Built the Kit as a Kid? Check out the Fullsize Red Baron Hot Rod

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.

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