AMT 1962 "Sock it to me" Corvette

[62rebel]

Picked up a couple of these last year to share with my grandson, but he's not interested in building models anymore. So, they've been sitting in the closet, until today... I opened one out of curiosity and it is one of the Kat kits, molded in translucent orange metallic...... First time I have encountered one. How in the world can you preserve the molded color and still build it? 

[62rebel]

By the way, the other one is molded in plain old white styrene.

[Daddyfink]

Some folks I know painted them from the inside to give them more depth in either silver or gold. 

[Greg Myers]

What Jesse said. Paint it like an R/C car, mask the outside, paint some gold or silver inside.

[Ace-Garageguy]

And...if you want to remove the mold lines from the body, you can carefully sand them off with 400 grit, and go to progressively finer and finer grits (wet), finishing up with polishing compound to return the original gloss to the bare plastic.

Unfortunately, it's not a really great kit and has rather a lot of scaling and proportion issues. The orange one was probably made as more of a "collectors" item, and a marketing piece to spur sales of a lackluster model.

[62rebel]

I'd only encountered solid color metallic plastic on Monogram kits before, never translucent like this one. My first AMT Cobra was molded in a near-translucent white, but not metallic. It will be interesting to work with. I'd built the previous issues before. I only opened these out of curiosity if there were "restored" parts... which, btw, I still don't know whether there are or not; the colored plastic threw me.

[Draggon]

The only thing I'm aware of being restored is the mag wheels and decals. I believe the last versions had something that looked like Vector wheels. I know it has a new decal sheet, but I'm not sure how much is different from the original. 

[62rebel]

I'll take it out again this evening and look closer. Not that I want to start building it, with the three new projects I already have going. Can only work on them when my overly curious and unbelievably determined pet raccoon is asleep. My first one managed to do a number on a bunch of models I had on a shelf I _ THOUGHT_ she couldn't reach..... trust me, there's no such thing as a shelf they can't reach

[62rebel]

Decided to shoot some silver onto the interior of the body and backside of the chassis plate; interesting effect. Since I bought this kit pretty cheap (Ollie's deal) I'm going to go ahead and build it with the dual blowers, etc; all the showy stuff, just to have one done in that style and in this outrageous color. The plain white one will eventually get built box stock. Odd note; for a model that uses metal axles, R2 only supplies ONE, expecting the builder to use plastic stub axles or the gasser suspension. No matter; got plenty of spare axle rods.

[gtx6970]

it builds into a really cool looking display piece. Mine was molded in white. and I painted it Testors Flaming Orange in an attempt to get close to the effect of the molded clear orange cars .  I bought a couple of them at Ollies for cheap and decided to build one as a quick build slump buster ( it worked btw )

I used the stub axles on the front and the metal axle in the rear, but shortened the inner rear wheel hubs to bring the tires all the way in under the body.

 

For a quickie, its turned into one of my best paint jobs ever and its one of my favorite builds in the case.

Edited March 20, 2017 by gtx6970

[Greg Myers]

Keep us posted. Pictures of the paint ?