Beer Wagon

Here's my stab at Monogram's rerelease of the Beer Wagon show rod. I don't know how the picture got to be so fuzzy; perhaps I'm not as good with the new digital camera as I think I am.

I don't build an awful lot of car models, mostly because they're a lot of work. There's a lot of painting, a lot of in-process painting, and a lot of general fiddling. And then there's all that chrome to deal with... Nor am I much of a car expert. I can look at an armored vehicle and tell you if it's a BMP-1 or BMP-2, but I can't tell a 392 Hemi from a 426 Hemi, and I'm really bad at identifying the make and model of any given car - I can usually identify a VW Bug, but past that, I generally assume that all hot rods are Ford Deuces until proven otherwise.

This kit is fun and simpler than most car models. Including the injector stacks, the engine consists of three parts, and the suspension is easy to paint and install after the fact. There is no glass to deal with it, no radiator hoses, no interior bucket. The hardest part, really, is painting the transmission and differential detail on the one-piece frame part. Critics of this kit contend that it is "toy-like", and I suppose it is, but the engraving (what there is of it) is pretty nice and it didn't assault me with a lot of difficulty and complication.

I left off the collectors on the ends of the headers because I thought they were oversized and clunky. I drilled out the tops of the injector stacks. I lost the gearshift lever and hand starter crank and obviously left them out. I stripped off most the chrome with Easy-Off oven cleaner and after cleaning up the parts repainted them with Testors Chrome Silver. I left the wheels chromed and did a lot of sanding on the vinyl tires to try to make them look more like real tires. I also left the steering wheel chromed, though I painted the rim a leathery brown color. The instrument panel is provided as a decal, but it is black with no white backing, so the instruments would get lost on the dark blue dash. Instead of applying the decal in the normal fashion, I cut it out and glued it to the dash with the paper backing in place to provide the white background. The decals, by the way, were thick but sturdy and worked pretty well.

I painted it using the famous Whudigot method. I didn't like the bright yellow of the original model and was going to paint it metallic green, but I couldn't find my can of metallic green. So I browsed my spray paint collection and found two cans of Tamiya dark metallic blue, and decided that that would do. The seats, headrests and bed stakes were painted Testors AMC Big Bad Blue lacquer out of a spray can. The detail paint was mostly craft paint (for the wooden bed floor) and Testors acrylics (mostly silver and semi-gloss white) and Tamiya (mostly NATO black). I painted the beer kegs a dark brown color from a Krylon spray can, and drybrushed them with "antique gold" craft paint. And that was pretty much it.

In general I enjoyed building the kit. The kit doesn't appear to pass muster with experts, and I'm sure my execution of it won't pass muster with experts either, but it was harmless fun and best of all, I didn't have to do any engine wiring. It was a fun break from 1/72nd scale armor, and who can ask for more than that?