How To Fix Everything Wrong With The AMT/ERTL 1969 Ford Fairlane Cobra Torino Model Car Kit Part 1

AMT's 1/25th scale 1969 Ford Fairlane Cobra / Torino Fastback model car kit has been on the market in many different forms since it was first issued in 1968.

First appearing as a factory stock car with the option to build it as a drag racer, the model was updated in 1969 as the Ford Fairlane Cobra.

Then in 1971, AMT released a series of Modified Stocker kits that were earlier annual kits that were converted into dirt oval track race cars.
These model cars included opened wheel arches, huge tires, exterior crash bars, bumper over-riders, and side impact bars.
AMT severely altered the original molds in order to add these modifications, hence destroying the first issue kit.

The AMT 1969 Ford Fairlane Cobra kit stayed in the factory archives for almost 2 decades!

Then a miracle happened in the 1990's!
Cashing in on the upcoming Muscle Car trend, AMT decided to restore a lot of the old, damaged molds in an effort to cater to the trending Muscle Car model kit builder. The 1969 Ford Fairlane Cobra model kit was one of those projects brought back to the hobby world, but it needed a lot of work to restore it to factory stock.

Although the restoration was decent, the model kit was plagued with fit issues, remnants of older release parts, a notorious frame and wheel base issue and many, many other headaches which are still part of this kit in Round 2's latest release.

In this series of videos, I will be teaching you How To Fix Everything Wrong With The AMT/ERTL 1969 Ford Fairlane Cobra Torino Model Car Kit.

My research into what went wrong with this kit came from many of my YouTube and Facebook followers as well as research spanning model car building forums on the internet, YouTube build videos about this car, blogs and my own experience building the two model cars shown in this video.
My research netted me 23 issues with the kit, but my build found many more. (I lost count!)

In this video, I have chosen to build two of these model car kits, one as a Factory Stock Cobra and the other as a "NASCAR" race car.

As you will see in this video series, it is not possible, right out of the box, to build a totally accurate 1969 Ford Fastback. Some versions of this kit, like the most current, include the 1969 Ford Torino rear bumper, making a Cobra build impossible, while other earlier versions include the corrected Cobra rear bumper. The Torino rear bumper also makes it impossible to build an accurate NASCAR version as the Torino rear "egg crate" body panel would have been removed to save weight in the race. Another factor to make any version incorrect is that the front bumper comes from the AMT 1968 Ford Fairlane Indy Pace Car convertible kit and that part was never changed for any of the kits.

Other issues with this kit come from the AMT instructions themselves. Although AMT made a good attempt to give you easy to follow assembly instructions, they do call you to use parts that can only fit in earlier releases, and that are problematic to use in the kit's current state.
I will be going through these parts and how to correct them in full detail as this series unfolds.

In addition to the standard hobby tools, you will also need a sheet of Plastruct or Evergreen styrene to correct a few of the problems.

Although the modifications and additions to this kit are lengthy, I will do my best in this series to walk you through the build so that you can enjoy this model and put it together as AMT intended.

I hope this series will help you and happy model building!