Toyota Supra, real thing and a model....
Tamiya 1/24th scale kit, and a 1/1 1990 car.
Made in 2019
What gave me the idea to start doing models of car ?
Well, I like performance cars, and although I’d never be rich enough to own one, I still fancy building them. Not only that I found kits of cars that I have owned, so making them, or in the case of ready-made ones, altering them to look like the cars I’ve owned.
Added to this, I think I may have infected my son with some of my preferences – he had a go at making models, and has recently returned to this hobby, and yes, you guessed it, he likes fast cars.
So to return to the original question, and related to this model in particular, it filled two purposes. It was coming up to Christmas...... OK it was August, but the idea hit me then and I had the time...... to make him a model of his favourite car – a 1990’s Toyota Supra – for part of his Christmas present, and to make it look like the one he owned for a short period of time.
Hence the picture of a real car here – that was his.
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Tamiya make a number of Supra’s in different guises, from race track cars to road-going vehicles. I picked the one that closest resembled Thomas’s, assembling it quite quickly and painting the cockpit to resemble the interior of the real vehicle.
The body shell was much the same as Thomas’s car, so no surgery needed, and painting was done from a tin of Halfords Toyota red over a white primer. The bonnet was masked off and sprayed black, and number plates made from thin card with the letters and numbers printed out on a desk top printer.
Although the wheels supplied in the kit were perfectly good, they didn’t match those on Thomas’s car and to the rescue came Ebay, with a set of wheels matching perfectly the ones I wanted, although they did cost about as much as the Tamiya kit.
So far, so good, and now we come to fitting parts together. I’ve found something else to hate – clear plastic parts. You can’t get away from them on civilian vehicles, although you can cheat a bit and have windows wound down on the vehicle sides. |front and back windscreens though – absolutely necessary, and no matter what I did with these, I had scratches or tiny glue marks on them. So they – to me at least – are very far from perfect.
Thomas loved it though and as an added bonus I painted up an old Knight Models 75mm ( 1/24th scale ) Bane figure – Thomas’s favourite character from the Batman films, it doesn’t so much go with the car, but if you’ve met Thomas in the last couple of years, you might see a certain resemblance.
So, not perfect regarding finishing, but a surprise present that went down well with the recipient. Happy days.
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So, Bane and a few more shots
This, although far from perfect, kickstarted my interest in building cars. Ebay is a whole problem unto itself, in that once you start looking, there is literally almost anything you could want in model form.
Granted, in the case of cars, and in this scale, sometimes you have to go for a "ready built" metal bodied kit, but even these can be taken apart and repainted to match your needs........ That's where a Crossfire came into the equation.
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