The Chinook Mk12 F5000, in 1/12th scale
Nov 24, 2023 0:41:54 GMT -8
Chris K. Hale and chrissmith like this
Post by arcticwolf on Nov 24, 2023 0:41:54 GMT -8
What seems like years ago my friend Patrick (pnance) sent a box of parts my way. If you put them together you'd have most of 2 Lotus 72s. I've been using up the parts but I always had this idea of what to actually build from them.
Chinooks were built in Toronto by George and Rudi Fejer. Mostly they looked at what was winning and built a copy of it. They built a sports racer that looks like a Chaparral 2, single seaters that looked like Colt Indycars, etc. I was a curious kid who liked to hang around and annoy them (and the Comstock guys). One day I saw this car they were working on, and assumed it was a Lotus 70, but Rudi said no, it was a Chinook, built to USAC, not SCCA, specs, to run in the new USAC road racing series. Some folks say it was for George Eaton, I don't know for sure, but the USAC series was cancelled, Eaton went CanAm racing and the car up and disappeared. I have reason to believe this is correct because when I saw the car, it had a Ford 4 cam in the back of it.
Later on, somebody was entering a "Chinook MK12" in some local F5000 events in upstate New York, then the car disappeared again. Years later, Mike Knittel found a car in a garage in Buffalo, restored it and it's a beauty, but it has shoulder rads and a chisel nose. It's the same car, just substantially modified by various people over the years.
I decided to build the car as I saw it in it's original form, close as I can remember from 1970 (funny, I can remember 1970 but not what I had for breakfast this morning). The Castrol paint scheme is my own imagination just because I like it and it's period correct. Yes, I took a large amount of creative license, I guarantee it's not close to 100% accurate, the model has flaws, but at least I know that nobody else in the world has one.
Something like 2 1/2 years to build it, on and off. I have progress pics and I'll be glad to answer any questions on how I built it if anybody is interested.
cheers
Paul