´64 Chevy Impala

1964 Chevrolet Impala SS

„The Desert Rose“

When I think about Lowriders, the first car that comes to my mind is the 1964 Chevy Impala Super Sport. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Eight, all of the Gangsta Rappers I listened to in the early 90s cruised their hoods in one of those lowriding icons. So it´s a natural I had to have one in my showcase.

I built this model some years before Revell offered their Lowrider-tooled kit with hydraulics in the open trunk and all the other Lowrider equipment, so the source for my Desert Rose was this stock amt/ERTL kit:

To convert it into a concrete scraping cruiser I had to collect some aftermarket items and scratch built everything not available. Well, mission accomplished:

First thing to do, of course, was to lower the car. The simple chassis design with stick-in axles allowed me to simulate a working hydraulic suspension:

The aftermarket wire wheels and whitewall tires came from Hoppin´Hydros.

 

The license plate frames and the window plaque are photo etched items from ModelCarGarage. The speakers in the backlite shelf were borrowed from amt´s Dodge Ram D-50.  The chain-steering wheel was scratch built and the whole interior was covered in blue and silver velvet.

Next thing I did was cutting out the deck lid and I scratch built a trunk with sheet-styrene.

In the trunk I installed two scratch built hydraulic pumps and four resin batteries from Scale Production. Of course the trunk was outfitted with velvet, too.

Under the hood is the box-stock engine plus a little wiring and plumbing and, of course, a lot of velvet.

 

The rose graphics were homemade with Photoshop, decal foil and my inkjet printer.

 

I confess that I messed up the paint job and that the velvet is a bit to rough-textured for this scale, but I think it is still a nice ride to cruise Crenshaw Blvd. on friday nights…