Heathkit Spectre Ford GT 40 NITRO!!!!

This is the Spectre car series, Ford GT 40 from Heathkit. They made radios and such along with radio kits, I built one of their shortwave radios when I was 12, but they tried to hop on the ever growing and popular RC hobby and one can tell by the style and type that it was made in the early seventies in competition with Kyosho and several other manufactures that were cranking out 1/8th scale cars at great speed. This car is powered, as were many at this time by the venerable K&B Veco .19. I have installed a Perry carb and air cleaner, both from the same period and it has the original Heathkit radio system installed and working. I snatched this off the bay for a really, really good price. The guy that listed it had a bad title, 2 bad pictures and a one line description. The paint is original and it must have come with a window kit which necessitated the removal of the styrene where they go. The vents in the body were cut out as well and I screened them for the grille effect. There is a unique scoop that runs the width of the car underneath and delivers air to the engine compartment. It also has a really nice radio box that seals quite nicely against the weather. Other than that, there are very few innovations on this car and it is basically a knock-off of a dozen others, although it is well made. I did run this car mainly to dial in the carb and it was surprising that for as heavy as it is it went pretty well, the Veco is not all that powerful of an engine, but at the time there were few with carbs, so they are in a lot of cars. The body as mentioned was painted, but the edges of the stripes had some bleed from the tape, a little striping tape fixed that and added the door outline. It also made the stripes a little better porportioned to the rest of the main color. Besides the new old stock parts and a strip and clean, this one was an easy one and a nice example of this car. There were 2 on last week that went over 300 US, and they were not near as nice. Another one for the 1/8th scale collection!