$3.99 Car of the Week:

1955 Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria, 1/43 Scale, Discount Store

Admittedly crude discount store find. Red and white paint is thickly applied, the trim is disproportionately scaled, and is generally awkwardly rendered, but there is a charm to any scaler of a unique or collectible vintage car like the tinted plexiglass-roofed Crown Vics of the fifties. This is a link to the Crown Vic Wiki. There's a small section on this first year model.

Showing off popular fifties fad, the rear-mounted Continental kit, the famed Fairlane "checkmark" chrome side trim is also evident in this view. While some Crown Vics came with an all-metal roof, this scale model has the optional green plexiglass insert. A snap-in cloth shade was available for bright days.

The chrome roofband "tiara" is seen from behind, the indented/painted scoops at the trailing edge of it rendered as a row of dots on this 3-inch long dime-store model. I appreciate the attempt at detail... The decals are close but not quite right in any detail or placement, lol.

The transparent roof is obvious in this view. Besides the Fairlane above, the same plexiglass roof was also available as the Mercury Sun Valley coupe in '55, below.

Google image of the '55 Mercury Sun Valley. No chrome roofband and fixed B pillar, but the same plexiglass roof insert on this pillarless coupe. Mercury's trim was always pretty thickly applied in their upper echelon series, imo. Lovely lines though, good bones, as they'd say in fashion.

Here's a suitably glitzy '55 metal-roofed Crown Victoria. Crown Vics were frequently over-accessorized, as many are even at today's car shows. These cars are fantastic, though. The '56 was just as beautiful. My parents owned a '56 Sunliner convertible when I was born, in pink and black. This image CV was found with Google Images.

Filtered Fairlane for Five-Hundredth Post

This little electronic ditty celebrates this blog's five-hundredth post... It's a nice, low rear view of the new Fairlane scale model. Image is filtered and rendered more artistically. I love to set up little photo shoots, and try to do so almost every night. Click to see larger and in more detail. All of these shots show the model atop a cardboard quilt still curing from its first layers of paint.