av405

Brian, while I respect your opinion, I must disagree. At the end of the day, what kits we find to be exciting or of broad appeal is subjective since we look at this topic from our own personal lens. I for one am excited to get such a highly detailed kit of this subject vs. one of a sports car or a "popular" and "sexy" type of vehicle. From my view, those are a dime a dozen and we truck guys don't get as much love. I think the Blazer checks off a lot of marks: - Tie-in to a long running popular series. Some people will buy the kit merely for this reason. - With the aftermarket, this kit essentially covers a 10 year design (1981-1991). A lot of people will be able to replicate a Blazer/Jimmy that they may have had or know of. - This will appeal to emergency modelers like me as they were heavily used by police/fire/EMS. - At this point, Blazers are "old school" cars that have cross-generational appeal. Many of us are REALLY hoping that this tooling leads to pickup truck and even Suburban versions. If that happens, the potential for return on investment on this kit would be BIG. To get back to your point: If I was king of a model car company for a day, I would invest equally into new tooling for both modern subjects and older subjects. Like a 1985 Blazer AND a 2023 Durango

Thank you, Brian. Very nice. Make sure you post a WIP thread, I would love to see the progress.

I finally got time to do a paint session today. I masked the body off with various sizes of Tamiya masking tape. The paint edges were masked off with bare metal foil. For crisp edges, I have found no better solution than BMF. Here's everything after applying 3 progressively heavier coats of Tamiya TS-14 Black. I'll give it about a week to dry, after which I will clear everything evenly.

2024 was my most productive year yet. I ventured outside of my usual cop car realm and built other subject matters. I also challenged myself to try new methods and expand into using 3D parts. As you can probably tell, I'm fond of emergency, light commercial, and stock everyday subjects. I hope to finish the Tahoe this year.

Very interesting info, thank you.

Looks great!

Stephen, thank you for the kind words. For the grill, send a message to Andy Lesiak. He is a member of this forum @zaina . It is not his design, but he modified and printed it out for me to fit the Tahoe. Andy is an upstanding individual. As for progress on this build, it has been very slow. I painted the black frit band around the front windshield using tape and Mr. Surfacer 1500 Black Primer along the inside. After this, I dipped the windshield into a bowl of Future Floor polish to give the clear plastic some extra shine. My bottle of Future is about 15 years old now and is yellow. If you're in the same boat, do not let this deter you as the Future does not dry yellow. As for the frit/black borders around the rest of the windows, I will brush paint those from the interior. I also primed the entire body with Mr. Surfacer 1500 White Primer. The white primer will serve as the base white color. Next up, I will tape off the white portions to paint the black parts and then clear coat the entire body. This is basically a shortcut for me as it takes away some of the labor of having to tape off the body twice to paint both the black and white portions separately. Since I always clear coat my bodies, this last step will give the flat white primer the gloss look it needs.

This is why I find the price to be a little more acceptable. Now I'm not spending $7 bucks or so for a can of gloss black to pair with my chrome spray paint. Your 79 Malibu is beautiful, by the way.

Bump

I'll refrain from posting most of my thoughts on the subject. People like HPIguys definitely have a place in the hobby, many of us just seem to disagree on what that place is. With that being said, this quote is a point I will challenge. I don't believe that he really points out a lot of faults or issues. If you pay close attention to some builds, you can see issues that he didn't address in the final result. As a youtuber of his stature, I'm not sure how many faults he can point out in a kit that he is provided with for free for the purposes of hyping it up. I like his videos just to see the kit contents (especially decal sheets), but I rely on this forum to point out any major issues with kits.

I'm guessing it's because the Blazer is the only new kit of the bunch, so they're working out last minute details?

Bump

Great project. Can't wait to see how it progresses.

Thank you, Ron.

Fantastic work! You don't see a lot of these heavy duty work trucks being built in scale. Can you post or link Tim's advice on 3D prep work?

I'm looking for a set of the larger aero-style mirrors and the decal sheet (partial is fine) found in this kit:

Thank you, Brian!

Thanks! Thank you. The mold is exactly what I should have done as an alternative, but didn't since I have no experience with molds. I will probably end up doing that next time. Thanks for the tips! A little more WIP. This is what the kit glass' rear window looks like. Before turning it into a split window, the rear windshield wiper has to be removed: I used a sprue cutter to remove the molded-in wiper. I then sanded the area with 600, 1000 and 3000 grit sanding sponges and followed it up with Novus 2 polish. After this, I took measurements, drew my cutting line, applied engraving tape and used my Tamiya scriber to create the split window: And here is the completed conversion. I glued a thin piece of styrene to the rear door hatch to create a more prominent and defined opening handle. The rear window should look more convincing once I paint the black trim on the inside. I do realize there are some slight body work imperfections on the rear doors. I got as far as my skills and patience could take me. Some of those imperfections will eventually be covered up with decals for the Sheriff's markings.

Looks nice. I haven't seen one of these kits built up in a while.

Looks like the light bar, sans lenses. It makes sense as it's with the rest of the parts to be chromed.

Well, things have been busy at home. But a few hours at a time, I got a chance to work on modifying the rear door. The AMT Tahoe comes with a lift tailgate. As many of you know, Chevy used to offer rear cargo doors (aka barn doors) as an option on the Tahoes and Suburbans up until the 2007 refresh. This was no different on the police package Tahoes. Since LASD used cargo doors, I had to add them to my build with some minor "plastic surgery." First of all, I want to sincerely thank AMT for having made the tailgate door a separate piece: First of all, I had to decide how to relocate the tailgate latch from the center to the right side of the door. I decided to cut out two square pieces from the top half of the door, with one containing the latch, and switch them around. My tools for this task were various scribing tools and some trusty scribing tape: Here's the WIP: After I reversed both pieces, I applied some thin styrene strips to the back of the tailgate as a brace and secured them with Tamiya Extra Thin cement. I made sure that the strips were thin enough to not interfere with the clearance between the door and the rest of the body. I then filled in the gaps with Tamiya Epoxy Putty. If you note, the door latch is about an 1/8 of an inch too far to the right. This was a conscious decision on my part as I would have had to have cut right next to the latch molding to get the distance more accurate, and this would have made the epoxy application/sanding process much harder. Following this, I applied the first layer of primer and it was time to scribe the cargo door line down the middle. I first took measurements and used a black pen to draw my cut line: I followed this up with my trusty Tamiya Scriber and scribing tape. I applied Tamiya yellow tape on the opposite side in case my blade went rogue on me: After taking my time with various slow, deliberate passes with my scriber, I had my cargo doors: Once I was happy with the door itself, I had to scribe out the piece shown below: If you'll notice, I accidentally obliterated much of the detail on the tailgate latch through the epoxy filler sanding stage. To give this area more definition, I scribed around the latch to give it deeper lines and drilled in a keyhole. Here is the final result after sanding things smooth with 600 and 3000 grit pads and re-priming: The real thing for comparison: I still have to scribe the cargo windows into the kit glass to complete the look, so that job will be next. In retrospect, it may have been easier to create a mold out of the door latch and then add that mold to where I needed it. This would have prevented a lot of the plastic surgery and I may have been able to get the latch more centered where it should be. I might try that next time I have to do something similar.

PM sent.

That looks good, you can definitely count me in to purchase when they're ready for sale. Have you ever considered doing bench seats for the square body trucks and the 90's OBS trucks?

Nicely done!

I don't disagree, but I'm sure his willingness and ability to churn out multiple built kits for companies to showcase is a huge factor. I sure know that at the speed I build, I would barely get 1/30th of the new releases completed, hence making me useless to the model companies ? Plus Chris' channel has a lot of followers, which doesn't hurt. I personally view his videos to check out the kit's contents as he's pretty thorough with his unboxings and is usually one of, if not the first, to publish them. But I look elsewhere for honest breakdowns and reviews of the kits since that channel doesn't go down that path. I'll just leave it at that as this subject has been covered numerous times on this forum.