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.
Holden, the last one to do ute’s with big-ass engines stopped producing new cars entirely as of October 2017, and as of writing Holden is still merely a importer of elsewhere built cars, predominantly Opels from German and Canadian plants. So even though the Australians have been the inventors and now the last to have enjoyed the rough and tumble big-block car-truck/pickup/coupe ute, they still could effectively buy a new ’17 HSV Maloo GTSR R8 with the Chevrolet 6.8L LS3 V8 that would churn out 570HP from a dealership today.
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!“.
There’s no more of them unfortunately, and granted, it was always a niche market. Who in their right mind shears off the ass end of a car, hollows it out like a deranged coroner and puts in a solid floorboard, add a foot or so to the back of it and there you go; car-pickup hybrid. Though while the concept sounds odd in marketing terms, it actually had a very solid market base for most of the sixties. They might’ve been aimed at the reed chewing farmer of the middle of the 20th century(fun fact, the origin of this type of car lies with an Australian farmer who wanted a car that could both handle farmyard work and be used as a car to go to church with on sunday), with ads showing dudes in Levis shoving hay bales or those old milk churns in the back of what would translate to Chevrolet “The Roads” or Ford “Ranchers”, but in reality the farmer of those days had the Chevy C-series or the Ford F-series parked dutifully on base, while the El Camino and Ranchero found more love on the paved roads.
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!
I mean, that right there is glossing over the point so thickly it should win an award for doing so, but in general that’s just about the gist of it. It worked though, the type of car grew into its own being and they lasted in the States for a reasonable while for the kind of fad they were, with like I said the El Camino lasting through 1987, it’s GMC counterpart, the much rarer and less liked GMC Sprint/Caballero and the Ranchero going on ’til 1979. Then there have been smaller editions as mentioned before, the ’82 Dodge Rampage/Plymouth Scamp took the throne as nippy pick-up and eventually even they died off to. At that point, it was just back to old fashioned pick up truck or car, nothing in between in the States and Europe. That being said, through-out its thirty year endeavor, there have been plenty of those weird editions that make you wonder what the hell the idea was.
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.
Luckily, there’s Revell, Monogram, MPC and AMT to keep us happy campers with the offerings of the aforementioned pick-up-car-things in kit form to keep some semblance of them in the world. Wait, what’s that? There’s only like nine kits as a whole in 1/25th and 1/24th scale? Well, Goddammit. Okay quick gander through the list; there’s Revell’s 1966 El Camino, Revell-Monogram’s 1978 El Camino, the ’57 Ranchero by them as well. AMT offers the ’59 through ’61 Rancheros and the ’59, ’63, ’64, ’65 and ’68 El Caminos respectively, while MPC dove deeper into the El Camino through the seventies offering the ’78 through ’86 El Camino’s as well as a one time why-the-hell-not run of the GMC Caballero. There have been plenty of cases where evidence got presented that any of the previously mentioned big two/three/four(depending on what decade you’re discussing) kit makers were planning on doing all sorts of these, the mid-seventies Ranchero, the ’73 El Camino, hell the ’70 El Camino was announced in print on multiple occasions and just… never happened.
Fortunately, there’s resin casters: Motor City Resin Casters has both the ’72 Ranchero GT and the ’73 El Camino in their repertoire. Jimmy Flintstone with the ’70 and ’72 El Camino bodies(although they’re entirely unchanged ’68 El Caminos with Chevelle front ends). There’s been plenty of coming-and-goers that offered transkit parts for anything from ’57 through ’86 and it looks like we’re never gonna truly run out of ways to whip up a mid sixties or seventies of either El Camino or Ranchero. On top of that, you got C1 Models’ excellent Golf-to-Caddy conversion kit so there’s some cross-continental love too. And I’m sure I’m leaving out a million more, it’s just to give some examples that while kit makers seem to have just forgotten about the American and even the Australian utility coupe, resin casters do their damnest to fill the gap.
Right, to cut to the chase after give or take 1200 words of bullshitting on; this particular article should be about the ’78 El Camino. The Royal Knight El Camino to be specific, which has in fact been kitted before in 1978 by Monogram. It’s such a damn hard to find kit nowadays as while there are three entirely unique kits by Revell/Monogram based on the ’78 El Camino, the hardest one to find is by some definitions stock. In ’78 they released the Royal Knight kit(MPC did both the Royal and Black Knight versions but one could argue that quality wise the MPC kit… drifted behind a tad). Then in ’79 they re-tooled the kit – it now packs a massive turbo-charger and a modified hood to accommodate the gargantuan new air-sucking utensil in the engine bay. Oh also, they for some reason decided to add camper parts. Neat-o! But they did remove the stock engine and hood, bummer.
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 ’81 Chevy Citation is a excellent example; it’s a beautiful re-pop of the old kit, with all the re-release editions crammed into one, a gargantuan new decal sheet that allowed options that weren’t even thought of in the eighties. Same goes for the ’92 Thunderbird, ’96 Impala SS and so on. The El Camino is yet another odd-ball lowrider kit that has all the “optional” parts packed in along with the stock ones and it makes for a much better complete package that despite the weird lowrider addition is quite a nice thing of them to do. Given that these days you’d be lucky to get a kit with extras, having one that is essentially a “greatest hits” of sorts is absolutely nice.
The kit itself on the other hand has aged quite poorly, despite Monogram being way ahead of the competitors on most areas like the sheer detail on the body, grille and all around crispness of the whole kit, it still has those old Monogram quirks. The engine bay is kind of a slab with droopy details(which essentially means, anything that’s a reservoir or a battery “bleeds” into the arches and goes all the way down), the interior is kind of plain with the inner doors having no detail at all and the seats are hilariously oversized. Though one can just grab the seats and dash from a 1/24th scale Monogram Monte Carlo and make due with those as they should fit just fine. Another thing is while Monogram definitely bucked that garbage ass trend of the ’70s with molded in chrome headlights, but they just swapped it around making the rear lights on the rear bumper chrome and not really recessing them enough. And on top of everything else, there’s some severe panel gaps; the bumpers suffer the most of this as you can clearly look into the model from the front and the back.
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 MPC/AMT ’86 El Camino SS.
That being said though, I did try to make the most out of this kit as it’s still a very, very nice one to work with. Goes together like a charm, like all those Monogram kits of the eighties it’s simple, yet nicely complex in some areas and it all just… works. I re-designed the entire El Camino Royal Knight decal sheet for this endeavor, though looking back at it I totally screwed up on the body stripes as it’s meant to follow the curve over the door, onto the bed, but y’know how I am, a failure is just half a success, keep working with it. While I’m absolutely in love with how it came out to be, I should’ve gone for a darker paint. I wanted this delightfully suave end seventies Bordeaux red that would look bright, lip-stick red in the sunlight and subdued as hell in the shadows. Unfortunately it’s now semi-bright in the shadows and bright as balls in the sunlight, making the decals hard to spot in any reasonably lit environment. On top of that, the tires are pre-lettered with Goodyear Polysteel Radial, which is nice if you haven’t got decals, but I did and had to use the rougher, undetailed inside of the tire to accommodate the decals.
Ohhh well… Also, first non-mostly decal related post in 3 months, hooray!
’78 Chevrolet El Camino Royal Knight specifications:
Kit: #85-2979
Skill Level: 2
Parts: 101
Molded in: White
Scale: 1/24
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.
So this will be a short one, I reckon – SnapTite kits are a blast. That’s roughly the gist of it! Revell has done a lot of these types of little kits and generally they’ve been rather decent, especially if folks put in a lot of extra work on some of the lesser regions like the headlights/taillights, the interior, so forth. To name a few examples of Revell SnapTite kits that are beautifully done and are actually really, really solid kits even while they pack… only a handful of parts or so at best – the ’77 Monte Carlo, the ’70 Chevelle and what matters to this kit in general; the 2010 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor kit. It’s essentially the forerunner to this one, it was really neatly detailed, contained nice, clear parts, was actually kind of fun to put together and all in all made for one neatly detailed model by the end of it.
But then again, we got a goddamn pickup truck kit in 2017. We got one. That’s basically all that matters. Back in the nineties, pick-up truck kits were everywhere, the Ford F-150s and Rangers, the Chevrolet S-10 and C-1500s, GMC Sierras, Syclones and Jimmys and so forth. They were everywhere and AMT as well as Revell were on their game back then, and prior to that MPC and AMT did just about every Ford, Dodge, GMC and Chevy truck for every year. Since the early 2000s, we’ve slowed down to a crawl and across the 2010s we’ve gotten literally around three modern ones, all in all. The wonderful 2010 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, the 
In contrast to the unfortunately not clear-cast rear lights and not-silver backed headlights, the pre-painted body is absolutely wonderful. It’s reminding me of those AMT ProShop kits where it’s stamped on the body, which shows a slight of a faded edge but it still makes for a very clean painted body. The rest is all single color cast plastic, all in a matte black besides the wheels, which are semi-gloss. The tires are also another giant, giant plus to this kit, nice and thick proper off-road tires that sit on the axles flawlessly. The only thing this kit could’ve used, y’know, other than some more loose parts to make the painting process easier, is decals. The “RAPTOR” decal is stamped onto the side of the body, for the rest there’s no decals at all – no little metal transfers for the mirrors, no dashboard, nothing. Again, it’s made for younger modelers and for those seeking a neat low effort kit.
Third time’s the charm, right? I’ve done the 
And y’know what, despite the fact that Don Johnson and the Nash Bridges show as well are now just a blip on TV history(lets be fair here, despite the sweet-ass car and decent cast, Johnson will forever be Sonny Crockett in every role) – the ’71 Cuda itself remains a star and then some. As I said earlier, the ’71 HEMI convertibles catch literal millions and they increase in value literally every single day, and the still ungodly quick and gorgeous ’71 Cudas with 340s, 383s and 440s convertible or hard top are well over 100K more expensive than the average house price in the United States(189K) – so you could have a ‘Cuda 440, or you could have a whole house and a hundred grand left over. They were and still are American muscle in absolute perfection; it’s ungodly pretty, it’s ungodly fast, it’s ungodly thirsty and it’s ungodly unwieldy. It nailed every point of being a peak muscle car era vehicle, besides the at the time sale price – one of the reasons why the ‘Cuda was always a more rare sight out there regardless of the shape it came in was because at the time is was one of the most expensive of the bunch. It’s sister car of the same year with the same engine was 400$ cheaper(the ‘Cuda HEMI was 3433$ + 1228$ HEMI upgrade, the Challenger R/T was 3273$ + 892$ for the HEMI), the 1969 Camaro Z/28 grand totaled a person 3185$(2726$ + 458$ for the Z/28 package) and for reference, a 1970 Mustang Boss 302 ran a person 3720$(all the previous prices were 1969-1971 dollar value) – so in reality, the ‘Cuda was of course the premium quality car but it also cost a person a premium to get a hold of.
To be fair, it has been re-released nine times since… 1982 it came out, in 1985 it was put out again as a street machine(pretty much the same but with the twin snorkel intake hood), then again in 1991 and another time in 1998 both as the stock versions again, then in 2000 it saw the return of the street machine, then in 2002 it got re-released again, in 2003 they changed the tool up again for the first time in 18 years by releasing this particular Nash Bridges edition, which saw another re-release in 2007, then another one in 2009 and one last one in 2012. But still, it’s the best 1971 kit out there, even with its flaws. Granted, Revell’s 2013’s new tool of the 1970 ‘Cuda is now the best ‘Cuda kit in general, but for ’71 – ain’t no better than the Monogram release from thirty six Goddamn years ago.
For the rest, I used pretty plain slightly off-white satin and matte enamel paints for the interior which is the true star of this kit, for a somewhat one-off release, they really did an excellent job with the interior. The detailing, the thickness and the look of it all is absolutely spot on and I will say, no convertible kit had the door panels meet the interior door panels so supremely on the dot as it does here. The kit does pack a lot more decals than any of the other releases, like side marker lights, full dash and arm rest decals, so forth, which weren’t included on any of the other ’71 Cuda releases. Hell, one of the Nash Bridges Cuda releases has Goodyear GT Radial white letter tire decals as a bonus too, go figure, a utter rarity to find in kit decal sheets due to licensing. I didn’t need any though given I used my own created decals but it’s actually really, really nice to see the extra effort put into basically a little distraction kit that was apparently only gonna get released twice.
Lemme start this one off right away by saying, yes you’re right – it isn’t a ’96. But Goddammit I want it to be. Besides its easier to sort in the total list where a ’94 Impala SS already sits, albeit something I now have the opportunity to overwrite and imagine I never built it, cause I… well, I didn’t do a very good job on it. The Revell kit has been re-released many times since the mid nineties(1996 to be exact), its roots originated as a SnapTite, though really it was one of those Basic Builder-ish scenarios where it was more complicated than a SnapTite just didn’t require glue. The whole thing is still very, very much that – just without the clicks and snaps of a SnapTite.
Is that a super gross simplification of how the Bel Air, Biscayne, Impala and Caprice came to separate into their own line of models through the seventies? Why yes, yes it is. And I am aware that grueling, horrible, maybe even inaccurate look at how they came to be but believe me when I say this… Chevrolet’s 1955 through 1969 model encyclopedia is nothing short of a M.C. Escher-esque maze to figure out accurately. What did happen is that in the mid seventies it became its own separate entity as a model, and even then you’d need a literal chart to play “spot the difference” on a Caprice Classic versus the Impala, it would have subtle but sometimes yet obvious changes to one-another like for instance, one having the indicators under the headlights and the other in the bumper, or a mesh grille opposed to a horizontal bar grille, interior would be bare plastic in one and splattered with wood grain in the other… The gist here is that in the end, the Caprice and the Impala were basically twins, the ones that are nearly identical but you learn to spot the clues to tell ’em apart.
You see, much like the Ford Crown Victoria/LTD, the Caprice too was basically “America’s Car”. What I mean with that is, name a picture, name a movie, name a scenic shot of a city and you’re likely to spot a series of Crown Vic or Caprice taxi cabs, police cars, fire department marshall’s, so on. Essentially, they were continuing the legacy of, well, the States’ cop car and cab. And when it got displayed to the populace, they fucking well laughed it off the stage. The new styling got a fairly harsh coat of insults plastered on it, like “beached whale”, “upside down bathtub”, “Orca-body” and “obesity on tires”. The Caprice 9C1 police package did do rather well, as we all know, it became literally the most popular police cruiser out there along with the Ford Crown Vic so, it did succeed, sorta. But on the regular average Joe front, changes needed to be made and they tried to do so at least. They ditched the skirted rear wheel wells(though kept ’em on the station wagons), which helped alleviate the fat look of the thing, introduced some Camaro parts to the interior and ended up also offering a de-tuned LT1 V8 from a Corvette.
Anywhoooo, the model. Yeah, right! So I did build one of the Revell Impala SS’s last year and came out slightly disappointing, just a bit. Released in 1996(and re-released like four times since), it was made a slightly more difficult glue-required kit with the origins dating back to a SnapTite kit that came out in the same year and holy crap you could tell it was once a SnapTite, the engine block is three parts, the whole interior snaps together pretty much with the clicky-snappy bits still there. The headlights and the tail lights still have painfully obvious pins you force into the slots and in turn make the headlights and tail lights look stupidly toy-like, but y’know, its a thing. Atleast they don’t flop out the bezel every odd second the model gets touched, so there’s that! It also looks quite gargantuan, like it is bigger than a 1/24th scale GMC pick-up in width so I wouldn’t be surprised if the scaling wasn’t 1/25th but 1/24th, but that’s just a small observation. The rest of the kit was actually kind of nice, the body crisp, the detail quite nice and so on. Oddly enough, there’s a pattern with the wheels going on – the 2002 re-release had the Impala SS on the box with these giant American Racing style rims, but didn’t actually have those. Now I got a 2008 re-release which was hilariously stupid with a lowrider version(something that Revell made a thing back then, including a fucking 
Which… I dunno, this kit feels like a 1/24th scale one, I can’t help but feeling it is. But ah well, anyway – I created a decal sheet specifically for the Impala to make it look a little more like a Grand Sport, including a Impala SS branded hood stripe and the iconic fender stripes. For the rest it was a set of custom badges, license plates, so forth. I’m not gonna lie, I’m really surprised by how they ended up looking. I really, really am for once proud of my friggin’ work! The SnapTite features that are still part of the kit really do take away from the whole thing though, like the very visible placement hole for the radiator, the overtly obvious twin prongs in the headlights as I mentioned before, so on.
Have you ever had the thing happen to you when you more or less blindly order something from say, Amazon, or some place and when the delivery guy gets to your door and they hold a box more aptly designed to transport a damn fridge and you quickly come to the realization that you may have made a mistake? Time wasn’t kind to this kit, or perhaps the owner but when the delivery guy came to the door, dude looked at me with despair in his eyes when he tilted it slightly and heard the noise that just sounded like someone packaged a broken vase. Well fortunately I already knew what I ordered had some pieces loose in the box but… that was odd, it sounded like it went from one far side of the three foot box to the other. There’s no way in hell there’s a little six and a half inch model in there. And lo and behold, a twenty five inch box comes out of the bigger one like some Russian nesting doll – Jesus, that is not a 1/25th scale kit, I thought to myself, I got myself a long out of production Camaro Berlinetta kit for 23 dollar and it’s also a friggin’ 1/16th scale one.
The Berlinetta was always meant to be the “upscale”, sporty, nicer and excuse my vomit inducing terminology; European. Berlinetta itself is an Italian term for ‘little saloon’ or ‘small saloon’ and was often found as a badge name for European cars destined to be grand tour coupes like old Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Maseratis, Opels, MGs, etc. What did General Motors do with the name? They slapped it to a Camaro as a replacement type for the Type LT luxury model, which is appropriate I suppose. But then they generally did fuck-all with the exterior(other than different wheels, a “unique” grille and some extra chrome) and used up the whole budget on the inside. And in a way, that’s fine, right? Some people want a luxurious sport car that wouldn’t cost them an arm or leg, that’s mostly what drives Alfa Romeo these days so why not back then. It was a very popular option on the second generation models from ’78 on and was re-introduced along the new third generation as a upgrade package with unique gold spoked wheels, gold accented stripes and badges plus the whole shebang on the inside; velour interior, digital dashboard from ’84 onwards, all the electrical gadgets you could cream over in… well, 1983 and a restyled nose, cause while I just said, they did fuck-all on the outside, well they broke that trend in 1983 and gave the Camaro an overbite!
Though granted, this was the era that sporty American cars were advertised by their “superior ride” due to weighing as much as a fully equipped Mercedes Benz wagon. Weird times they were, and no that’s not my European superiority bleeding through, I’m a snarky shit but we can all agree these days that while being heavy allowed for a floaty ride, the last thing you need on your “sporty” car is 3500 pounds of weight(just for reference, a ’93 Mercedes 220E Estate weighs 3100lbs) but y’know… at least it was pretty. And the model kit does replicate this quite well, granted it’s easier to get the detail out there at 1/16th scale so it’s not like I’m praising it for being out of the ordinary, but you know, it’s still a pretty damn close replica of the real deal – a car so rare now that most Berlinettas that exist have either been parted into a regular Camaro due to replacement parts being so hard to come by you’d just have to go for other versions or have just… died, as so many cars from the eighties.
It looks really subdued all things considered, it’s totally a thing I see people get to using thinking it looks better than the actual Berlinetta stripes, which were just some golden accented stripes that were hard to spot even in normal daylight. But figured I’d roll ol’ stock for funsies and getting the whole thing in black. As I said, I had to re-do the whole sheet but I thought I’d expand on some omissions like the dashboard dials, the armrest clock, the nosecone badge, the giant air cleaner decal and the likes. So all in all, some stuff to get the best detail on the body with. The problem with the 33 year old decals is that they were… milky, to say the least. Hell, they required a literal washing to be any sort of usable whatsoever so the two decals I did use(the Camaro license plates) required like twenty minutes of rubbing and touching up like some demented puppy to get all the paper backing, milky substances and all the other old gunk off. That being said though, for a early eighties kit, well middle-eighties, the decal sheet isn’t all too bad, it comes with all the Camaro and Berlinetta badges, no dials and no front Camaro badge but even then, the mold quality is high enough to simply fill in the badge yourself by hand.
Now earlier I said that time did a number on this kit and not on just the decals, like the tires for instance. They had gone all white, fuzzy and looked very much like a rotten apple, which is just the rubberizing agent seeping out the tires which is the downside of old, old rubber, but apparently I mended it by just spray painting it gently with some satin black after scrubbing the more gunky stuff away. What I couldn’t mend was a problem of a slightly more painful nature; the tendency for shit to warp. The chassis had warped like a Goddamn banana, which made getting it into the body stupidly difficult. There’s now also the downside that the engine sits a quarter inch higher than the rest so I can’t close the hood without removing the air cleaner, but it’s all fine. It’s a 33 year old kit, it’s fine, it can be busted up, broken, fucked up, it’s just age doing its thing. That being said though, this kit is… really, really good, especially with age in mind.
It’s just one of those things that I always wanted, and weirdly enough surprised me in the best of ways. I got my rare edition Camaro kit, I got to try a 1/16th scale kit and all of this without the hassle of having to sell a child into slavery or rob a bank to afford it! What a hell of a kit. That being said though, I do seriously still want to find an affordable ’82 or ’83 Camaro kit by Revell, or the ’82 Firebird brother, just to see what the detail level would’ve been at a 1/25th scale. Shame those kits are as rare or even rarer than this one.
For Pontiac, the early 2000s were a time of change and adaptation. Gently guided by the revamp of their lineup and the broadening of their market by General Motors in 2004, which saw legendary names like the Firebird getting axed in 2002(which had less to do with the revamp and more to do with the beyond terrible sales numbers for it and the Camaro brother), the Bonneville getting axed in 2004, the Grand Am in 2005, the GTO came back badge-engineered from an Australian badass that still lives today(as the HSV Commodore); the Holden Monaro and the last decade also saw the introduction of a few new ones like the Solstice, a fun and quite killer looking little two door, the G6 and G8 saloons and the… Aztek, which got replaced by a more sensible albeit a slightly fatter looking Dodge Caliber.
So, y’know, long story, but the last decade of Pontiac’s life was actually kind of depressing and the Firebird being killed off in 2002 didn’t help. But it got a nice little last hurrah if you will, being granted a “Collector Edition”, originally intended as a 35th anniversary which turned more into a final salute. Less than 2000 were offered, with options like a convertible or a T-top and by default the nice WS6 package which comes with the LS1 5.7L V8 that churned out a solid 325 horsepower, embroidered Collector Edition emblems into the seats and a number badge on the center console showing the build number of the car, two metal CE badges on the doors and a series of black, gray and silver stripes running along the rear quarter and across the hood. In kit form however, the 
But that’s besides the point, the plastic is also of a somewhat increased quality, the T-top decals were once kind of matted glass-textured and now turned into literal black slabs, which in some cases can be seen as a improvement or considered to be a lot cheaper and worse, up to the builder I suppose, but y’know – it’s still a bit better. The only problem I ran into is that given the previous owner of this delightful little kit had opened it and somehow let it get squashed. The body warped outwards which I stupidly over corrected by squeezing it too far back inwards, causing the bumpers to no longer fit and the hood to no longer shut properly. This exaggerated the panel gaps on the bumpers quite a friggin’ bit… But oh well. That’s just how life goes whilst trying to be a cheapskate.
The Hurst nameplate is one of those you immediately associate with muscle cars, without a doubt. A lesser known fact is that George Hurst’s company invented the 
So we’re left with 1969, 1972 and 1983 for the time being. And Revell is a month away from unleashing the ’85 Oldsmobile 442 with a second option in there to turn it into a FE3-X “Darth Vader” show car, they haven’t yet blessed us with a 1984 Cutlass kit. Which is… understandable, it’s just a swapped paint job and decal scheme of the ’83 version and some minor differences in the grille, rear axle and tail lights and I doubt its worth the effort of boxing one for that. I built the 
I mean, for the most part I’m gonna be regurgitating information that you could read over in either the
GMC’s never really been a name you’d associate performance with, right? Generally it’s trucks, light trucks, pick up trucks and… shit, that’s just about it. For the most part, especially recently, GMC’s been the alternative to Chevrolet for the supposed “professional“. It’s a confusing thing, yet it’s simple as sin at the origin – they’re the same car with small cosmetic differences but according to GM, the Chevrolet’s the daily driver(therefor cheaper) meant to be worn down to just bolts as it racks up 500K miles, while the GMC is the work truck(for some reason more expensive) that is meant to be dented to the heavens and filthy as can be, but it’ll last the model’s lifespan and can be pawned off in favor for a newer model once it comes around. (Excuse the sun-kissed as hell photos, they were taken on a foggy day with sun beaming through it like a ball of hellfire, once Spring rolls around they’ll be updated!)
Granted, all it had going for it was short term speed. While it ran to the 60 mile an hour mark in 4.6 seconds, it did only have a top speed of 126MPH(202KM/h). So while it has all of the merits of a true sports… truck, it also came with the downside of not being able to keep up with actual sports cars. But it’s not a big deal, the little Syclone had proven something and it had made its mark on the map. It out-dragged just about anything, Chevrolet Corvettes, Ferrari’s, Audi’s, BMW’s, it had the off-the-light speed boost that would allow you to be the badass around town. It was a good ride, it stopped well, it also lasted pretty long even though the turbocharger and liquid cooler had shorter lifespans(as they always do), it was a fun little truck. Which I suppose is the reason why people like Jay Leno own one and drive one still, just for funsies. People see a black pick up truck, think “typical American truck, all stickers, no speed” and then bolt away from said person at friggin’ light speed. A year later, GMC introduced the Typhoon, a closed bed with rear seats version of the Syclone. Came in different colors and slightly less power due to the weight re-distribution and such, but still a lightning bolt.
That being said, I bought a second one. Specifically for one reason; to make the Marlboro edition of the Syclone. In 1992, Marlboro, or rather Phillip Morris, Inc(whom are evil as sin, but y’know, car/kit blog, no bullshit) had a reward for the ten winners of the Marlboro Racing Contest ’92. Ten Syclones were given to the designer of the Corvette and Boss Mustangs, Larry Shinoda and he did the following: gave ’em T-tops with special holders in the bed, rear window that could slide down, special Boyd Coddington Cobra chrome-black wheels, Recaro seats and a MOMO sports steering wheel and of course, the “Hot Lick” bright red-as-sin paint job and Marlboro chevron-style stripes on the doors and hood. Now I should say right off the bat, the kit didn’t pack any Marlboro brand decals for a very simple reason: advertising cigarette brands is somewhere along the same line as putting tits on a billboard. I don’t give a damn myself, but folks, even for historical subjects(like say, a race literally called the Marlboro Racing Contest) say “nope”.
That was slightly more difficult as, A) the Boyd Coddington wheels are a rare one in their own right, as they were designed by the guy himself and he sadly passed away in 2008, so getting something even remotely similar in 1/25th scale… Yeah, no. B) the early nineties Revell wheel adapters were slightly… well, one size fits barely. So it had to be something from a similar era and luck would have it that some old Chevrolet Impala SS wheels from 1994 would be exact fits, I mean like perfect flush fit. I mean, unfortunate that I gutted a Impala SS model for parts but y’know, circle of a models life. Built, kept, torn asunder, re-built. The wheels just took a lick of semi-gloss black and wham, semi-good looking replacement of the custom Coddington wheels. The real version also has targa-tops which uhh… Yeah, I love them and American Sunroof Corp. did an ace job at making ’em look okay on the Syclone but, really, I did not want to ravage two T-top panels onto the already rather frail body and just painting them on seemed too much of a cop-out.
It always feels good to tinker on these old pick-up kits and both Revell-Monogram and AMT Ertl have shown up to the stage with stellar kits, whether it is the S-15 types from GMC or the S-10 types from Chevrolet, they’ve both been on top of their game with the releases. Chassis, body, engine, interior, it all gets an equal amount of love from the companies and it’s even a bit strange that some of their more well-desired car kits come with less detail in some cases. But y’know, lamenting blah-blah and all. Ah well, onwards to the Sonoma SLS soon!
Back in 2005, the Dodge Charger came back from its 20 year hiatus, or 32 year hiatus if you don’t count the dressed up Dodge Omni from ’81-’87 or the Chrysler Cordoba badge-swap from ’75-’78. And it was quite a success, hell it still is. It became a very proficient police car for a lot of townships, it’s a solid four door semi-luxury car that sort of echoes the original days of the Charger plus it’s actually… pretty damn sexy looking. And speaking of echoing its past, Chrysler was on top of it something fierce – just a year later, at the North American International Auto Show they showed off a SRT8 with a Super Bee livery(on which this kit is based), a while later it turned out the production model would be a little different 
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I despise the way it looks. The giant wheels? Fine, after all, I am a fan of the “Dubbed out” 
Cause they were fun! Fun fun fun! Purpose built for the child like of heart(yours truly included), burning rubber for no reason whatsoever until the steel belts came flying off, annoyingly bright paint job with decals that got the attention of everyone and the sighs of “ugh, friggin’ douche” quickly followed. The big 6.1L V8, also known as the Street & Racing Technologies’ V8 HEMI – it pumped 425 horse power into a car that (curb)weighs as much as a loaded up ’06 Dodge Ram Van 1500. That does explain why the car has a tendency of going all over the damn place besides forwards, it’s a ton of power nestled onto the wheels and the immense amount of torque that giant V8 shoves out is just too much for the car, but holy hell does it make for a fun little toy. A toy that costs close to fifty grand new, but… y’know. Yeah okay, that makes for a rather shit toy, but the sentiment stands, dammit. In 2007, the 
For instance, parts where it ain’t all simple or where it benefits of the simplistic approach: the headlights are literally just the chrome lamps and indicators, which makes it a thousand times easier to get that blacked out headlight effect the real thing has. The bumpers are all already part of the body and just the grille needs to be fitted, which makes for a more smooth body – which of course is utterly negated by the stupid doors. The simplicity of it all hasn’t affected the mold detail at all, the whole engine detail is there, it just isn’t there to be build by you. Same goes for the interior, it’s all high quality – just hardly any building required. Decals enhance the whole ordeal a ton too, but I would’ve liked a full bore 120 plus piece kit instead of this.
