The Visible V8, the Most Popular Model Engine Kit Ever, and Other See-Through Model Engine Kits: Part 1

Children don’t really change much from generation to generation, which explains the evergreen appeal of many children’s toys, games, and amusements that were created generations ago and are still popular today. Despite the ubiquity and easy availability of video games and toys based on high technology, you can walk into just about any store with a toy department and still be able to buy a brand-new version of Barbie, Monopoly, or an Etch-A-Sketch. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that you can also still buy and build the Visible V8 model engine kit, first sold by Renwal in 1958 and one of the longest-selling plastic model kits of all time. I have bought one, in fact, and plan to assemble it with my three grandsons.

Before we begin to build, let’s start this three-part series with a little bit of history.

To understand the origins of plastic car models, we must go back to the history of models in general. In 1931, Jerry Aronson and Joe Eisendrath bought the assets of a company named Banker’s Thrift Corp., a well-known maker of cast-metal coin banks, and renamed it Banthrico. Banthrico’s main market was actual banks, which would give away the coin banks as promotional items, often commissioning them as replicas of the bank’s building. Banthrico eventually expanded the line to include celebrities, political leaders, animals, college mascots, and vehicles. Like the coin banks sold to banks, the vehicles were often used as promotional items by automobile manufacturers and car dealers.

The development of polymer plastics in the late 1930s and during WWII opened up a world of opportunities for manufacturing. After the war, brothers Ed and Paul Ford started the Product Miniature Company (PMC) to compete with Banthrico’s car-shaped coin banks, only the Fords’ banks were made of cellulose acetate plastic, not a zinc-metal alloy.

Some model makers went a step further in their promotional efforts and worked directly with the companies that built the real-life vehicles. In 1947, John Hanley, a tool and die maker in Detroit, started a company making promotional advertising specialties, model aircraft, and industrial models. After making Chrysler a model that training mechanics could use to service the company’s then-new fluid-drive automatic transmission, Hanley got a contract to produce promotional models of vehicles for the automaker. Hanley eventually renamed his firm Jo-Han due to a trademark dispute with a large toy company. By the 1950s, just about every car company was giving away 1:25-scale promotional models of their cars to the children of car buyers. (My older brother and I got a model of our grandfather’s 1963 Oldsmobile 98.)

Not until the ’50s were modern model-making processes developed. In 1948, a Detroit lawyer with family connections to the Ford Motor Company, West Gallogly Jr., started a company named Aluminum Model Toys to exploit that market. Gallogly hired George Toteff, a pattern maker with an inventive bent, to run the company. Toteff switched to plastic and developed a process to injection-mold complete bodies in one piece. He also developed a method for vacuum deposition of a mirror-chrome-looking finish on plastic that is still used today for automotive trim. Toteff also changed from cellulose-acetate to styrene-based plastic, which could be both molded in finer detail and assembled with solvent-based glues, allowing for more complex models. Later, Toteff would start his own firm, Model Product Company (MPC).

Now we have set the stage for the origins of Renwal, the original makers of the Visible V8. Irving Lawner, the company’s founder, started out making plastic kitchen utensils in Manhattan in the late-1930s. Soon he also was making plastic toy airplanes and automobiles under the Renwal brand name—Lawner, spelled backwards. After WWII, Lawner added plastic dollhouse furniture to his line as well as transparent plastic dollhouses, which Renwal sold to toy stores, doll hospitals, and toy soldier shops to display their miniatures. Eventually Lawner sold Renwal, and the company moved to the NYC suburbs, in Mineola. With its relationships with high-end retailers solidly established, Renwal introduced a line of highly detailed “Blueprint” military models, aimed at a higher price point than competitors like Lindberg.

The sources don’t say what inspired Renwal’s most enduring product in 1958 (it has survived the Renwal company itself). Perhaps it was the company’s experience with clear plastic displays, or possibly the success that AMT and Jo-Han were having with their automotive lines, or maybe a combination of those factors that led to Renwal’s introduction of the Visible V8 plastic model kit, a 1:4 scale replica of the overhead-valve pushrod V8 design that became popular in the postwar era. While it is rather generic and not based on any one engine, it bears some resemblance to the Cadillac and Studebaker V8 engines of the kind produced in the 1950s, when the model V8 was being developed at Renwal.

Described by Renwal as “a transparent, operating auto engine assembly kit,” the Visible V8 used clear plastic for molding the cylinder block, heads, and valve covers, allowing builders to view over 100 moving internal parts, including the crankshaft, rods, pistons, pushrods, valves, and even the fan belt. It was powered by two C-cell batteries and a “Powerful Per-Mag” electric motor. The motor and its reducer gears were all cleverly hidden in the starter case. Little light bulbs, wired from the spinning distributor and lighting up in the proper firing order, replicated spark plugs. “Parts are perfectly timed just as on a real engine,” the box proclaimed.

The Visible V8 model was accurate enough to be used in science and auto shop classes in high schools, playing into the model company’s slogan “Renwal turns science into hobbies and hobbies into science.” It may not be coincidental that the Visible V8 model kit was introduced a year after the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite, which spurred a significant interest and increase in science education in the United States. Toys became “educational.”

The transparent model engine kit was so successful that Renwal followed the V8 with the Visible Man and the Visible Woman. As those models were made for children, while they were anatomically correct, they were not anatomically complete. Similarly, in light of the sensitivities of the 1950s, parents were assured on the box cover that the “The Miracle of Creation” feature, a kit of alternate parts modeled on a woman who was seven months pregnant, was completely optional. Those parts had their own individual box and a separate instruction sheet.

Speaking of boxes, one of my favorite features of the original Renwal Visible V8 kit was the art on the box top. A father with graying temples, a button-down shirt, a suit jacket, and a pipe looks proudly over the shoulder of his young teenage son at the son’s completed Visible V8. I think it’s a classic of mid-century commercial art.

In 1963 Renwal also introduced a companion model kit to the Visible V8, the Visible Automotive Chassis, a somewhat less mellifluous and less alliterative name than that of its predecessor, which could be mounted onto the chassis. It was also electrically powered and had a transparent transmission and differential. When built, builders could shift gears and operate the steering and brakes.

While I haven’t been able to find the original retail price, sources say that the Visible Automobile Chassis was rather costly. It was also, like the Visible V8, in 1:4 scale, which made it a fourth the size of an actual car chassis, or about 3 feet long. Expensive and large when new, like the GI Joe USS Flagg, it is highly collectible today, selling for over $1,000 when new-in-box and unbuilt. Unbuilt, vintage Visible V8 model kits in the original box are a more reasonable $100 to $200.

Eventually, Renwal offered an extensive line of Visible models, including the Visible Head, the Visible Horse, and the Visible Dog. There was even a Visible model of the nine-cylinder Pratt & Whitney Wasp rotary aircraft engine, also motorized.

Keeping up with changes in automotive technology, in 1973, Renwal introduced the Visible Wankel kit, a working, motorized 1:3 scale model of a two-rotor rotary engine. As it is much rarer, the rotary kit is more expensive. Renwal’s wasn’t the first transparent rotary model kit, though. In the 1960s, Japan’s Gakken model company introduced a motorized, 1:5 scale model of Mazda’s Wankel, which has subsequently been reissued by Entech and later by Minicraft. In the 1970s, AMT made a 1:4-scale, transparent Wankel that was not motorized.

In the mid-1970s, the Revell company bought out Renwal. Injection molds can last a very long time, so when model kit companies go out of business, their models don’t disappear. When molds are bought, their models are either reissued from time to time or they just stay in production, like the Visible V8, which you can buy today and build yourself for less than $100.

Revell originally made the Visible V8 just as Renwal had, but in 1993 they switched from electric power to a hand crank and there are no longer spark plugs that light up. Surprisingly, though the revision required molds for the new parts, Revell did not invest in new molds to update the ’50s-era generator to a more modern alternator.

To give you an idea of how popular the Visible V8 was to both model builders and car companies, in the early 1960s, when Chrysler got wind that Revell, one of Renwal’s competitors, was planning on introducing a model of the small-block Chevy V-8 to compete with the Visible V8, the automaker persuaded the model company to instead make a working, cutaway version of the Slant Six, with some transparent parts.

Four decades later, in 2005, the Testor’s company introduced its own competition for the Visible V8, another Mopar mill, a see-through, motorized 1:4 scale model of Chrysler’s legendary 426 Hemi engine. Appropriately for the 21st century, in addition to motorized motion, the plastic fantastic Hemi includes an “Authentic Hemi Sound Chip.”

Today, in addition to vintage model kits on eBay and Revell’s reissued Visible V8 kit you can buy a variety of “visible” engine model kits, ranging from generic inline-fours to V-8s. The Franzis company in Germany makes a line of factory-licensed, see-through model engine kits for the 289 Ford, as well as a variety of air-cooled Volkswagen and Porsche motors. They appear to be a bit more detailed, and more expensive, than the vintage models covered in this article.

This article is planned as the first in a series wherein I will be building a vintage Renwal Visible V8, a Minicraft Wankel, and a Testor’s 426 Hemi with my grandsons. At six, nine, and 12 years old, they have fairly advanced Lego-building skills—their father is a master Lego builder—but this will be a challenge, as they’ve never built a plastic model from a kit before. Of course, I’ll be doing most of the work involving solvent glue and X-acto knives, but they should learn something about engines and model building in the process.