This week I thought a lot about what paint scheme would look good. I wanted something retro looking, but not "stock". I had some Duplicolor royal blue and gold mist lacquers around....
After taping off with Tamiya tape, I came up with a simple two tone scheme. So far, so good. But I am usually impatient when it comes to applying the Bare Metal Foil, decal, polish and what not. This time the lacquer is going to gas out for at least a week before I continue.
In the meantime I am starting the next stock Mopar build. For this I purchased an MPC/Ertl Roadrunner kit on Ebay for about $40. But is it "safe?" The last "vintage" stock build, a 69 Charger 500, took nearly 6 months to complete and was fraught with fear and loathing from warped rooflines, clearcoat eating through the color coat and front grilles that didn't fit; in general, a much harder and more time consuming build than expected. So let's see if this one takes as long--and if I learn from my mistakes.
As far as the kit (MPC/Ertl 6282--there is no reissue I know of that can be purchased new, and Revell's offering is a GTX in 1:24 scale, not a 1:25 Roadrunner): it was in good condition, unbuilt except for the engine which someone had started; the body was in good shape; like the Charger 500 build I'm going to steal the engine and other critical components from more recently tooled, better detailed Mopar kits....
The 71 Dodge Charger (#30053) is such an offering from AMT/Ertl. What a difference in detail between modern tooling of the 71 Charger and the older Plymouth kit! I got this from Ebay as well for about $15; I am pretty sure it's not that hard to find elsewhere if you look around.
Repeating the same process I used to spice up the 69 Charger 500's engine compartment, I hacked the inner fender walls from the '71 Charger and grafted it into the older kit....
It's not that hard a process to do...surprising easily actually.....I finished off the engine compartment "sheetmetal" using sheet styrene shims and thick superglue to fill some of the gaps.
Getting the hood to stay up was tricky. I tried supergluing styrene posts to the hood and then shoving the posts into enlarged holes in the firewall, only to find that there was no friction to hold the hood up--the hood would slide back down and shut every time! I needed to cut ridges into the posts, but at first I couldn't figure out how to do this. After some thought I came up with a solution: I softened up the styrene posts with plastic weld and then with the plastic soft and I pressed a scored piece of metal onto it. This left ridges in the soft plastic, and when the glue dried I had a sort of plastic ratchet. Now the hood stays up due to the ridges on the posts. I am probably going to display this hood up, so having the hood stay up isn't a bad thing!
Paint for this will be from scalefinishes.com. I want to see how their paint compares to MCW's, especially the clearcoat. I will probably have a chance to paint the 71 Roadrunner before turning back to the Charger "scrapper" so stay tuned....
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