
by DwightFrye

Report by Mat Irvine
It may be a chilly December day here at SMN Towers, but the sky is blue and wouldn’t it be nice to have a folding hard-top to see more of that sunshine? Such cars are available and all owe their ancestry to the Ford Skyliner, the first car to feature a ‘convertible hard top’. A way-out idea in the 1950s, the concept has since become standard fare from manufacturers such as Peugeot, Ford and Vauxhall-Opel.

The Skyliner’s folding system was mega-complex, involving no less than seven motors, ten power relays, eight circuit breakers and nearly 200 m (600 ft) of wiring, all to move the hardtop roof completely in and out of the trunk. The video above demos you the lot in full working order.

The full-size car was produced from 1957 to 1959, and Revell made a kit of the last year of production, with a completely working roof. OK, you had to move it by hand, but given that this was in the early years of model kit production, it was still a masterpiece of engineering. It has been reissued a few times over the intervening years – including the ‘Skip’s Fiesta Drive In’ series and was later reissued in the Selected Subjects Program Phase 9 (Winter 1995). Revell-Germany’s 50th anniversary range also featured the car, so examples could still be around.

The pictures show, top to bottom:
1 Kit boxes from top left anti-clockwise - original, followed by more recent issues and most recent top right.
2 Roof retraction sequence of the Revell kit.

The kit is not made at present, though we tracked down a reasonably priced one on offer at eBay here.

RETRO-STYLE 1:25 SCALE REVELL CHEVROLET SSR

A MAT IRVINE REVIEW
Retro is ‘in’, especially when it comes to cars designed with the past in mind. In the US, it started with Chrysler’s Plymouth Prowler and PT Cruiser, then rival GM took up the challenge and created the Chevrolet HHR (Heritage High Roof) and SSR (Super Sport Roadster) convertible pickup. SSRs were made between 2003 and 2006, although sales were not as high as GM hoped for. The chunky but more practical HHR is currently still in production, though it hasn’t yet been kitted. However, Revell has produced a very nice 1:25 scale model of the SSR.

The Revell SSR is moulded in white, grey and black plastic, plus clear and transparent red, and a chrome-plated runner for those shiny retro parts. The kit is new-style in the accurate way it goes together, and even comes with the interior tub tucked into the bodyshell to show its final position - though that could equally be just for ease of packing!

These vehicles really need to be finished in some distinctive colour, but the SSR’s plans say only ‘red’. For the model shown here, I opted for a Testors enamel spray, Sunburst, which looks more or less as the name, a very bright reddish-orange. The shade was originally one of the ‘Colors by Boyd’ range, but these have now been incorporated into the ‘Car & Truck Enamel Paint’ range. The SSR has optional decals for pinstripes or white panels, though these were not applied to this particular model.

So far as working features go, the real SSR has an electric roof that folds into the trunk when the driver wants to let the sunshine in. The kit is non-working in that respect - the hardtop doesn’t fold, but you can remove it and pretend it is stored! All in all, The Revell SSR is a nice little kit that assembles well, and looks pretty much like the real thing.

Talking of the SSR’s folding roof, I’ll do a piece soon on a splendid piece of retro-Americana, Ford’s extravagant Skyliner of the late 1950s, in which the whole hardtop - for what was a full-size sedan - retracted into the trunk, at which point it left virtually no space for luggage (but who cares...). Revell made a working model of the Skyliner way back, which actually had a working retractable roof. Those were the days!

You can buy the Chevy SSR at model stores and online suppliers, including Amazon here.

You can see the Testors huge paint range here.