polybius

Great color choice! The grille detail is very nice and I like the interior details as well. Nice job!

Excellent! I love these full size 1980s sedans and always wished the kitmakers would offer more like them. You've done a great job of capturing the look, well done!

Great color scheme on this and nice details!

Very nice, and great lightbar! The black and chrome trim all around the car can be tricky but you nailed it! These Crown Vics were so plentiful back then but now they're rarely seen, and it's great to see one built so nicely. Well done!

Thanks so much everyone, I appreciate the comments and the stroll down memory lane! As a kid in the 80s I built the '85 T/A and '87 GTA but they came out as gluebombs and ended up unfortunately like most of the F-bodies of the era in a scrap heap. I remember being excited to have gotten a nice grey metallic finish from a Testors enamel rattle can on the GTA, but couldn't wait for the paint to dry before globbing it all together in a matter of hours. By then the paint was smudged and the tube of cement was empty. Fastforwarding a few decades, the plans are to build all of the '82-92 Monogram/Revell iterations including the '85 and '87. I have the '85 kit but the '87 GTA is getting scarce and pricey. This '89 version would be an easy conversion since the body is molded with the GTA badging that had to be removed for this Turbo livery, and these kits seem to be easier to find at a reasonable price. It helped that the tail lights were molded in smoke clear to begin with, but it'd be nice to have the rest of the clear parts including the fog lights molded in clear rather than tinted. After masking the inside of the tail lights with thin strips of tape, first horizontally then vertically, they first got the black grid laid down and then Tamiya clear red. On the frontside, a thin strip of foil with a coat of clear red was used for the reflector strip. A small section of black vinyl tape with some gold accents simulated the turbo-specific center, and the bird was dry brushed in gold with white accents carefully dabbed in. I swapped out the tinted windshield for a clear unit from the later Revell Formula kit but kept the original kit's tinted hatch glass. There are still some inaccuracies such as the missing Indy wing&wheel emblems on the front edge of the side skirts. I found several decals that would have been suitable but none were gold, and I didn't want to risk a catastrophe trying to hand-paint them. Thanks again for taking a look and for the encouraging comments!!

Stunning! It's great to see one so accurately built and well done. The color, finish, and details are spot on and one is tempted to get in and drive it away!

I've seen only a few of these built and it's refreshing to see one especially so nicely done! Great job!

This '89 T/A Turbo is the third in a series of 3rd generation F-body Pontiac builds that started with an '82 T/A and will end whenever I build the last one. I'm less a fan of GM F-bodies and more a fan of 80s Monogram kits like these. I had two of these kits on the shelf and one will be converted to into a GTA, so this one got the box stock 20th anniversary V-6 turbo livery. It was going to build it with the Indy Pace Car door markings but around the time the paint was drying I looked at the decal sheet and saw there were no Indy decals. Then it hit me that it was the AMT version that came with the Indy decals, and without any in my stash it was destined to be a showroom stock T/A Turbo. At least the color choice was easy since they were only offered in white. The interior work came first and it was converted from the kit's 5-speed to the correct 4-speed automatic by scratchbuilding a shifter, removing the clutch pedal, and enlarging the brake pedal. In 1989 the T/A had a fancy new steering wheel with duplicate radio control buttons. The kit, however, offered only the earlier three-spoke wheel. After studying the correct 1:1 steering wheel, I found a spare AMT 1990 Taurus steering wheel with four spokes to use as a start. The wheel was trimmed, smoothed, and scribed, and with some detail painting it was close enough for my eye. The rest was painted two-tone camel and tan, and it got some tan flocking for the floor and cargo area carpeting. The engine and chassis were assembled, painted, and detailed with the kit's ignition wiring. The kit's dull chrome wheels were stripped and airbrushed in Vallejo duraluminum, dry-brushed Mr. Color gold lacquer, and acrylic black wash. Finally the bodywork began. The bumbers and side skits were fitted, but the kit's parts lacked the endcaps for all of the skirts resulting in gaps at the lower wheelwells. Endcaps were cut and trimmed from thin sheet styrene and were blended with the bodywork for the correct OE look. The hood vents were opened up by filing away material underneath. The exterior finish started as rattlecan Plastikote Super White acrylic lacquer until two coats in when the can's nozzle freaked out and spewed buckets of white paint all over me, the floor, and the body. I stopped immediately and let the body dry, then sanded the globs and splatters while deciding the next steps. After trying different spray nozzles it was obvious there was a defect in the can and there'd be no way to finish the remaining coats using it. Since it was the only can I had, the remaining paint was decanted and the final color coats were airbrushed. The glosscoats were my usual rattlecan Rustoleum clear gloss lacquer followed by some wet sanding and polishing. The kit's decals were 30 years old and very difficult to work with. No amount of decal solvent seemed to settle them down but at least they survived the hot clearcoat. While Monogram made some effort to convert their existing GTA tooling to the T/A Turbo, they overlooked some of the badging and other details so I did the best with what they offered. The tail lights were particularly tricky but some 1:1 reference photos were handy. Overall this one really fought me the whole way it seemed, much unlike the previous two 'Birds that seemed to go together a bit easier. Regardless, it looks at home with its two siblings on the shelf and plans are in the works for more sometime down the road.

Thank you everyone! All of the comments are appreciated! I started work on an Oxford White '89 XR7 to make it a trio, but keep getting sidetracked with other projects but hopefully it'll be off the bench soon. Regarding the back-up lights, the kit's once-piece clear red unit has the appropriate recesses for the slots. It would have been nice to have a clear unit to start with, but a thinned wash of Vallejo flat white filled the recesses and the slick nature of the clear red plastic made easy work of wiping off the excess. Besides the aforementioned reflector buckets, the bird logos were picked out with some Molotow liquid chrome and a sharpened toothpick. After installation the seam lines got a wash of satin black to accentuate the individual lenses. For some kits the lenses are often some of the trickiest parts. Getting white or silver paint on clear red plastic to look 'translucent' is close to impossible. I'd love to do a few AMT 89-91 Taurus SHOs but those chrome headlights and red molded tail lights are the holdup. I've been experimenting with the clear UV-cured epoxy to cast duplicates in clear, but haven't come up with the ideal solution yet.

Great looking build! I agree with kelson, simply beautiful!

This build just rolled off the bench with a sordid past. I've been a fan of Rustoleum's clear gloss lacquer so I set up two bodies to paint for an experiment using Rustoleum's gloss black lacquer. I'd used it on trim pieces and as a basecoat for metal finishes, but hadn't been brave enough to hose it all over a carefully prepped and primed body. And so it went. One build received primer and only the gloss black lacquer, and the other build received the same treatment except with an additional step of several typical coats of the clear gloss lacquer as clearcoat. The result of the experiement yielded one body that was very pleasing to my eye, and one body that had to go to the dunk tank. This Revell '89 Thunderbird Super Coupe was the one that got straight-up gloss black lacquer wet sanded and polished without a clearcoat, so for the experimental purposes it was the success. The build is otherwise mostly box-stock. After building a few of these back in the day I knew there were some tricky areas that would need some closer attention. The bumpers were attached during the body prep, rather than as a final assembly step. This allowed some reinforcement of the attachment points, and all the light lenses could be test-fit to make any adjustments. Fortunately this kit, despite being the original 30 year old tooling, was in fair condition without much body warpage as I've found to be common with the early issues of this and the Cougar. Attaching the bumpers before the chassis is mated presents a few minor issues. The rear corners of the chassis must be trimmed to allow it all to mate without putting too much pressure on the delicate bumper attachments. I learned this the hard way while recently building the Cougar variant so I took extra care to trim, trim some more, and even more, rather than risking it. Once the chassis slides into place the trimmed areas are not noticeable so it seems to work out doing it this way. Some flocking was added to the interior carpet and parcel shelf. Whereas the Cougar version provides a reflector bucket for the tail lights, the Thunderbird versions have no such mounting surface. After some trial and error with different paint and materials, I settled on fabricating some reflector buckets for the outer tail/stop lamp segments. Using some HVAC metal tape that isn't as flimsy and cruncy as plain aluminum foil, I cut some small pieces and formed them into reflector buckets that were then attached to the backside of the light unit with some super glue. This ended up working out fine for the look I was aiming for, but it took a lot of time and patience. Despite some fidding here and there, it was a fun build that took me back to the 80s and 90s for a while, and I'm glad to see it finally on the display shelf instead of in the box or on the bench. It has already found a friend in the '91 Cougar XR-7 that recently made the same a similar giant leap.

Beautiful build! Very nice work!

It's great to see this! Well done!

Beautiful color and finish, and very nice work all around!

Very nice! I can envision those green Coke bottles that match the era. The classic white and red is a good looking contrast, too!

Very nice build and great color! You've done a nice job with the details and it looks showroom fresh!

Beautiful Fords! They really capture the era nicely, great work!!

Great to see it brought back to life! Nice work!!

Thank you everyone for the kind comments, much appreciated! After finishing this one up I regretted getting rid of the other late-model Revell Mustang kits I had a while back. In the meantime and while I seem to have Mustangs on the mind, an '89 GT convertible in rare dove grey with red interior is on the bench now. Thanks again for the encouragement!

Very nice job on this kit! It's hard to find one, like you mentioned about the Thunderbird, that doesn't have a warped roof or broken pillars. You've done great with it, well done!

Beautiful build, super color and paint, and great engine detail. Very nicely done all around!

It's great to see one of these built so nicely. Beautiful build of an unusual subject!

Great build and great car! These look great right out of the box and I'm a fan of the classic blue with white stripes that you chose for this one.

Wow, very nice! I immediately thought of Kojak. Great builds, love these 70s tanks!

Great work! It looks showroom fresh, well done!