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Posted

This is the AMT snapper kit. It's molded in white with the interior molded in red and white. I removed all mold lines and polished the body and there is very little paint on the finished model—some in the interior, the black of the grille, and the red rims of the wheels. I did the fins of the wheel covers in red Sharpie and then rubbed it off the high spots—not perfect, but better than doing nothing and probably better than I could have done in paint, and it was quick, painless, and easy. The side trim, front emblem and windshield frame are kitchen foil and Micro Metal Foil Adhesive; other trim is Silver Sharpie.

Biggest pain on this build was the panel lines. They're molded fairly wide but shallow. I scribed them all out but there still wasn't enough contrast, so I flowed a very thin wash of flat black acrylic into them, which proved to provide much, MUCH too contrast:

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I tried to get all the black out first with rubbing alcohol and a toothbrush, then by “power-washing” with pure alcohol in my airbrush turned up to 45 PSI and it still looked too dark. So I ran some medium gray in there—still too dark! Tried a very light gray—STILL too dark and prominent! I ended up filling all the panel gaps with acrylic flat white paint, which over the darker colors, finally looked about right, or close to it, or as close to it as I was gonna get.

This would have been a real fun build if not for the panel line fiasco. I'm not a huge fan of the '53-'55 Vette and wouldn't have put the effort into building a full-detail kit of it, but I like the way it come out so much I'm thinking of making a series of unpainted, polished-white-plastic Corvette roadsters with red interiors. I have an AMT '59 on the bench and about half done, and an AMT '63 would be easy to do, as would an MPC '75. Might do a Revell '68, too. And then see what's available in C4 and later generation kits. So here it is; as always, comments welcome.

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Posted

   Those build up real nice I see!?!  I like the AMT snaps quite

a bit myself. The '74 Cuda is real cool, I also did the '99? Silverado!

    Nice job Snake!!

        David S.

Posted
10 hours ago, TooOld said:

Nice one Snake !  It looks great polished and after all of the hassle the panel lines look just right ! :D

Agreed, glad you stayed after it!

Posted
On 12/10/2018 at 5:36 PM, peekay said:

Really nice! The snapper looks better than the kit IMHO.

I've heard complaints that the side trim "runs uphill" on the kit, but it doesn't seem to on this one. 

Somewhere I came into possession of a regular kit's soft up-top. It is NOT a drop on fit for this snapper, but I've been trying to tweak it to make it work. :unsure:

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