Biting the hand that feeds us!!!

IMHO the 1948 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery is a very beautifully detailed kit except for one part, the BODY. All of the gripes I have are with the Sedan Delivery body and only the body.

First, the side indent panels are worse than I thought. Not at all prototypical, way too angular and too narrow vertically, the upper and lower lines of the indent should not be parallel. I will be modifying mine by first adjusting the opening height of the side windows. They need to be made a tad taller, closer to the height of the top of the windshield, but still lower. I will measure a 1:1 for the proportions. I will then reshape the indent to better reflect the indent proportions and the new window height. No material will be removed at the belt line and the drip rail will have to be redone. I don't know if this body was drawn on a computer but it is way to angular in the wrong places. The rear delivery door window for instance, instead of following the contours of the door opening (a smooth jelly bean curve at the top and bottom) is actually a PENTAGON shape (it does however have the correct curve at the bottom). The windshield is also too narrow for its height but this can be corrected by the trimming into the A pillars and narrowing the center bar a bit. The windshield center bar should also be triangular instead of flat. Measuring the center bar with an accurate caliper multiplied by 25 renders a dimension of 1.80 inches wide. I used to own a 1:1 '41 Chevy and still have the windshield center bar, it measures .935", that's nearly half the width. The width of the center bar and the fat A pillars combine to give the overall effect of the windshield being too narrow . Of course a new windshield frame will have to be scribed. As a last comment, this one has nothing to do with body proportions, I would have liked to have seen the fender trim strips actually molded into the fenders. To be scraped off if not required.

The following is a bit more of a personal gripe with Galaxie. When I heard of this fledgling company putting out '48 Chevies, I wrote to Gary Schmidt to offer him my Technical Illustrating services to produce the instruction sheets. I never got an answer. Of course, when I opened the kit, the first thing I looked for was the instruction sheets. The sedan delivery illustrations (by Jarius Watson) on the Historical Data page are excellent, they also appear in color on the box top (if the styrene body had been as well proportioned as these colored illustrations, you wouldn't be reading this rant). The exploded views of the mechanicals, the layout itself, the detailed instruction paragraphs and the fact that all the items are both numbered and called out by their name is also superb. My gripe here again is only with the BODY. The illustration of the body is totally wrong, but as you must know by now, I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

To sum up, contrary to my griping, I still love this kit very much, but because I will have to do so much scratch-building and adjusting on the body, I will not be buying multiples of the Sedan Delivery. The amount of work to do on the body reminds me of the early models that we had to carve out of a solid block of wood. The only advantage with this one is that the basic shape is there and the inside is already carved out! I would gladly have traded some underpinning details for an accurately proportioned Sedan Delivery body. Subjects like this one are the staple of the Street Rod modeling world. I know I will still be buying multiples of their other offerings, especially if the ‘41 is released. The price of Galaxie kits does not bother me in the least because you can see where the money went, in the details. I only wish they had put a bit more time and money in quality control to better the proportions of the body.

As a Canadian, (we are way too apologetic) I must apologize for my ranting, but I had been waiting for this body style way before Galaxie ever offered it. I know I am going to get flack on this one but I had to air my opinions. We will all be seeing many examples beautifully built up for contests and for magazines articles and most of them will still have these inherent defects blatantly uncorrected. Remember the lower window sills on Ertl '55 Chevy pickup cabs, I hope that Galaxie corrects some, if not all, of these defects in subsequent reissues, like Ertl corrected the window sill flaw with their '57 pickup release.