And now for another Camaro, why yes indeed! The better of the two Camaro kits(for now), with a crisper mold and arguably a better overall image in the model car kit community. I was holding this one up against the Camaro Z/28 the whole way through that particular article and knowing that I’ve had this kit for a year plus now and it just… sat there, it really could do with being built. The whole reason I initially bought it was to do the decal sheet for it and do it properly. As well as of course do the split-stripe Baldwin Motion 454 Camaro for the 1971 year. And uh… many more.
Regardless, it sat collecting dust under a table after I scanned in and photographed the body plenty enough. Then, long after I stowed it away, Round 2 proudly announced the re-tooling of the Camaro kit and finally give us a damn full bumper, single headlight Camaro. The first one since 1973, can you believe that? In an age of re-releases where every odd month a tool from 1967 is dug up to be used up after so long, it’s truly peculiar to see one of the best selling muscle cars of all time fall by the way side.
But, I hear you say, but Mr. Writer Man, that is because they took the tool for the full bumper kit behind the shed and let it closely examine the rifling of the Remington rifle that got shoved in its eyes – and you’re right! They executed the full bumper tool and re purposed its empty chest cavity for the double headlight split bumper in the eighties, combining this amalgamation of half-MPC guts, half-AMT guts into one gargantuan misshapen, ugly, terrible mess. Also side note, I know the term should be “twin headlight” and “quad headlight” rather than single and twin, but I’m a fool so bear with me.
Either way, it’s finally happening and in celebration thereof I’m revisiting my, what, third and fourth models respectively? I never did write an article about the Baldwin Motion and the Z/28 article was uh, a thing. So I thought its time to use my tricks that I learned over the years and put them to use with a little elbow grease and actually try to make something nice out of them for once. For the Z/28 350, I went with the dark gray I at first wanted to do this one in but then it occurred to me, all of the Baldwin Motion cars are abrasively out there; they don’t do subtle. The green is honestly the darkest shade you could get the damn thing in, so I swapped the colors out – popping metallic blue under the black rear, why yes, yes indeed.
Baldwin Motion is one of those four or five big names from the 1960s-going-on-1970s that really latched onto GM’s “COPO” program. They’re all dealers from across the United States, all dealt in GM products and they all fell in love with the Camaro, Chevelle, Corvette and Nova the most. Dana Chevrolet out of Long Beach, CA was the first to transplant the 427ci V8 out of the ‘Vette into the Camaro and that’s where the whole idea of dealers making subtle sleepers came from; the Dana hood for instance is just a simple twin-snorkel hood that on the outside doesn’t really scream “437HP car”. Then you had Nickey Chevrolet out in Chicago, IL where it became quite literally a customization shop to the customer’s taste. But you also had the now ever so famous Yenko, ran by Don Yenko out of Cannonsburg, PA and just like Nickey, just like Dana, Yenko too was a racing car driver with a dealership that just didn’t get enough power out of the supposed ‘powerful’ cars, so he just like the rest, began to offer suped-up versions; namely the Yenko S/C or sYc; the Yenko Super Car. And honestly, I can go on all day and not even remotely do those people’s backgrounds justice, they’re all enigmatic and engineering masterminds who turned the muscle car, into a beefcake car.
I didn’t even mention the elephant in the room in that little background wade there; Baldwin Motion. Joel Rosen, a racing car driver and engine builder out of Brooklyn joined Baldwin Chevrolet out of well, Baldwin in New York and even before the Baldwin days, Rosen was known for making supremely, over the top, outrageously fast engines that would set a dyno on fire. In 1966 when he joined Baldwin, they began to offer specialty tuned packages on just about any Chevrolet on the lot if the customer so desired. And from these, we get the wide-as-hell selection of everything. The whole point was to create a car that was fast as balls on the road and could be not-at-all compromised on the track still. It had road-going comforts and for the most part it was the customer who chose if the luxury had to go for more speed(weight v.s. power back then was… well, with 3500 pound cars, no-one gave a shit if you had the top of the line luxury added atop of the minivan sized engine), and Rosen made it so that even fully equipped, that car could dominate. Even going as far as to call his cars “super cars”. And you know what, they were. And in 1967, when the all-new Camaro came to the public, those dealers had a damn field day.
The funny thing is, a 1967 ad for the ’67 Phase III Motion Camaro called out exactly what I just described. Quite literally saying it’s not a sports car, drag car or a family car, yet somehow, still being exactly all of them. Considering they threaded the line of being called a jack of all trades and a master of none, they kind of pulled it off – being exactly a jack of all trades and a master of all nonetheless. It wasn’t until 1968 when the crazy sticker packages started to take off, with the 1968 Phase III having a quite lively stripe set that got further expanded on in 1969(Rosen gone on record saying there’s no Phase I or II, “Phase III” just sounds cool). But lets be fair, it got… it got conkers in 1970. Fresh of the line in mid-1970, the Camaro got a kick up something fierce; a freshly developed 1970 LS6 454 cubic inch V8 sourced once again from the Corvette which was now also offered into the other models by default would make it into the Camaro which at the time didn’t actually get a block bigger than the 396ci V8 and torque-monster 400ci V8 by default.
And those 454’s… they were huge. They really packed a considerable punch and they were really popular among the dealership cars, right up there with the Yenkos. Though unfortunately, Baldwin Motion was also kind of responsible along with Yenko for bringing the custom dealership car to a painful halt in 1973. Yenko abruptly backed out the EPA testing of his ’72 Vega Stinger with the 4 cylinder cranked up to max via turbocharger cause they required 50000 miles to be driven in one before it was allowed to pass. He did eventually push out the already tested Stinger Vegas without the turbo, but this was quite literally the last Yenko Super Car model that left their shop. And Baldwin Motion ran into a totally different issue, albeit with the same agency and the same damn model: The Motion Super Vega.
A 454 powered modified(pretty much only in the suspension, tire and engine housing compartment) that got Joel Rosen a cease-and-desist letter from the EPA in 1974 after being featured in Car Craft magazine, and they quite literally demanded that if they didn’t stop putting non-factory options onto any car, they would be given a 10,000$ fine per removed emission device. This was 1974 money, in 2019 money this is 51,000$ per Vega. That’s a staggering, ungodly high penalty. So… he ceased doing exactly that by settling a 500$ fine in 1975 and promising to no longer continue it for on the road vehicles, from then on he marked every car as ‘export only’ and ‘for off-road use only’. From there on out, Motion kind of faded into the background, though it still exists today, go figure!
And that right there was a six paragraph history lesson on dealer-tuned cars and how… they all went away. Besides Yenko. And technically Hurst. And kind of Motion Performance. Oh fuck it. Anyway! One more thing of interest about Joel Rosen is that in the nineties, he was by this point a massive, avid model enthusiast. Like, of any type: prop planes, tanks, military planes, boats, military ships, it goes on and one thing of considerable import to us car model kit folks: he joined Ertl and Racing Champions back then to help put out the Baldwin Motion Camaro, ensuring its high grade quality with the Motion Performance name. It’s claimed(though I myself can’t verify it) he was also part of Revell’s undertaking of the 1969 Baldwin Motion Camaro around the same time.
Like I kept rambling on about in the Z/28 350 article, this kit’s… the better one. In terms of mold quality, it’s leaps and bounds ahead, even though they come from the same damn source. The hood isn’t warped and torn to shreds due to crappy plastic quality and stupendously idiotic injector point placement, where you can actually hide the injection part, it’s got clearer details on most the parts cause they’re not soft blobs in the same of car related parts, the front end is… less crappy, which on the Z/28 kit is damn near flat due to the quality of the plastic but on the Baldwin Motion kit is actually kind of reasonable. That being said though, this kit desperately, like to a disturbing degree, separate headlight buckets. It’s awful. There’s no adequate way of describing how much better it would be if they could’ve been separate. Now you have to squeeze 4 transparent headlight pieces into the body and because of the way the body is molded, they don’t fit. They awkwardly get forced in there and they don’t really ever seem to look… right.
Another problem that is unique to this kit is, and you might’ve spotted in the pictures, is the damn knuckle-dragger stance. There’s no way, no real way of knowing how low your exhausts will be. They should never have made it so the exhaust headers are one piece down to the chassis and have the rest of the exhaust pipes be a separate piece. Instead, a fix would’ve been quite simple: have the exhaust pipes with the headers, you know, the visible piece outside the car, be met halfway in the engine, where they’re covered by the engine block and engine bay, so even if you dicked it up, it’ll be hidden from view. The way they have it now is that the engine, with the headers, will be glued and stuck, incapable to be adjusted, days ahead of placing the exhausts. I mean for Gods sake… it’s pretty, pretty damn bad.
On the flip side, however! This is the better version, it’s got a far more detailed engine bay, the quality is leaps ahead of the oddly enough exact same version just with different sprues, it has better tires and it has a better decal sheet. So, what did I do to it to make it more unique? Well for starters, only the stripes are used from the kit and I painted them gloss black with Tamiya blacks. The rest are my own decals, even though I screwed up the placement of the tail ones: the left one should’ve been a SS emblem and the Baldwin Motion badge above it, with the 454 emblem on the right, but instead I just put more Motion decals. The engine bay is fully wired, plumbed and decal’d up the wazoo – and holy shit does the air cleaner look good with the decal, I’m so pleasantly surprised by it.
The body is painted with Tamiya’s TS-54 “Light Metallic Blue” with their clear over it and it’s the first time I’ve used their simple glossy clear and it’s actually supremely nice to use. It dries in a instant, it’s no wet look but it’s precisely what it says on the cap: glossy. Plus, it’s a decal’s best pal. It’s not gonna curl ’em, cause them to rip on the body, so forth, it actually seals them in perfectly. Another little home-addition I did, first time for anything – hood latches. I used some stray wire strands I yanked from the wires I’m using in the engine bay and painted ’em silver, leaving them to dry. Then I forced them in with the grille piece which forced them stuck perfectly and drilled holes in the hood latches. In the end, I gotta say, it’s quite a nice little finishing touch.
Like, all in all – definitely one of my better efforts I’d say. It joins the other Camaro, the Z/28 on the shelf and a little vacant spot’s gonna stay until the full bumper Camaro sees itself being shoved onto hobby store shelves. Until then, it’s gonna be finishing up the 1977 Firebird T/A S.E. and 1977 Pinto Special Accent Group – good time for ’77!
’70 Chevrolet Camaro SS Baldwin Motion 454 Phase III specifications:
Kit: AMT855
Skill Level: 2
Parts: 159
Molded in: Dark Green
Scale: 1/25
Ahh yes, one of my first model kits that I built when I jumped back into this particular hobby. Heck, in fact, this particular kit might also be one of the first posts I did on this website, copying it like the ham fisted oaf that I am from a crappy Amazon.co.uk review. Well, we’re now a rigorous 300 or so models further into the future, it’s time to give this ol’ boy a re-do. Why? Honestly, there’s no big ‘true‘ reason, part of me was inspired by the anouncement of AMT’s semi-new tool 1970 Camaro with the full bumper and single headlights. Holy shit right? It only took them 30 years to finally do something with this kit. Though one shouldn’t bite the cramped, over-reaching hand that feeds him, this is a truth, it’s not AMT’s fault, it’s… well, it’s Round 2’s fault. A company that quite literally just invests in shoving more liquid plastic through old molds so they can make more AutoWorld 1/18th scale cars and be hugged by Coca-Cola Company for being good boys.
Yet part of that is to blame on the kit itself, but I’ll go further into that in a moment. First, some well deserved history on the car and the kit; you see, this is like one of those cars that you really gotta give credit. Think of the Mustang, back in 1965 when they put out the Fastback alongside the convertible and coupe, that right there was serious concern for magnum opus. How the in the ever living fuck were they gonna triumph that? They essentially had designed the greatest hits album right there and then, and of course Caroll Shelby came along and for ’67 he essentially made the sexiest automobile in the history of mankind, better known as the 1967 Shelby GT500, not even the Eleanor version that added too much square to an all around slab of perfect. What the hell are you gonna do next? 1968 was largely unchanged and 1969 came along and it just went straight into Elvis territory from there, getting fatter and heavier until Ford had to damn near scrap it in 1973.
However, it was fortunately also a car to which GM for once in their lifetime actually listened to the consumers. The Camaro was popular in all configurations, as a two door family car all the way to Trans-Am racer. One of the biggest complaints from the first generation was the ride quality, it was lumpy, it was bumpy and generally it was a blast to drive as long as you went straight on a smooth road. They really took to the mantra of “the driver’s car”; they put on far better suspension, revamped the brakes, soundproofed the car and also did little comforts like longer doors for easier rear bench entry, more powerful steering, you name it. Essentially, while it was chunkier, it was also better. And it was still fast as all hell being a true to itself muscle car, until the 1973 oil crisis you had the base 290ci V6 but most customers chose the revamped 350ci V8 LT-1 engine sourced from the Corvette that would become a staple for the Camaro until deep into the eighties. The power monster 396ci V8 would be available until 1973 before it would get chopped in favor of… well, less.
And the AMT kit also had its fair share of troubles, yes nice segue I know. From the seventies, AMT did the 1970, 1971 and 1972 all in the single headlight SS specs with the 396ci V8 engine. These were uh, well, they weren’t great. But ’twas 1970 and choice was rather limited and so was technology so lets forgive them for that. Then, in 1989 they did the impossible – they somehow fudged together the AMT and MPC kits from 1970 into one ugly abomination of ill-fitting shit that honestly didn’t deserve to see the light of day. It truly was every way a terrible kit, screwballed into a kit and you know it was a crapfest of a kit when not even the re-release kings Ertl, Racing Champions and Round 2 gave this one a second run. Instead, during the Racing Champions era of AMT Ertl, they invested in a ground up new tool of the 1970 Camaro in 1999, specifically the Baldwin Motion 454 Camaro in all new-tool glory. Even at the time specifically designed with the future in mind, the RS Z/28 Camaro hit the shelves in 2001.
The hood is molded onto the sprue from the left side all the way down and cause the plastic is so thin and flimsy it curves upwards horribly. The entire detail of the suspension and small pieces like the springs and shocks are just blobs. Hell the only thing to look somewhat decent are the A-arms, the rest is chunky and just decked with flash. Like an ungodly amount. And the worst part, I’d argue, is the front end of the body. The headlights are just ruined by flash, you need some surgical skills to reduce it to a reasonable amount and even then the thin, crappy plastic has shown its mark once again. The headlights are arguably the worst casualty of the plastic quality. For the rest however, it isn’t too bad. One can say though that this kit desperately could use more chrome pieces. They only chromed the two bumperettes, the grille, the rear bumper and the stick shift. Thats it. The wheels, for one, really could’ve used the chrome treatment, heck it could’ve used a rear-view mirror too. Maybe some headlight buckets instead of the molded on ones. Here’s hoping the full bumper Z/28 does see some separate headlight buckets. And some wheel support as there, well, isn’t any. They just loosely hang from the axles and eventually they go crooked… again. I kinda gave up on resetting the stance so the rear tires no cave in a tiny bit, I’m thinking “what the hell ever” by this point.
So while I’m at it, I’m giving this decal sheet a do-over purely became it needs one and it lacks a bunch of stuff so, keep an eye out for that one to join the Baldwin Motion decal set I’ve made a while before. And here I am now, approaching the end of this article with one hell of a muscle car to show for it even with all the troubles and problems that plague the kit. Cause that’s really where it stands, despite everything crap, terrible and horrible about this kit, it still is quite… grand. The mold must’ve gone to hell over the years and frankly the build quality isn’t terrible. It’s nowhere near the ’69 Camaro from Revell in terms of how nice it all goes together and the crispness of the detail, but it’s damn well up there.
More Tamiya! And more Tamiya to come! Hooray! So to give myself a royal break from the normal, typical kits I tend to build and enjoy, I fully immersed myself into one of those more expensive Tamiya kits, and there’s plenty to choose from. I was torn between the Lexus LFA, the Honda NSX, the Ford GT and this one, well initially its older brother – the SLR McLaren. The regular, plain Jane one. Yeah bet no-one’s ever been able to say “plain Jane” to a damn SLR McLaren, but what did you expect given this little website’s history. This kit in particular is the last of the SLR McLaren that Tamiya put out, starting with the regular SLR McLaren in 2006, this kit based on the penultimate SLR; the 722 in 2010 and then a re-release of the original SLR with a fully transparent body in 2013. Though don’t be fooled, the original SLR apparently is still cheaper despite it all and the clear version is… well, the same, besides being clear.
It got formally announced in 2003 in the shape we know it today, but it got its first conceptual unveiling in 1999 as the Vision SLR Concept; which to me always looked like the hairdressers favorite Mercedes SLK with the front end yanked outwards but I can’t deny it had something going on, like a big ol’ smooch right on the forehead of days of yore; the time of the grand tourer. What the uppety fuck is a grand tourer, I hear you ask? Well, turns out in the old days of barely sixty years ago, people with copious amounts of dosh and the desire to take the ol’ girl for a cruise would stuff their Louis Vuitton suitcases in the tiny trunk, hop in the massive luxuriously decorated cabin and stare over the long hood for many hours as they drive their iteration of the grand tourer which could be a Mercedes 300SL, a Jaguar E-Type or a Maserati 3500GT or anything with a luxurious mix of speed and interior opulence, on well, a grand tour. I mean, what the hell else would you do while stupidly wealthy? Those types of cars were made specifically for those situations, they could handle running for several thousand miles with not much of a stop in between, they were exciting rides for exciting drives to exciting places.
Every single angle of the SLR is intimidating, especially know how soft and smooth it was in its concept stage. Plus, it has the added benefit of having the ever sexy name “McLaren” in its official title. You see, this came to be out of two reasons: One is that Mercedes, or rather “Daimler-Chrysler” at the time was very much into adding more nameplates to their flag line up outside their HQ in Stuttgart, they bought a 40% share into McLaren Automotive. Heck, before I go on about that – anyone remember the Daimler-Chrysler times? Those were… a thing, weren’t they. The Chrysler Crossfire, unofficial Quasimodo brother of the SLK, oh hell yes! Anyway, so they owned a whole lot of McLaren and basically formally invited them to become part of the creation that would become the road going version of our beloved Vision SLR, now called the SLR McLaren.
But lo and behold, I probably wasn’t the only one who felt this way cause three years after the first production car rolled out of the factory in 2003, it got a formal new edition called the “722 Edition” in 2006 – so called after the #722 300SLR that took the number 1 place in Italy at the 1955 Mille Miglia, driven by none other than Stirling Moss. This 722 was pretty much the prettiest version I’d say, they capitalized on the supremely sinister sharp yet rounded angles of the car by further going in the dark with it; darkened tail lights, carbon fiber colored wheels, darker shade of gray for the paint, blacked out head lights, carbon fiber grilles on the hood, and of course a wholly black interior opposed to the popping red ones of before. And holy shit did this work!
I figured since this is kind of my first “I’mma see this one finished” automotive kit since God knows how long, I thought lets go all the way like I did with the Kawasaki Ninja H2R. I bought the TS-42 “Light Gun Metal” spray by Tamiya, all the prerequisite bottles of matte, gloss and in between by Tamiya, panel line ink also by Tamiya and just to fuck with the sequence; the ever so lovely yet amazingly great Vallejo Metal color line which honestly makes for as close to the true thing shades of metal that one can achieve. They’re best worked with an air brush but they have no issue setting just as nicely with a regular soft brush, provided you go over it a time or two. So the paint is close to the real deal and the panel lines are nicely accentuated and I have to admit; it does look good. That shade of gray really looks like the stuff Mercedes would put on themselves. Not to mention the panel line ink does its job supremely well, dries in seconds too!
Number two is that opening doors, no matter how intelligent, no matter how clever always results in the same two things. You’ll always lose the little rods that are meant to prop the doors open, and you’ll always have the doors not fit in the Goddamn body when you want ’em shut. Fine, I guess though – it is a really intelligent system where the door hinges are two metal Z-pieces and the actual plastic connector bit being part of the body, forced snug between the windshield and the roofline. Though it still looks jarring when you want ’em to be closed, you can’t not have that. Also I was a idiot and skipped the step with the little Z-rods and can’t actually prop them open easily either – whoops!
Luckily, you get an answer when you assemble the hood and realize the sheer force of the smooshing the hood shut so it doesn’t have the panel gap, that it sort of corrects the angle perfectly. However, those are just a handful of complaints and I will admit that the only reason I sit here pointing them out is because of the sheet quality the kit offers. It’s all praise, all the time, so it’s a bit extra glaring when you hit those niggles. Seriously, it’s such a great kit – right up there with damn near anything Tamiya offers. The hood assembly, how the tail lights are set up, the simplicity of some of the parts that somehow still ends up looking incredibly complex. And there’s some kit exclusive things that far as I know only the SLR McLaren kits have had; a thick, heavy realistically molded chassis plate, a die-cast one even!
Oh boy, he’s back! Kind of! And oh boy has he got a hell of a thing to return with! Something he doesn’t know a damn thing about but is very keen on learning! So, lately I’ve been either stupidly busy trying to keep this decal business alive and not so much afloat as just keeping her… buoyant, or doing literally anything else. And I’ve been having the itch to not only build something but actually finish something for close to half a year now, I’m basically sitting here doing the Requiem for a Dream monkey claw scratching down to my very bone, aching to get my lazy ass to finish a thing.
But safety, pish-posh, safety shouldn’t kill your fun, it only shouldn’t kill you. And while I know the square root of jack shit about motorcycles, I know enough to kind of get them. The appeal, the reasons, the whole thought of sitting Major Kong style on top of a well balanced V2 rocket and the only line between you and death being some cow skin cured into a road-rash preventing system. It’s the adrenaline, the sheer mindfuckery of watching the world go into strings of light like you’ve hit the Hyperspace button. It’s the same reason why people fling themselves off bridges with the only thing between being a fleshy lawn dart and safely bouncing along being a elastic rope hopefully attached properly by a underpaid Point Break reject with a van. It’s raw, it’s basic and deadly, the holy trinity that essentially made muscle cars great as well. Yeah they crumpled like a can and had the impact resistance of a wet paper boat, and sitting on a bicycle that has a engine the size of a Nissan Micra, it quickly becomes apparent that sitting in or on deadly things is a good bit of joy.
And I always knew that Tamiya and Aoshima(and a hell of a lot more companies) had been producing really, really good motorcycle kits and I’ll be honest, they’ve always caught my eye but it was always a case of “I’d rather have X” and it slipped back again. Until now that is, I love the type of motorcycle that is somewhere halfways between a naked bike and a hyperbike and the Ninja H2R is as close as one can get for a reasonable amount of money(for the kit, the actual bike runs 52,000$, for 4 grand more you can have a brand new 4-door 2015 BMW M3). It’s one imposing, scary ass looking bike all around. It’s decked from top to bottom in carbon panels, it has actual goddamn wings, no headlights to speak of, no indicators, just a tail light assembly, no mirrors, no driver comforts, just some foam with leather over it to plant your butt on. It’s a track bike, through and through. The Ninja H2 for on the road(legally at least) has a much bigger muffler on the exhaust, the necessary bits to make it road legal, no carbon panels and a slightly de-tuned engine to make it, y’know, capable of driving well.
Luckily for me, there’s the Ninja H2R kit. And it’s a spectacularly good kit at that. And I’m by no means biased based on the fact that it’s my first and only built up motorcycle kit, no not at all. Yeah take all of what I say with your standard grain of salt, grab a shaker while you’re at it cause it’s about to get worse and/or better. The kit was put out on the market in December 2016 by Tamiya, their woof, like 130th or so bike kit and based on what I can tell from other kits’ contents and holding onto the Yamaha YZF-R1M kit as we speak, it’s nothing short of a excellent line-up with full detail, hyper accurate and over the top gorgeous motorcycles in damn near every shape and form. You see though, and I’m gonna be saying this a lot, it’s my first motorcycle kit and having built like 250 car kits, it’s a whole damn different world even though my intelligent man brain earlier proudly proclaimed motorcycles are like well balanced half cars.
It’s a hideously complex build, which is exactly what I longed for. Not a frustrating type of build, mind you, no no, quite the opposite. It’s complex in the sense that every single step has to be done right and accurately or you’ll know 17 steps down the line you’ve royally fucked up and thanks to Tamiya’s excellent quality stuff, that never happens. Every step is carefully planned out and every piece is crafted perfectly and it all fits together absolutely as it should. None of that Round 2 or even in some cases Revell like attitude of “just force everything in and pray nothing breaks”, just surgical precision. None of the “this whole assembly hangs by two small I-beams, lets hope gravity won’t dick up your progress today” that you’d see in so many older car kits, all excellent, tight, screw based strength build quality. And it’s really, truly a case of you feel like you built this one yourself from the engine up.
That being said, I have learned a few things. And boy did it impact this model a bit. One being, spray paint the pre-existing painted bits. Yeah the metallic dark green looks great but, uh-oh, it turns out that was a Tamiya choice on account of not wanting to plan out and print a bunch of carbon decals. It made me wonder right away, “why not make the plastic metallic dark silver or something?” and y’know, why didn’t they? I guess in the right light it looks just like carbon or something, I dunno. Though I have to say, it does look uh… more unique, in the forest green color. But hey, I did actually go through the trouble of buying some actual Tamiya brand paints for everything else, hooray! So everything but the actual color of the damn bike is accurate, it’s something.
That being said though, it did come with a few moments of pure “uhhh”. Sometimes the instructions show… a thing. There’s no other way of saying it, I can say that you’ll spend minutes at a time trying to work out what in the hell you’re looking at, from which angle, from what microscopic piece a hose needs to go and where it needs to end up, how to coil ’em through the frame, etc. Though even while that’s a uh, complaint in some sense, it’s not impossible to figure out, eventually like a 15000 piece puzzle you hit that magical moment where you can see through the Matrix and figure it all out in a single whiff.
But the underlying point here is, and it’s a pretty important one – do yourself a favor, if you’re anything like me and your purest interests lie with vehicles, old and new, and have considered branching out; before you take on big rig truck kits, try a motorcycle kit. It’s… for what it’s all worth, truly and massively reinvigorated my love for this hobby, made me figure out what the fuss was about Tamiya paints and fallen in love with them fiercely and it’s just… it’s great. It’s a great, great kit and I’m writing this particular paragraphs having built the Yamaha YZF-R1M kit and I can once again affirm: they’re all like this, and they’re all great. Do yourself the favor though, get the right tools for the job, get the right paints and if you have the dosh to spare, get that front fork detail up set by Tamiya themselves and the carbon fiber decal set from Studio20, they really enhance the results massively.
The El Camino is downright one of my favorite cars to ever touch the planet, it’s such a wicked car all around. Or coupe utility vehicle, if you’re one of those people. I’d rather go with car, or ute. You see, I’ll defend the merits of a ‘Cuda until the sun goes down, or the value of Ford stumbling through the seventies keeping the Mustang alive, or how something like the El Camino should and needs to exist. Today, there’s no worldwide version of what is the quintessential muscle car with a pick-up for an ass.
As for the rest of the world, we gotta make due with effectively the last of the El Caminos that date back to the 1980s, 1987 to exact or the equally extinct Ford Ranchero, which got ol’ Yeller’d in 1979. Since then, for the Americans and Europeans it was to either import a sweet chunk of Mad Max-ian deliciousness or take in a… well shit, might as well get it out of the way; through-out the decades it would’ve come down to a Ford Courier, Dodge Rampage, Plymouth Scamp, VW Rabbit/Caddy Pick Up, Fiat Strada, Subaru BRAT or something to that extend. And all of those are small, compact little pickups with the front end of one of their more popular cars, small engine and sustainable(unless it’s the Dodge or Plymouth, those rusted away in a few months time), but not anything that would make you wanna go “Fuck yeah, I’d take that over a Camaro!“.
Why? Well in the United States especially at least, it just was timed incredibly poorly. The El Camino and Ranchero were briefly very popular in the mid to late 50s, but then it just kind of collapsed in on itself. They had three massive hurdles to overcome, one was that it was meant to do work all the while looking like a gorgeous car and it had trouble doing so. Two was a simple problem that other cars had to deal with too, take the Camaro – it had to co-exist with a more convenient, more powerful and in some ways more attractive Corvette, the El Camino and Ranchero had to exist alongside the very cars they were based off from 1960 onwards. The third? Well, they were appalling for the exact task they were designed, they were meant to be half pick-up, half car and in most cases it wasn’t even close to being a fifth as useful. Why spend 3800$ of your fresh 1970 dollars on a El Camino if you could get a fully equipped C/K 2500 for the same money that did everything the El Camino could, but better. Well, that’s kind of where these type of cars grew into their own; they gained a following for what they were. A utility built Chevelle with the same insurance quote destroying 454SS in the front? Hell to the yes, man!
You got the very much pretty Chevelle based stripes on the El Camino throughout the sixties, the Torino GT stripes on the Ranchero, the twin-stripe SS get-up on the seventies El Caminos, the Scamp GT and Rampage both having just overblown either totally black or super colorful stripe packages, the VW Caddy/Rabbit “Sportstruck”, whatever the hell that might’ve been and so forth on the US side of the story. And that right there was eight paragraphs of me rambling on about a car with a pick up for a booty and how it’s no longer part of our world as we know it and ho-boy does it suck.
Fortunately, there’s resin casters: 
Then for twenty years, not a Goddamn thing. The first and as of writing last re-release of this kit was in 2000 which was this kit I’m talking about right now, the re-release with newly crafted lowrider parts and decals. Back then, apparently Revell was on a roll bringing back long-dead kits and pumping them full, full of life and doing a stellar and sometimes awkward job of it. The 
So it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, but it’s also miles ahead of the curve for this particular era of El Camino kits. The MPC kits weren’t terrible, by now means – they were just incredibly basic. While it has more interior detail, it lacks severely on the body and engine bay, and while the all around model has more variety with the tool(like the ’82 quad-light grille and the Choo-Choo Customs Monte Carlo SS nosed edition), it still very much on the outside comes across like a toy car with tiny wheels and a sunken stance. That being said, I personally would’ve preferred a middle-ground where Monogram did the body and chassis and MPC handled everything else, we’d have one excellent kit to work with – but alas, the best El Camino offering we have and likely will have for the foreseeable future will likely be a shared number one spot with this kit and the 
For me, this whole car or pick-up if you will is one of the strangest amalgamations of the strengths and weaknesses of both the United States and Europe car industries packed into one, small and in some senses even adorable little pick up. The Volkswagen Golf has been and still is one of the world’s most popular cars, it’s the hatchback version of the utterly unstoppable Toyota Hi-Lux – it’s dominated popular culture, it’s dominated the world and in some ways it’s even dominated history. And it’s because of that, that’s why I’m sitting here thinking “oh boy this Euro-toy is one of the defining cars of the people” and then it struck me; while the Golf Mk.1 is definitely European, hell, extremely German even – the Caddy isn’t.
In May 1974, the Golf was available to be sold around most of western Europe and it may have literally saved an ailing Volkswagen Group from dying out. Volkswagen was barely clinging to life and had been since the early sixties, building over 1.5 million vehicles and only selling a few hundred thousand a year across the decade, competitors like Opel and Ford were killing VW quite effectively by simply playing their own game; building affordable small vehicles. VW held national market shares of nearly half in Germany in 1962, to only 26% in 1972 – hell, the company sat in debt up to the wazoo that would make GM of today piss its pants; in ’74 VW had a 850 million DM loss alone, 
The Golf very quickly became a top seller across most of Europe in just about every Western European country for every year across multiple decades, and the United States got its first chomp of the Golf cake in 1975 when Volkswagen effectively said; export these, do it. It was essentially the same car, just with mandated side marker lights, higher ride height and those ever so delightful beauty ruiners known as the “5 MPH Bumper”, it also got a MPH dash and of course the most important thing, a proper export name. In the US, for some reason or another, it got the name “Rabbit”. Why? Well, nobody seems to really know – there’s plenty of theories among marketers, one being Rabbit just having a nicer ring to it and summons images of cute little fuzzy roadkills and the other being that you really couldn’t fit a bag of golf clubs in the back, so there’s that. In ’78 Volkswagen allowed the Americans to effectively produce their own Rabbit Golfs and “Americanize” them, which was famously dubbed by then VW CEO Werner Schmidt as “Malibu-ing”, softening the springs, cheapening the plastic and those square headlights cause that was a trend in those days.
So that’s precisely what I did with this VW Caddy model I bought from 
I opted for the GTI Pirelli cause I kind of prefer the whole get up, not to mention it was the most recently released kit and was cheapest score. Yay me. When I unpacked the Golf kit, I was absolutely flabbergasted by the detail on this puppy, holy shit. I don’t think I have ever seen this much eye to detail in a kit without resorting to P.E. parts, hell even better, I have never ever seen this much detail in a kit that also still goes together damn near flawlessly. It’s just staggering, the whole thing goes together like a LEGO build, I shit you not. The tiniest little details like engine hoses, the seatbelt and hand-holders in the interior, the perfect little puzzle around the slanted 1.8L inline four engine, it’s such a delightful kit. There’s a ton, and I do mean a ton of little decals to accentuate on every little detail they couldn’t do via casting. I imagine it can’t have been easy to construct the resin kit around this much of a well designed kit, cause any step being taken out in the middle can lead to the absolute ruination of this kit as a whole and they damn well pulled it off.
I am so most definitely buying the GTI Pirelli kit again to build that one proper cause my Lord is it a fantastic kit that I had to butcher for the most part to build this Caddy with, had I known that this kit was this good, I’d have bought two. It’s rare to see two separate entities doing such great work at the same time, I always wanted to buy a C1 Models kit but unfortunately missed out on the ’10 Camaro ALMS transkit they had, but then when I spotted that Caddy I knew I had to have it, even though I knew literally nothing of their quality other than seeing one of their Ferrari transkits being built, once. Now, I honestly can say as far as transkits go, these guys are pretty much the peak of it all, first and best experience all at once go figure. And the same I can say of Revell of Germany with the Golf Mk.1 kit, holy shit, it’s something special. It’s dramatically detailed yet such a simple, stress free experience to slap together and it’s… one hell of a good looking build by the end of it.
