ItsMillerTime

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Reviewed - AMT 1957 Chevy Bel Air

Published on June 29, 2022

First written January 19, 2025

Filed under Reviews

Welcome to another unboxing video, this time we are taking a look at the AMT 1/25 1935 Chevy Bel Air, a classic American car.

What's in the box?

Digging into this rebox of a rebox of a rebox, well you get the point we find instructions, a decal sheet, and many loosely packed sprues with things falling off everywhere, a sign of a many-time reboxed kit. The decals in this kit were pretty ok, most I'll not use as they aren't applicable, and the ones that are, well I think bare-metal foil or such will do a better job anyways.

The instructions are pretty usual for AMT, black and white on plain paper, and don't give you much beyond how to assemble the model. They don't really even give color callouts at all, so research will need to be done on that front to figure out how it should be done, and being a classic car, where references might be a bit hard to find it's a shame they don't bother giving that information.

Onto the sprues nonetheless, there is one clear plastic, 2 with the terrible AMT chrome, and many disparate sprues in a greenish-blue color for the rest of the model, plus the body and lower chassis. I forgot to snap a picture of the clear sprue, but it just contains the windows anyways and they looked fairly clear and molded well enough to call it good enough. The wheels included are the typical AMT vinyl type, the tread pattern looks pretty decent and I couldn't make out much in the terms of a seam line, but that'll be determined when I actually build the model.

I'll start with the chrome sprues since they are actually in one piece. The first sprue contains the driveline and rear suspension, as well as the front control arms and cross-brace for the engine, the detail on them looks good enough, and once oven cleaner is used to take off the chrome to redo it myself I think it'll look much better. The second of the sprues contain things like the valve covers, fan, air cleaner, bumpers, and rims, again detail hidden by the thick chrome plating and I know they'll look good afterward.
Moving onto the non-chrome sprues we have all the engine, and parts for the interior bench seating and rims, they are scattered across many smaller sprues and the detail on them looks great, although with a mold this old the flash is certainly showing and will require a lot of work to fix later, time to bust out the sanding sticks.

Lastly coming to the parts that aren't on sprues at all we have the body, interior bucket, and the chassis itself. The detail on the bottom side looks really well done, minus the fact that the exhaust pipes are molded into it, something I wish they'd have done separately as I'll have to spend extra time painting that. Also the stampings for trademarks and such, I'll have to spend time sanding that out. The interior bucket looks really well done, with great texture on the seats and sides, and the pedals have nice raised detail to them as well. Turning to the body of the car the details present look really well done, with the body trim being raised a pretty good amount, making it much easier to paint later I'm sure, in the engine bay you can see quite a bit of detail as well.

Overall this model looks like it will build up pretty well, especially for its age, it'll be my first time with a car with a lot of chrome on It though so it might present a problem, but we shall see. I'll catch ya all after the build to see the final result!