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Another Model T finished in december 2014, this time a 1923 Ford Model T Snap-on Sales Car. The first time I saw this car was as a 1/32 scale model at my local Saab dealer. I spend a lot of time on my free Saturdays there and the owner knows that I’m interested in those cars. He got the model from, how fitting, a Snap-on salesman when he bought some new equipment. I took some pictures of the model and tried to find some more information on it, but couldn’t find anything. For some reason the project stalled, but this year I finally found some more pictures and decided to build it. The problem with this car was the fact that there was only one picture of the original car. The main item from the car was the large box which would hold the Snap-on tools and with only one side view picture of the car there was no way to tell how that box looked like on the inside. The first below is that b/w picture. I did spend a lot of time to find a similar car and found some pictures which gave me an indication how the inside of that would have looked. The Snap-on company has a replica of the car, but the toolbox on that had only three drawers with a substantial gap between the drawers and the tools were covered with a plexiglass sheet. It does look nice, but it looked more like a show car. After some head scratching I decide to build a toolbox with four drawers which would give me enough space to hold enough tools. And no space between the drawers, it had to be a tight fit to prevent any tools from falling out of a drawer. Time to start building! As a base I used the old, faithful AMT 1925 Ford Model T Roadster. The main parts I changed on that kit were the windshield, which received some extra details, and the top, which had to be changed from a 1 to a 2 rear window top. And I added some details too, like the top irons. On the body I added the saddles for the top irons. The front wheels were made steerable. I rarely make a drawing but as the toolbox was a bit complicated with opening drawers I first made a small drawing to get the correct sizes of all parts. The construction went well and without any problems. Now were getting somewhere. But what about the tools? How did they look like? And how many were there? I was lucky to find a site, Collecting Snap-on, were I discovered a 1923 catalog of the Snap-on tools. Every bit of info I needed was now complete. Below you can see some pages of that catalog. I made every tool in the catalog, all the handles, sockets, screw driver bits from plastic and brass rod. A total of 44 tools. Further below you can see an example of how the still unpainted tools looked like in an unpainted drawer. One drawer was for generic tools not listed in the Snap-on catalog. And after a paint job things are looking much better. One of the pictures show the painted toolbox, still without the doors. All the parts were now more or less ready, but an essential thing was still missing: all the lettering on the model! I copied the text from the original picture (that first b/w picture), inverted the colors so had a more or less white background with black (fussy) letters and reconstructed the whole text almost pixel by pixel. That job took several evenings, but if you look at the picture with the text only, it was worth the hours and hours of work. And here are finally the pictures of the finished model: |
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