Going into the new year with some more new sets, desperately trying to finish one series of a model before going to the next and more or less leaving it in progress forever. Since December 2nd, there’s sixteen new sets and as I type this I’m literally finishing off two more.
New Sets – 1976-1980 Chevrolet Monza
One of the biggest to-do’s on my list for well over two years was to do the Chevrolet Monza, they’ve kind of become super illusive these days and I always got turned off by the 60$+ MPC kits that are already opened or started and even the promos were more often than not sitting around the forty bucks range, so it just… never happened. But then I got lucky, a Dutch seller had a ’77 and a ’79 Monza 2+2 promo and I found a 99% finished ’78 Monza MPC kit that was just… in pieces. It was missing a lot of parts, some tires, one of the tail lights, the rear window louvers, so forth, but for decal designing that would do just fine.
Left to Right Top: ’77 Monza Spyder, ’77 Monza Mirage & ’78 Monza GT Prototype(Z29 Code)
Left to Right Bottom: ’80 Monza Spyder & ’77 Monza Mirage BORT “Rapide” Prototype
So far I’ve got all but two of the Monzas I wanted to do ready and able, the one that is pretty much a ground up design from just grainy, crappy photographs is the 1980 Spyder, which I shit you not is damn near impossible to find. Thanks to the Monza Homestead, I found some excellent info on some really, truly elusive Monzas and Monza concepts, like the BORT Rapide, the first running prototype of what would eventually become the ’77 Monza Mirage GT and the ’78 Monza Scorpion, a dealer option decal upgrade on 2+2s that honestly no-one seems to have any idea about where they came from, or what they originally truly looked like – that one’s coming soon, it’s a hell of a lot of work doing that one.
The next big list of Monza, or rather H-Body list are the various Buick Skyhawk editions, like the two Free Spirits, the Roadhawk and Nighthawk. Maybe down the line the Oldsmobile Starfire editions like the Firenza GT, Starfire GT and so on.
New Sets – 1969 Chevrolet Camaro
Ever since I discovered that the ’69 Camaro Baldwin by Revell could only be built with the white stripes in mind, I figured this had to change. But other things kept taking precedence and it just fell to the back every time, until now. I bought the Yenko Camaro and Baldwin Motion Camaro kits by Revell and grabbed my old Revell of Germany ’69 kit to get as much stuff to nail the decal sheet the first time through. I effectively did the same thing with these sets as I did with the ‘Cuda, making all of the emblems, logos, air cleaner decals and such for every version that I could copy and re-use on any of the other sets, so this means you get enough emblems to do any of the Camaros with any set and it’s the extra bits and the stripes that make the set unique.
Left to Right Top: ’69 Camaro Z/28, ’69 Camaro SS DX-1 Stripes & ’69 Camaro ZL-1 COPO #9567 Concept
Left to Right Bottom: ’69 Camaro SS, ’69 Camaro ZL-1 Z/427 Concept & ’69 Camaro SS Baldwin Motion L-72 454
So the general Z/28, SS and RS stripes are there as well as the unique DX-1 option, but also the Baldwin Motion 454 and 427(which is coming up next), the ZL-1 COPO #9567 concept and the super rare one of a kind Bill Mitchell one-off ’69 Camaro Z/427.
Updated Set – 1970 Plymouth AAR ‘Cuda
Speaking of the aforementioned ‘Cuda, I re-did the ‘Cuda AAR set for the model world legend Tim Boyd so it wouldn’t just be more accurate but also have the exact amount and similarly sized blocks on the stripe to the real deal, and most importantly it follows the body curve like the real deal, unlike the Revell AAR ‘Cuda stripe.
’70 ‘Cuda AAR
New Sets – 1970-1971 Ford Torino
Couple of more of the… more random completions, I finally got around to finishing the ’71 Torino Cobra and the ’70 Torino King Cobra and actually started on the ’72 Torinos like the Gran Torino Sport and the Torino with the laser stripes. I wanted to get these out of the way before getting to the Mercury’s of the time, like the Cougar and Cyclone.
’71 Torino Cobra & ’70 Torino King Cobra
New Sets – 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass
Last month I re-did the whole Cutlass Hurst/Olds set to include the whole interior, far better resolution and quality body stripes and so on, and then I discovered the prototype 442 W-30 for ’85 that was part Darth Vader FE3-X and part 442 and… it needed a decal sheet to commemorate the damn thing existing. I also did the whole FE3-X set as well, given the Revell kit has far too thick stripes for the body and the gold emblems aren’t quite gold, so why the hell not. I’m also doing the ’83 Hurst/Olds as well and the ’85 442 just to complement the whole line-up.
’85 Cutlass 442 W-30 FE3-X Prototype & ’85 Cutlass FE3-X “Darth Vader” Prototype
And… that was it for now! The designing goes on still, and I also revamped the Decals page to be a bit less of a hassle to read, it’s more compact and less heavy to load in. It also now has all the prices in the list rather than in a separate PDF file, so hopefully that clears the whole thing up a little bit, I won’t lie – the damn page was a bit of a mess. Also, happy new years, still!
Holy crap it’s the goddamn Bandit. The somewhat harder to come by and in my opinion the better of the ’77 Firebird versions offered by the various model kit companies, lovingly crafted by Revell from a die-cast mold. And everyone knows this car, let’s be totally fair – it’s one of the most recognizable movie cars, ahead of the ’76 Gran Torino from Starsky & Hutch, it might even be ahead the ’69 Charger from the Dukes of Hazzard. Smokey and the Bandit is in all rights not just a solid movie, but also a time capsule of 1970s America.
Hell, the star car in fact is 1970s through and through. While the movie’s popularity made it literally destroy the Camaro’s reputation as a whole, causing the Firebird sales to surge massively and the Camaro sales to tank, part of the iconic look of the new 1977 Firebird at the time was the adjustment of a quite strange U.S. law in 1976. You see, headlights of all things had a odd, hard line restriction to it. Not only were they at first restricted quite literally to size, diameter and… shape, it also took well over thirty years for designers to be allowed to use square shaped headlights. From 1940 through 1957, you could only have one headlight per side, and had to have low and high beam filaments in the same lamp and could only be 7 inches in diameter. Then in 1958, the first drastic change was permitted; twin goddamn headlights, yes baby! And you can tell designers were quite literally waiting for this as damn near every single car from then on would have twin headlights and be permitted to be smaller than the odd 7 inch requirement, but this came again with another weird limit: yes, you can now have smaller headlamps, but they could only be 5 ¾ inch.
And there’s the oddball history lesson of this particular article, last time it was dealer specific tuners that made some of the most powerful muscle cars and this time its… headlights. Can always count on me derailing my own content into some lesson you didn’t know yet and I’ll bet didn’t feel like learning, but you’re welcome, now you too can tell people about the weird restrictions on car headlights in the US from the fifties through the eighties! Anyway, back to the hero car here. In real life, back in 2018, Burt Reynolds’ estate sold his private Firebird S.E. replica, given the originals were either wrecked or just driven to death this was a replica built to be as faithful as can be, with some modern overhauls such as a better performing custom built transmission, a fully rebuilt 400ci V8 and of course a damn must these days; air conditioning. But literally everything else down to the CB radio was original, also on the chopping block were two other of his private Firebirds, a ’78 Firebird in red, a perfect replica of the Hooper car and a ’84 Firebird in black and gold which he had built to promote his football team, the Tampa Bay Bandits.
So here we are, seven paragraphs or so down and we’ve hardly even began to discuss the model kit this article should be about. It’s not my first rodeo with this kit, in fact, 
One of the downsides however is the decal sheet, which is undeniably fleshed out as hell. The problem is that the gold(or rather dull yellow on the sheet) stripes are outlined with a thick black, which just doesn’t come out right with any paint. So I remedied this by simply copying the whole decal sheet and actually completing it, the thin bumper stripes, the mirror stripes, the air intake stripes, so forth, they’re all there, and of course all the necessary extras. I opted for the Protrac Radial R/P tires cause they’re not only perfectly age appropriate(Protrac really tried to cash in on Pontiac’s Firebird line) and they’re also something I reckon Burt Reynolds would’ve been all about: every single fucking ad that Protrac put out in magazines or on papers was some half naked woman with clearly no bra and in a stupendously cold room straddling the tires, it was such abrasive sexism and trying to pander to men that I can’t even feel disappointed at it. Like they went for it, they gave zero damns. The second downside of this kit is that the tires are so thin and small that it’s like they’re made for a Beetle, but alas, such is life.
Either way, given I made the absolutely humongous decal sheet for it, I figured just like the ’70 Camaro Baldwin Motion, I’d try to go all in. I got all the gold stripes and placed ’em one by one like a patient model aircraft builder, plumbed the entirety of the engine, down to the pre-molded A/C system. Got a can of smoke tint paint to do the T-tops with to make them more authentic, got some seatbelts and tried to accurately put them in there which was far more difficult than I thought and of course the aformentioned Protrac Radial R/P white letter tire decals. I had like four different tints of metallic gold from three different brands just to see which ended up being the closest to legit, which was actually a mix of Tamiya’s Leaf Gold and Titanium Gold along with the Vallejo Metal Color Gold, and as you can see on the wheels, kind of worked to a realistic deal.
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.
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.
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.
The funny thing is, 
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!
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.
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.
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 
