And mum said building models
was no way to get a-head in life. Sorry.
This was a bit of fun, a diversion from the more serious
side of modelling; well, as serious as you can get about
gluing bits of plastic together anyway. For the most part
I was impressed with the quality of the kit, the frame
and bat being particularly nice mouldings. The frame is
a bit spindly given all the weight it's carrying, and
the method of mounting those gi-normous Tombstone tires
wasn't the best, so the model is quite fragile when finished.
I think AMT missed the boat by not including "GhoulYears"
or " Fire & Brimstones" for the front but
hey, that's just me.
I made a couple of modifications
to the kit, but otherwise it was pretty much straight
out of the box. The main change I incorporated was to
the headlight/eye thingies. I didn't like the bug-eyed
look they had and wanted them to be more sunken, like
the box art. I packed the back of the eye sockets with
Milliput and then used the trusty Dremel to carve them
out a bit. The blanked off sockets were drilled out and
the red headlights - if that's what they are - were mounted
behind instead of in the front. I think this improves
the kit immensely. The other changes I made were to cut
the rear light mounting posts in half as I thought they
were too tall, drilled out the exhausts and added spark
plug wires.
The kit is moulded in glow-in-the-dark plastic, but despite
being sorely tempted to leave it this way, I thought it
would be a bit too toy-like and would offend all the other
models in the display case, not to mention keep them awake
at night with that incessant glowing. I went with a purple
theme for no other reason than I like purple. The body,
frame, radiator shell and casket shaped intake were painted
in Testor's Plum Crazy, and purple spark plug wires are
from Detail Master. I did make two concessions to the
warm glowing, warming glow of the plastic. The gauges
and "R.I.P." on the radiator were left glow-in-the-dark,
neither of which really show up. Most of the chrome was
stripped with oven cleaner, as has become my standard
practice, and re-finished with Alclad Chrome after cleaning
up seams and moulding imperfections. Gunze clear blue
and yellow simulated the heat-stained exhaust pipes.
I managed to lose one of the shocks down the sink whilst
washing off the oven cleaner (I seem to have a habit of
doing this) so I scratch built a couple of new ones.
I couldn't resist adding
the "664 The Neighbour of the Beast" license
plate. I saw this on a bumper sticker many years ago and
have been waiting for an excuse to add it to a model ever
since. I did it on the computer, printed it out on regular
paper and added it to a license plate frame found in ye
olde spares box. A few coats of clear sealed it in and
made it look less paper-like.
AMT say to paint the fuel tank silver, but they moulded
it with a wood grain pattern. I thought wood was more
appropriate, since it is a casket after all, though I
admit the idea of a wooden fuel tank is a bit weird. Not
like driving around in a giant skull isn't. I sanded off
the wood grain and painted the fuel tank a yellowy brown
colour. This was given a streaky wash of Tamiya Deck Linoleum
(a red brown colour) and then oversprayed with a thin
coat of Tamiya Clear orange. The snakes were sprayed Testors
Metalizer Brass, just to be different.
The skull was painted off-white with washes of various
browns to make it look more evil. Or something.
Who could resist driving
around in a giant head with a ludicrous triple stack blower
out front, pipe organ exhausts and ridiculously large
steamroller slicks in the back??
Back to 1/25th Cars Main
Construction