The Red Baron - Tom Daniels , Chuck Miller

If you are of a certain age, this car needs no introduction or explanation. If not, well, it was the Sixties, man. Monogram model designer Tom Daniel was looking for inspiration to follow up his very successful Beer Wagon kit and found it, in all places, in a German World War I helmet. Again, if you were around then, it’s not as weird as it sounds. German helmets were adopted as a sign of rebellion by bikers, surfers, and other cultural outlaws. Heck, Ed Roth even sold replicas in magazine ads alongside his T-shirts. Plus, in the funny pages, you’d find Charles Schultz’s Snoopy flying his “Sopwith Camel”—his doghouse—in imaginary dogfights against the Red Baron, adventures that prompted a group called The Royal Guardsmen to release “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” That single went to number-two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in late 1966.


Daniel thought the helmet would look cool on top of a T-bucket-type hot rod, and he created what became one of the most popular kits in modeling history. No kid could resist that giant chrome helmet, the machine guns on either side of the cowl, or the powerful inline engine with its trumpet-like zoomies, the same kind of engine as the one that powered the blood-red Fokker triplane flown by the real Red Baron.





Monogram had the kit on display at the 1967 Chicago Toy Fair. Also in Chicago that fall was Bob Larivee Sr., whose Promotions Inc. was one of the premier car show organizations of the era. Larivee happened by the Toy Fair, saw the kit, and immediately buttonholed Monogram management to work out a deal to produce a fullsize version of the Red Baron for his shows.




Larivee contacted Chuck Miller to turn the plastic model into a real car. Miller, who ran Styline Customs in Detroit, had been working for Promotions Inc. for a while, repairing show cars that had been damaged in transit from one city to the next. Miller had also just won the Ridler Award for his Fire Truck C-cab hot rod, so the project seemed a good fit.
Unlike the plastic Monogram kit that was such a hit with a generation of young rodders, the fullsize Red Baron was hand fabricated and scratch built by Chuck Miller, so as to duplicate Tom Daniel’s original kit design as precisely as possible.




“Larivee came to my shop with a model of the car, and we started from there,” Miller remembers. “We had to get the scale off of that, figure out how big the car had to be.”

Miller says the car took about six months to build, from that first meeting with Larivee to the 11th-hour roll-in at the 1969 Autorama. Much of the car had to be built from scratch, since in 1968 there weren’t a lot of off-the-shelf components for building any kind of hot rod, let alone one that’s part T-bucket, part triplane.




He handbuilt the frame, following the look of the kit’s chassis, and then formed the bucket body out of sheetmetal. Once the body was roughed in he could start on the helmet, since the two had to fit seamlessly together. Miller fashioned a clay model of the helmet—much like car designers model their future products in clay—then made a mold from the clay to create the finished helmet in fiberglass.
Miller sculpted the big German helmet in clay first, and then built a mold to use to form the car’s iconic roof in fiberglass. It was finished in silver metalflake, and topped with a metal spike turned on a lathe.



The machine guns were scratch-built out of steel and then chromed “to look like the machine guns in the kit,” Miller says. The gunsight radiator ornament, the radiator and its large Maltese cross, and the Maltese crosses on the reverse-chrome wheels were all hand fabricated. The suspension and steering are a mix of hot rod parts—a Tri-Five Chevy rearend, Model T rear spring—and hand-fabricated pieces, “because at the time there were no spindles, radius rods, or tie rods in the size we needed to match the kit,” he says.

The hardest part, Miller remembers, was the engine. In real life, the WWI-vintage Mercedes aircraft engine Daniel put in his kit would be far too long for a T-bucket-size hot rod. Yet Miller wanted to echo the kit’s inline-six powerplant. The solution was to use one of the new Pontiac OHC six-bangers. “That single center valve cover looked aviation-type,” he recalls. The only problem? The Pontiac’s exhaust exited on the left side of the engine. Daniel’s exhaust trumpets were on the right.
The closest thing Miller could get to replicate Daniel’s idea of putting a Mercedes aircraft engine in the Baron was to use a six-cylinder OHC Pontiac motor. Just one problem: Mercedes’ exhaust exits on the right, Pontiac’s on the left. Otherwise the motors are remarkably similar, right down to the chromed helmet air cleaner cover.



“To make the headers go across, under, or around the engine would look stupid,” Miller realized at the time. “So we left them on the left side. That’s the one big difference between the car and the kit.” Exhaust placement wasn’t a big deal when the Red Baron debuted in Detroit; folks loved it. When Larivee and Miller brought it to California and showed Daniel, however, the model maker fumed. “You messed up my car,” Miller remembers Daniel saying before stomping off. “Larivee and I just looked at each other and wondered what that was all about,” Miller says. “We figured, if he had designed it right in the first place, this wouldn’t be a problem.” Eventually Daniel cooled off, Miller says, and came to like the 1:1 version of his creation.
Those are good ol’ chrome reverse wheels behind the custom Maltese crosses. “If I remember right, they just clipped onto the wheel,” Miller says.




The Red Baron was a huge hit, so big, says Miller, that “I probably should have built two, one for West Coast shows and one for the East Coast.” Once the Red Baron came off the circuit, Larivee sold it to Jim Brucker for his Movieworld Cars of the Stars museum in Southern California, with the understanding that he’d have first shot to buy it back if Brucker were to ever sell it. Eventually it did wind up back in Larivee’s hands.
That’s a real Moon tank on the back of the Baron, one of the few pieces Miller didn’t have to build himself. “We told them what we needed, size-wise, and they made it for us,” he says.
Originally the Red Baron had a Hurst T-handle shifter, and also an eight-track tape player from a Lear jet, as Lear was one of Larivee’s sponsors. “But some things on the car grew legs,” says Miller, and had to be replaced. The hand grenade shift knob is a later addition.




A few years ago, the Red Baron was sold again, this time to Bill Smith’s Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed in Lincoln, Nebraska. You can see it there now, and it will eventually be a part of a larger display of hot rods and customs that the museum will park in a planned expansion of its facility, Larivee said.

Even all these years later, the Red Baron has lost none of its impact. Miller—and Daniel—should be proud. And if you’re hankering to build one of your own (again, right?) you’ll find ’em on eBay. But they’re not cheap.
Hallmark Guitars’ Bob Shade, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and George Barris pose with Shade’s Barris-inspired guitars, the Dragula, Barris Krest, and Wing-Bat. Photo Credit: Michael G. Stewart




Play the Baron
Hallmark Guitars’ Bob Shade is a longtime car guy who, as a 10-year-old, saw the Red Baron at a car show in Washington, D.C. “From that day forward the Red Baron was seared into my thoughts as the coolest ever.” Show car design elements eventually found their way into Shade’s custom-made guitars, which then led to an association with George Barris to build limited-edition instruments inspired by the Kustom King.
Hallmark will make 50 of the limited-edition Red Baron guitars, each with its own certificate of authenticity.

Shade also makes one-off guitars that he donates to charity auctions, and it was at one such auction that he crossed paths with Bob Larivee and Chuck Miller. “Chuck and Bob both seemed to really like my custom car guitars too, and they asked when the Red Baron guitar was going to be produced. They said, ‘We need a Red Baron guitar!’ I was floored. So I got to work on a design and showed up with one of the prototype Red Baron guitars at Cobo Hall in Detroit. Bob invited us to set up at his booth and display the new guitar, and we got a tremendous response. I decided right then to put the Red Baron guitar into limited-edition production.”



It took Shade a year to get the guitar from prototype to production ready, hand-building two to get the playability just right. “These are not cool-looking wall hangers,” he says. “These are professional guitars that are custom made, and something you can't get anywhere else. Just like a custom car. We make our own custom-wound pickups and die-cast hardware here, so the whole guitar is proprietary to our brand that started in 1965.”
Details that mimic the car are all over the guitar. See the helmet spike?

Guitar Player magazine gave the Red Baron a rave review, calling it “an entertaining and musical way to slay audiences with its striking looks and killer tones.” The guitar’s “slim neck is easy to negotiate, the iron-cross body shape actually feels comfy when sitting down and standing, and the master volume is super easy to control with your pinky (especially with its rubber ‘tire’ knob).”

Just 50 Red Baron guitars will be made, each housed in a red leather and velvet case and with a certificate of authenticity signed by Larivee and Shade. Visit hallmarkguitars.com for more info.
Craftsmanship on these custom guitars is first-rate. Bodies are made of alder, the necks are maple, fingerboards rosewood

http://www.hotrod.com/cars/featured/1601-built-the-kit-as-a-kid-check-out-fullsize-red-baron-hot-rod/

En réponse à des coms datant de 2012.