AMT 1/25th Creepy T
And mum said building models was no way to get a-head in life.... 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 heat stained 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 wood grain in. 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??
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