Oh, Someday

I've been reading Finescale Modeler and Scale Auto magazines for about a thousand years, and over those years, I've been exposed to a great many really excellent modelers:  Paul Boyer, who I think deserves some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award for consistently great work.  Tony Greenland, whose weathering of German armored vehicles suggests that he applies paint with molecule-by-molecule precision.  Alex Kustov, who makes me want to build cars, and Juha Airio, whose cars are so good they look like miniature people could drive them away.

But today I speak of Lewis Pruneau, who is (deservedly) famous for building very large dioramas to a staggeringly high level of craftsmanship.  Pruneau's work is astonishing, but I rarely want to try to emulate it - it's just so damned big!  The thought of painting 100+ figures for one diorama daunts me, to say nothing of having no idea where I'd find a home for a diorama on such an epic scale.  I say rarely, because I once saw a Lewis Pruneau diorama in FSM that I really did want to emulate:  a diorama of a typical afternoon at the drag races, with a bunch of cars, a bunch of mechanics, a bunch of fans, and a bunch of general drag racing appeal.  Ever since, I've wanted to build something like that.  Not a part-for-part recreation, but my own take on a local drag race, such as those seen at Speedworld in Surprise, Arizona (near enough my house that I can hear the V-8s roaring on Saturday nights from my workbench).    

So here's my starting point:  two drag cars staged on my workbench.  I can't remember who made the kits.  One's a hatchback Nova (a car I'm quite fond of) and the other is a Chevelle, but past that, things are a blur. They've actually been quasi-finished for a long time, but the other day I happened to remember that the Slixx decals I'd ordered had long since arrived, so I washed the cars off and applied the desired Slixx offerings, mostly tire decals.  So there it is.  Not quite a drag racing diorama, but it's a start.

Drag aficionados will note many problems with these models.  The Chevelle has no side windows, and I think that's against the rules.  Neither has a fire extinguisher inside the car.  And there's a dead moth in the Chevelle that would be about three feet long in scale.  And I have no idea how to make sense of NHRA classes; I jotted down some classes and numbers the last time I was at the drag strip and painted them on, but who knows if they're right or not.  Certainly not I.  And certainly not anyone I know.  And if you look, you'll see that the Chevelle has a bracket time of 9.97 seconds, but the driver is wearing a short-sleeved shirt.  I think if you go that fast, you need to be wearing a fire suit.  Or at least should be.

The Nova is painted Testors Fathom Green, and the Chevelle is painted with some kind of dark grey metalflake, but it has a very rough finish and the flakes are way too big - the perils of hardware store metalflake, I guess.  Both have flat black hoods, and drivers cobbled together from Fujimi and Tamiya figure sets.  And just the other day I bought a reissue of the "Mongoose" top fuel dragster, and found that the kit came with an actual 'Christmas tree'.  So I have that going for me too.

The point is, someday I'll get around to building more cars.  I'm not sure when, but hey, I have to start somewhere.