Mid '70s tires

[Deleted]

I just cracked open an AMT '73 McLaren and I had forgotten how truly bad the tires were back then. Is there a resin alternative? What do you guys use?

[pje]

I’ve also struggled with mid ‘70’s tire sizes. For my 1972 McLaren using the Bill Jorgensen transkit, I was going to use a set of Michael Portaro’s 1970-1971 tires and fill in the tread to make slicks. Now that Lance has announced that he is going to release a 1972 McLaren kit it looks like I won’t have to worry about tires for that car. I seem to remember that (Michael?) is going to do some parts or transkit for the 1973 McLaren and maybe that will include tires, but maybe my memory is failing me on that one.
Going further into the decade, I started looking at mid ‘70’s tires because of 1974 and 1976 McLaren builds that I’m working on. Since I couldn’t find the actual tire sizes for that era, I decided to go with what Carousel 1 used for their 1/18th scale die cast McLarens as they look right to my eye. I measured the 1/18th scale tires, reduced those measurements down to 1/25th scale and started to compare all the various Indy car tires that I had. In both the front and rear tire dimensions, the closest tires that I had were the AMT tires from the late ‘80’s Indy car kits. I’ll remove the lettering on the sidewalls and use Indycal tire decals to finish them.
Hope my thoughts help you, but if anyone else wants to jump in with their views, please do as this is certainly a topic that I think would have a lot of interest.

Paul Erlendson

[Deleted]

Very helpful Paul. Thank you!