This past week I have been working like mad on this little guy. It is a 55 Chevy gasser that Roundbadge sent me that started life as an orange Heat Fleet mainline. I wanted it for the yellow glass to help the look of this build. This is a clone of a roadkill feature car that belongs to Mike Finnegan who is a staff editor for Hot Rod Magazine. It is called “Blasphemi”
He wanted a 55 Chevy that had a specific look to mimic what he fell in love with while watching the movie called Two-Lane Blacktop:
Bare bones gasser, radius cut rear fenders, home-made hood scoop, and plenty of attitude. Mikes car is very unique as it has a 500+ CI HEMI with fuel injection...oh yea and big old 871 blower! The car also has a stick which is waaay cool in my book.
Now, onto how I built my version to pay homage to Mikes.
I sacrificed a Maisto 55 Nomad Gasser for a lot of parts on this.
Lets start with the engine: BLASP(HEMI)
At first the car was naturally aspirated breathing through some velocity stacks which is what I mimicked.
I filed down the block, cut the heads off of a gold hemi I had, and used the stacks from the maisto:
Looked the part until I discovered that he had put a blower on the car recently...hmmm
Time to follow suit!
I had to actually cut out the entire original engine and leave the frame rails and headers to get the fit and look I was after.
Looks even closer to the real car now!
With the engine in it was time to make the body fit around it. TONS of filing on both the firewall and radiator area. This also meant getting rid of the front rivet that held the car together....which also meant cutting away a large area of the the chassis. In the completed pics notice how open the front is :)
Since I couldn’t do a flip forward front end I decided to fit a hood instead. I used the hood from the Maisto (entirely different size but same basic shape) and filed for hours to get the fitment right on both the body and engine:
During this time I also installed axle tubes. The front is lowered about 1/16th of an inch.
I also used the seats and roll cage from the maisto and cut/filed everything to fit: You will see in the completed shots
After all the details were fit I went ahead and stripped the paint
After some flat black:
I then started on the EXTENSIVE hand painting details. The most important part was the name:
Test run to get the brush loaded right
Then the most nerve-wracking part of the build:
Finally, after painting the headlights, tail lights, rear decals, engine, chassis, interior, grille, license plate that I made, wheels, and sanding tires, and removing the rear bumper it was done!
Enjoy
I even suck my initials into this :)
Yea, its got a HEMI!
The steering wheel is made out of a paperclip I bent up and cut.
So there you have it! Sorry for the amount of pictures, I just had a ton of fun with it and couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. Let me know if you have any questions as to how/why I did stuff. Thanks for looking guys!