Third time’s the charm, right? I’ve done the ’71 ‘Cuda kit by Revell/Monogram twice so far, one as but a wee lad and the second time as a little test between mixing enamel paints and using photo etch parts, in either case royally screwing it up. Like, thoroughly. So when I got my hands on a cheap brand new Nash Bridges ‘Cuda kit by Revell, I figured let’s A) do this right for a change, you utter fool and B) no really, do this kit justice for a friggin’ change. I needed a little, tiny break from working on decals at a lovely rate of one entire sheet per day, so I picked up on doing the ’76 Mustang II turning it into a Cobra II and this ’71 ‘Cuda convertible – using it as a little distraction and as well to prove that this website hasn’t just died for that one page named “Decals“. Also, I wanted to give the ’71 ‘Cuda decals I made a whirl, see how they turned out.
But first things first, most car enthusiasts will know about either the weird little gem of a TV show called “Nash Bridges” or at the very least his supposed all-yellow 1971 HEMI ‘Cuda convertible. Which, given how ungodly rare the ’71 Cuda as a convertible is by itself, rarely was an actual ’71 Cuda convertible, nor a HEMI – but that’s TV for ya’, they can’t just buy a 1971 ‘Cuda with a HEMI and be a convertible, hell one of those sold for 3.5 million dollar in 2014(given only 11 HEMI Cuda convertibles were ever built in 1971). I mean, Christ, a 440 equipped 6 barrel ‘Cuda convertible is still valued between 300,000$ and 450,000$. So they substituted the all ‘Curious Yellow’ 1971 ‘Cuda with several 1970s that were front and tail-swapped to look like a ’71 and they added the fender grilles afterwards as well. There was only one 1971 ‘Cuda on the show, the other three were from 1970 and not one had a HEMI block in there. But hey, that’s TV for ya’ – they still all caught over 150K a piece afterwards from Barrett Jackson or eBay so in a way, even the “not real deal” cars that were engine, front and rear swapped were still valuable as sin.
And y’know what, despite the fact that Don Johnson and the Nash Bridges show as well are now just a blip on TV history(lets be fair here, despite the sweet-ass car and decent cast, Johnson will forever be Sonny Crockett in every role) – the ’71 Cuda itself remains a star and then some. As I said earlier, the ’71 HEMI convertibles catch literal millions and they increase in value literally every single day, and the still ungodly quick and gorgeous ’71 Cudas with 340s, 383s and 440s convertible or hard top are well over 100K more expensive than the average house price in the United States(189K) – so you could have a ‘Cuda 440, or you could have a whole house and a hundred grand left over. They were and still are American muscle in absolute perfection; it’s ungodly pretty, it’s ungodly fast, it’s ungodly thirsty and it’s ungodly unwieldy. It nailed every point of being a peak muscle car era vehicle, besides the at the time sale price – one of the reasons why the ‘Cuda was always a more rare sight out there regardless of the shape it came in was because at the time is was one of the most expensive of the bunch. It’s sister car of the same year with the same engine was 400$ 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$(all the previous prices were 1969-1971 dollar value) – so in reality, the ‘Cuda was of course the premium quality car but it also cost a person a premium to get a hold of.
But I mean, if I were alive in 1971, if I had what now is the equivalent of 30,000$ in 1971 money, and I wanted a car that was fun, luxurious and borderline undrivable(as just about any muscle car was), I’d get a ‘Cuda, cause as I said, it was just about peak muscle car, it was aggressively styled, it was stupidly difficult to keep straight on the road and it was staggeringly quick in every respect. So, y’know, that was three paragraphs to basically summarize “the car is good fun“, hooray! Though in the model kit world, the ‘Cudas never really had a lot of attention headed their way – MPC did annuals of the car from 1968 through 1974, AMT did the Barracudas from 1965 through 1969 and Jo-Han also did 1970 and 1971 and those kits just had a bunch of exactly-as-they-were re-releases in the 1980s and 1990s, with Jo-Han’s last blast in 1992, MPC’s in 1980 and AMT Ertl re-released a Snap-Tite 1974 ‘Cuda twice in early 2003 and again in 2010 – but Monogram and Revell remain reigning kings on this, in 1982 Monogram released the 1971 ‘Cuda kit and arguably, to date, it remains to be the best ‘Cuda kit out there for that year.
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.
Though like I said in the beginning, I’ve royally dicked this kit up twice before in the past and I wanted to do it proper for a change, just once. So I used the can of Plum Crazy Purple metallic I had left over from doing the ’74 Gremlin some time ago, which I knew wasn’t the right Plum Crazy, given its from the new generation Challenger, but still looks absolutely lovely on the ‘Cuda. Then I tore the 440 V8 block from a ’70 GTX kit which I knew would fit given Monogram’s simplistic, yet absolutely excellent chassis and engine blocks, though I couldn’t get the carbs to match the location of the Shaker so I just… glued the Shaker to the underside of the hood, which works well enough aesthetically. I also took the five spoke wheels from the same kit, as per usual, the wheels fit the tires perfectly and the adapters were 100% identical.
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.
All I would’ve asked for in this kit would’ve been a option to put the top up, that would be it, really. For the rest, goodness is this still a solid kit after all these years. Despite the simplified nature, which is par for the course with older Monogram kits like pretty blocky engine bay detail and the one issue where getting the chassis to fit deep into the body shell enough for you to slot the rear valance on there with the exhausts sticking correctly out of the ports… those were an annoying twenty minutes. The exhausts are molded onto the chassis, which is fine and all, but the real valance has the exhausts sticking out there and you have to place that absolutely perfectly so you can force the chassis/exhausts through – which either means, it won’t go deep enough and tear the rear off, or it does fit perfectly and you’re done. No middle ground. Despite that… boy, great kit, what a great kit.
’71 Plymouth ‘Cuda 440 Convertible specifications:
Kit: #85-2381
Skill Level: 2
Parts: 72
Molded in: White
Scale: 1/24
I say this every time and will likely say it every time from here on out, ’til the day I die – Japanese kits make for a pleasant, excellent time. Aoshima’s kits are the perfect balance in the middle between Fujimi and Hasegawa and Tamiya, which for me, still stands right at the top. When I got the kit in my hands, I spotted a little box of text on the side that says and I quote: “
As the seventies pulled on, the Celica underwent some cosmetic changes but it stayed the same for the most part, until 1973 where it received a very… familiar looking version added to the trim choices. Called the Liftback, it added well, a lifted rear, with some louvers on the sides and effectively, it made it a gorgeous, little Asian cousin/brother to the Ford Mustang. And to be honest, it ‘borrowed’ a lot of design cues from the Mustang, nevermind the basic shape. The vertical stripe tail lights, the short but raised lip on the tail, the little louvers, it kind of goes on – which is fine. Cause ironically, this particular 1977 Celica LB-2000GT was more Mustang than the real, original 1977 Mustang ever would be. The problem with the Mustang, which I described in full on the ’77 Mustang II article, is that it became too much car for the changing landscape, it had to shrink and it had to do it right there and then, no second chances were given – many choices were pondered, but the design teams went with the… Ford Pinto, as a starting platform to build upon.
Aoshima’s got just about all the Celica’s, well at least the older generations. They’ve got the normal Celica 1600GT, this LB 2000GT, a shitload of tuner and weirdly stanced versions of those two, the second gen from the early eighties, Beemax did a few rally versions of the ’84 and ’85 TA64’s and also one from 1990, and it kinda goes on. Tamiya has the more recent Celicas, on the other hand but Aoshima’s the company with the majority of the earlier generations covered. And this one in particular is the most recent re-release of the LB 2000GT kit, with from what I can tell some incredible additions like photo etched parts and optional deep dish wheels.
Y’know, this kit is one of those kits that make me even more confused about the state of the model kit business as a whole. You read, particularly among the English speaking community, that there’s a stupendous amount of salt. The dominant mentalities of “I’ve got 600 kits, therefore I couldn’t care less if any company goes down” and “I pay premiums for what comes down to re-hashed shit from 1978” – and it’s kind of sad. I honestly don’t know if companies like Revell-Monogram(and their parent company Hobbico) and MPC/AMT Ertl under Round 2 kind of barely scrape by or go utterly bankrupt due to our picky-as-shit buying or that the market is just that different stateside, or if its just that the whole idea of “keeping American, American” just raises the price to a point where it’s just not possible. I’m not a saint, I scolded MPC for giving me kits they’ve re-released 9 times before unchanged, I’ve scolded Round 2 for cherry-picking their new releases whether its a re-release or not, I’ve also never been a stickler for price given as a European I automatically get charged 20 to 25 bucks on top of the buy price just to have it come my way. Obviously, there’s many people who know it either better or actually know it for a fact how it all works, it just fascinates me to watch companies fall apart and rise to new heights simultaneously in such a similar field.
Yeah you knew it was gonna degenerate into this. Seriously, the bottom line is that the non-fuckery-weird-low-dropped-semi-drifter factory stock Aoshima kits are absolutely superb. There, my one paragraph summary. Also apologies for the supremely slow rate of articles as of late, I’m going into more depth about that soon-ish – it’s as you may have guessed if you’re a frequent flyer overhere, it’s the damn decals.
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.
Oh boy, oh boy, I finally got one. A second generation Ford Mustang kit, and not just any of them, the friggin’ AMT release. The Mustang II fascinates me to no end, for all the wrong reasons – lemme just get my sins out of the way. I like it for several reasons, one’s obviously the story behind the absolute US automotive disaster the Mustang II became to symbolize, the second is that I, and fuck me for saying this, kind of dig the way it looked, especially the more European styled Mustang II Ghia and third; where it ended up going. Cause the Mustang is basically the Elvis of the automotive industry, it came in and it essentially changed the whole game there and then in 1964. Then as it became to define success, by 1969, it started packing on some… weight.
Obviously, something had to be done and Iacocca definitely nailed it on the head when he noted that the Mustang had to be downsized to ever stand a chance at living on, cause it didn’t just define the muscle car era, it also defined the horrible side of perpetual growth in the muscle car market. James May and his Detroit-oriented interviewees said it best in a episode of 
In a way, the Mustang II might have been the best thing to have happened to the entire Mustang lineage. I know, hot take there Mr. Grumpyfuck, why don’t you go and worship some more European scrap, you cretin. And I’d say, you’d be right, I am that but still – look at the fox body Mustang that followed it in ’79. It was compact-ish, it was quick, it maintained the awesome hatchback design for most of its models, it was a nippy, lightweight… fox! And by some ways I like to imagine that the Mustang II’s downsizing helped that vision be realized, cause while the Camaro, Firebird and other muscle car survivors maintained their livelihoods, they stayed quite… large. Lengthy, at the least.
The body has fitting issues, there’s a sunken part on the tailgate right where the Ford lettering is, the mold lines are obscene, the hood nor the hatch will fit at all, the clear pieces slot in from the bottom, giving the illusion that the damn windows sit deep as hell and looks like someone glued plastic sheets in from the inside to cover the fact that the car came with no windows. The rims inside the stupidly huge wheels are also too damn big, the tail lights are unfortunately just chrome pieces, the whole chassis is just a flat plate and the suspension is absolutely huge and so weirdly shaped compared to the flat chassis, the interior is smooshed flat in a odd manner and just looks… wrong. The engine is a nice one though, goes together smoothly and the underappreciated 250ci/4.0L V6 is nicely detailed and it is one of the few quite well cast V6’s too.
And y’know what, in the end, who the hell cares right, with some effort and part sourcing, something I definitely didn’t get around to, you could quite handily turn this into a much better model than the box initially offers. Smaller tires aren’t otherworldly to come across, some wing mirrors aren’t too difficult to find spares of, the decals I’ve got for sale now so there’s those and you could do some chisel-work to the hood and tailgate to get ’em to shut properly. I love, absolutely love these misery cars from the seventies, for the lessons that were learned, for the slowly-growing appreciation for the Mustang II, for the overall perspective one gains looking into these things, from both the modeler’s side of things as well as the actual car, and how it held up opposed to other competitors at the time, now that we live in a facts-found-in-seconds world… Speaking of competitors, the next build I’m currently actively messing about with is the ’77 Toyota Celica LB-2000GT – Basically its Japanese cousin. Oh yes, oh yes indeed.
So, last year I built the 
I bought the kit for two reasons, one is that I desperately wanted an accurate Camaro kit to design the decal sheets off, two was that I desperately wanted a damn good Camaro kit. And well over a year later, on eBay I accidentally stumble over a second hand Camaro kit from 1975, the box all ripped and quite frankly, rotten beyond belief. But whoever had this thing sitting around since 1976, did me a big solid. He unpacked it, clearly but he then put the parts(that were all just in one giant soggy bag) in separate baggies and… just left it be. I am 100% certain that the baggies that he put them in were at least 30 years old as even under cardboard they’d turned a nice shade of smokers’ beige. But this prevented the typical 1970s kits woes; the rubber wheels melting into the plastic parts and the clear plastics turning into a misty milky white.
Speaking of which, “Rally Sport”, the arguably most sporty Camaro of ’75 truly didn’t deserve the name “sport” in there, did it. I mean, Jesus wept that thing had absolutely the worst and lowest power output of all the Camaros, ever. The 350ci V8 produced 155HP. There are bog standard VW Jettas with that amount of horsepower. Though, yeah, in Chevrolet’s defense, they were trying times. They were the days of unregulated growth and interchangeability. Your ’68 Camaro is starting to show its ripe age of seven years, rusting to the bolts, engine popping about like someone’s firing machine guns in there and interior trim disintegrating upon touching? Well, you’re done paying for the thing so why not get yourself a new one. That was basically how cars worked back then, they were somewhat meant to be replaceable. Bit like the iPhones and Galaxy series phones of today, we are more than willing to lay down the same amount every so often to get the newer version, so it’s not such a unusual practice.
So while Lee Iacocca was fighting off Ford techs and designers to get the Mustang to be downsized to a Maverick(though it became a Pinto platform in the end), GM decided that it was about time to give the Camaro a revitalization with the upcoming changes in the… well, everything climate. Political, economical, world, food, you name it, it was a year of everything must go. The 
And MPC gave it a fair run for its money, the supposed “full detail” kits, which was early seventies marketing speak for “it’s not a dealer promo” were quite accurate. Even though the engine bay was very typical like all the MPC kits, even of today, barren and sad, the rest of the model like the body and the interior were quite good. Two of the definite improvements over the AMT Camaro kit is the fact that the grille and the bumper are just two separate pieces that are meant to slot into the body, so you don’t ever get that ugly ass drooping nose that AMT’s Camaro kits do get. Two is, the wider wheels that look a thousand times better than any of AMT’s offerings from back then. I was quite surprised by the crispness of the whole ordeal, clear Camaro emblems on the fenders, the tail lights quite clearly showed where the reverse lights would be with subtle patterns, the dashboard is well detailed and nicely raised, it just goes on and on. Stole some wing mirrors from the AMT Ertl ’70 Baldwin Motion kit to complete the look a little more cause they sure as hell didn’t come with the kit, or any kit from that era. The anemic as all hell 350ci V8 is nicely detailed too but it just looks… sad in the barren, empty engine bay. I did use a 5.7L Z/28 air cleaner decal on it to test it out and see if it would fit and, it did! Though of course the ’75 Camaro’s no Z/28, just wanted to test it out.
So we all have our favorite motorsports. Okay shouldn’t call them “sports” per se, more “the type of crashes or lack thereof that interest me“. For some folks it’s NASCAR, other folks its JGTC and its new Super GT buddy, Formula 1, so on. For me, it’s DTM and its distant cousin WTCC. The thing that interests me the most about either is the… somewhat vague intention that it’s still cars being driven by racers, not plastic husks that are all the same shape. I know, technically this is called a “silhouette” for motorsports, complicated racing gear underneath the shell of a heavily modified car, but at least unlike NASCAR, DTM still attempts to keep it unique! Not a bunch of colored slabs that are tailgating fiercely that you have to identify by their damn headlight or taillight stickers to spot the friggin’ make.
To be fair, it isn’t as complicated as the Revell DTM kits, but that’s thanks to two parts; one being it having no engine and not needing a whole removable front lid and two being that most of the complicated parts and aerodynamic bits are already attached to the body. For instance, the Audi A4 kit by Revell has you manually attach around eight canards to a side, bit by bit. I personally prefer the somewhat less complicated manner, but I can see how folks would prefer the “everything needs to be done by hand” method. One thing that Tamiya has done a friggin’ good job of is the attempts at helping the builder out on trying to nail the two tone paint job, it’s still somewhat of a guess-job as it tells you to cut out shapes of the decal instruction sheet for little spray paint masks, which is nice and all but its just one of those things that is more effort than its worth, given you can also just tape off a similar body line and just do it the slightly harder way.
So as a whole, Opel racing cars from the nineties onwards are rarities in general, there’s a handful of different types out there and even less are available in model kit shape. Tamiya has taken on two of them as model car kits, one being the Calibra from the mid-nineties which was in theme kind of similar with the white and yellow mix and then of course there’s this one. Though Tamiya is no stranger to Opels as a whole, though unfortunately they’re limited to a bunch of 1/10th scale R/C bodies. One unique thing about this kit is the gullwing doors, which are beautifully thought out save for one, tiny thing. They become damn near non-functional cause the bracing struts is attached to the weakest point of the door and its expected to be glued onto the door frame by you. Now on paper, this works. In practice, this means the next time you flip the gullwings open, it’ll just snap the little heads off.
Three? Little chrome stickers you transfer onto the kit. I absolutely love them. When they work, they work. The Opel emblem in the grille looks a thousand times better with an embossed sticker than a decal, and that’s coming from a guy who spend the last three months peddling his own decal sheets. And lastly, four; mold the most complicated parts as one piece. I love silhouette racing cars for the most part because they’re so damn complicated and I just enjoy going balls-to-the-wall sometimes, however when you got like eight little canards across the body, either make them supremely easy to slot in(like in the same manner the wing is slotted into the tail rather than just glued to it), or mold them into the body before hand. It’s just no fun half-assedly trying to put tiny, tiny canards on there that refuse to stick, specifically looking at you Revell with the Audi A4 DTM car.
There’s only a handful of cars that were made for the buyers with “fun” being up front. There’s plenty of examples where the car is designed for the buyer’s comfort, like the 
Until 2007, when Toyota showed a concept car that had direct heritage to the AE86 with the same similar set-up. Normal, ordinary interior, nothing wild. Light weight yet very powerful for its size engine block. Rear wheel drive with the power balance shifted to the rear. Low weight all around on the car. That recipe. At first though it was a hybrid V6 block and it was sort of destined to be yet another concept that would attract a lot of attention for a year and just be forgotten about the next, until in 2008 when Subaru decided to want to partner up on this on one(after the lead designer had asked them to, which was first rejected by Toyota’s peers cause of Subaru’s reputation with AWD cars, not necessarily RWD) – keep in mind, this is like Chrysler coming in to GM’s offices to offer help on improving the Camaro. Subaru designed a boxer engine, a 4 cylinder boxer engine was designed by Subaru and they improved upon one of their already tight-as-hell chassis and gearbox from a Impreza to build the newly improved FT-86 concept.
And to say the least, it was welcomed quite well. It brought back the boyish joy of just spinning out your car whenever you wanted but that could still behave when necessary. It wasn’t super fast, it wasn’t the quickest to 60MPH and it was the most luxurious but the car did get the sticker of approval for “most fun” without a doubt. And Asian kit makers did jump on this boat with some finesse, both Tamiya and Aoshima produced a full detail kit(which is unusual to say the least, engines are usually considered a luxury on their kits) and they might be so similar that I’m not even sure they’re not a same joint-venture, but I figured I’d go with the Tamiya kit just because I generally trust Tamiya to be 100% the best of the bunch.
It’s also a nice and complicated kit that as usual goes together with some force but ends up looking excellent. Plus as I mentioned before, for a change – a whole engine! The 4U-GSE engine is replicated with a fair amount of detail, albeit a five piece construction. Literally just the half engine block, a set of manifolds, intakes and the engine strut – that’s about it. The reservoirs and all are all one piece and what isn’t a slab or a single piece is already molded onto the body or the chassis. But fine, who cares – it’s an Asian kit with a engine and that makes me happy by default. And they also didn’t half-ass it given the engine bay looks accurate enough like the real deal(unlike MPC kits of yore where it’s wheel wells and engine block with some reservoirs awkwardly slapped on top).
Given it’s such a beautiful kit and knowing how good Tamiya kits are I decided y’know what, stop being such a cheap asshole and actually get the kits brand new no matter the age. So I did! I got the Opel Astra DTM, the Subaru Ayclone, the Honda S2000 and a couple more coming up down the line some time. Maybe one day I’ll reinvest in a model or a used kit to steal the headlight and the fender indicators from so I can complete this beauty, truly.
Oh man, oh man, I love me some Volarés and Aspens, so much so that I’ve actively made a decal sheet for every damn version of the car. Well, for the Aspen at least. Anyhow, the Volaré and Aspen cars are so rare and forgotten that you actually might’ve spotted a fair few of ’em and just never even gave it a thought cause they were so… trivial(even though the Volaré was one of Chrysler’s best selling cars of ’77). It didn’t help that there were four giant problems plaguing the whole replacement for the Dart and Valiant era; one being in peak Malaise era where having cars basically meant a drain on your wallet and your sanity, two being production rush that very much gave people a 1976 version of Windows Vista, something I’ll come back to in a moment, three was Chrysler being mighty ambiguous with where the new Dart/Valiant would head and four was competition being just… better, weirdly enough.
However in 1977 they also introduced the new top-line model; the Aspen R/T or the Volaré Road Runner. Both came with possible largest-of-the-engines 360 cubic inch V8s with TorqueFlite 3 speed automatic, both came with appropriate all-around decal sets that were… something else, to say the least. In ’78 they escalated it with the Super Coupe for both the models. The upgrade kit was… well, an air dam, fender flares, window louvres and a set of stickers. But that being said, it was quite something to behold and it was actually made to be a really, really quick little bastard for the era. With the 360 it could out-drag(0-60MPH), and here comes a list: 1978 Camaro Z/28, 1978 Corvette, 1978 Firebird Trans Am, 1978 Mustang King Cobra II and it actually kind of goes on. So all the while it recaptured some of the dead-as-can-friggin’-be era of muscle cars, it sold… not great. Like, it was rather embarrassing.
But y’know, the whole Malaise era was full of stories like these. Failures, sad attempts, screw ups and above all; customer exploitation. It didn’t keep the fucktrain from derailing though, not until way into the eighties! Hooray for bailouts, bailouts of bailouts and just good old fashioned bailing out the bailout of the bailout. Anyway! MPC made several Volaré kits in the seventies, all the way from the days where it was still a Satellite masquerading as a Road Runner, then when it was a Fury masquerading as a Road Runner and then lastly when it became a Volaré masquerading as a Road Runner, or as Chrysler’s clever marketing folks made it; a “Fun Runner!”. From 1977 it brought out annual Volaré kits and promos until 1980(skipping the ’79 year as it was largely unchanged from ’78) and not a damn thing exists of the Dodge Aspen but that’s where I supposedly come in with my decal sets… Anyway, it was a right pain in the ass to find a decently priced kit, so I settled for a promo from 1977 and used some parts from my previously built 
So I just tried my damnest to give it all a royal red coat for the interior and attempted to detail it as best I could between the steering wheel arms and the seats. I bought some spray paint that allegedly was between dark red and black, which is somewhat close to the real Volaré Super Coupe’s color. Yeah, as you yourself have probably pointed out in aggravation; it’s just a shade of Goddamn maroon. I figured I might get it darker if I used a black primer, which helped but it only made it a dark shade of maroon. And at this point I was seventy bucks deep into this promo, not counting the wrecking of a ’80 Volaré kit for the tail lights, chassis and engine. And then, to finish this calamity off, I realized the decals I spend a lifetime trying to design didn’t fit as snugly over the door handles as I’d hoped. They at least do look quite good, especially with the new quality of ’em(similar to the somewhat thicker Aoshima and Tamiya decals), so there’s that. I am kinda in love with the wheels though, they fit the Super Coupe really well and it was all I had other than the stock steelies they slapped on there by default, put some Fireball Modelworks Grand Am Radial GT tire decals on there to finish it off and poof, decent looking wheels – minus the stance but that’s more a MPC promo problem and less a fitting problem.
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.
