Revell Ford F1 Pickup--Son of Speed Build!

I have a 3 day weekend and thought it might be relaxing to try to build another kit FAST.  So I went to the LHS (that's "local Hobby Shop" in hobby-mag speak) and picked out the Revell 50 Ford pickup, #7203.

I realize that a lot of my model building is retracing my hobby life when I was 10 or 11 years old. I stopped building when I was 13 I think, and started again maybe 5 years ago?  that all said, I never remember my brothers or me building a model of a pickup.  Which means: I didn't pick this kit out of nostalgia; I picked it because to me it looks like I could build it fast.  Nice round body panels are easy to prep and paint; no need for bare metal foil (not much anyway) and not many logos or other body details to worry about.

The multi-piece body had some nasty mold lines and needed various clean up touches but it's drying now. I hope to be able to paint it tomorrow.

Chassis and engine block had flash galore but went together easily enough, at least so far. To save time, I will paint each of these subassemblies as a unit.  I am going to work on masking glue points again; that's something I started doing for the 58 Chevy and seemed to speed things up--just put a bit of scotch tape over where the parts go together; no endless paint scraping!  After removing the masks and gluing, touch up the paint. It's fast, and makes for a sturdier and maybe even cleaner build than scrape-scrape-scaping all the painted surfaces to be joined.

Here's a trick for cleaning up seams and mold lines: over-apply Plastruct Weld.  When used with gusto, Plastruct weld melts mold lines away and even fills minor seams.  I found this out accidentally when I used to much for an engine assembly--all the details got wiped out--but now I use this trick all the time; on the 50 F1 for instance I used a boatload of weld to clean up the very noticeable mold lines on the exhaust pipes.

No way I am using metalizers on this build, all that airbrushing and drying takes way too much time! Rattle can hardware store metal finishes will have to do.  Left to right: Kryon Stainless; Tamiya something or other; Duplicolor chrome which looks to me more like aluminum than chrome, and Krylon gold, the latter is the most "metallic" non-metalizer I know.  If you like the red label on the krylon gold, please be aware that it's that way because my dad used it for a paint stand.  Nice!!!!