Bill Elliott Dodge Intrepid
NASCAR Stock Car
Being a Chrysler fan, AND a
NASCAR fan, I was needless to say, very excited when Dodge announced that they
were returning to Winston Cup racing in 2001. And, I was looking forward to
building an Intrepid stocker for my collection. And considering the level of
detail in Revell's NASCAR kits, I was expecting something of the same ilk.
I was, unfortunately disappointed. First off, I must say that the body
is excellent. The molding was high quality, with almost no seams or flash to
clean up, although the body is VERY thick. And, the vinyl window net and
hoses, the tampo printed tires, and some of the other details were much to my
surprise. But the overall detail of the kit suffers greatly compared to
Revell's previous efforts. The kit is obviously baseed on a 1:24 diecast, and in
many areas, has been simplified. The kit seems to be made of a
different type of styrene than I am used to. It is quite a bit softer than
syrene kits I have built in the past. Admittedly, this kit was a quick build,
but that was NOT what I was looking for. This being said, I ended up building
this one pretty much box stock, which is highly unusual for me. I have been
putting more and more detail into my work, and I just couldn't see the point in
doing the same for this one. The car DOES make a good display piece, but I'm not
particularly happy with the kit overall, I hope that Revell gets it's collective
act together soon, because this one was very disappointing! And an
attept to e-mail them to let them know how I feel, was impossible since they
show no e-mail link to contact them.
OK, enough
complaining, on with the feature!
Like I said in the intro, the kit DOES
build up to be a nice looking display model.The body is EXCELLENT and the decals
are high quality. The paint I used was Plasti-Cote bottle touch up paint. The
color is, I beleive, 2001 Dodge Bright Red which I think is a good match for
what Uncle Ray used on the 1:1 car. By the way, I shot it straight from the
bottle, and it went on perfectly!
The Chassis. Here's where the diecast
lineage became apparent. Note in the trunk area the screw pads? I filled these
in from the bottom.
Here's the low chassis shot. As good as
the body was, the chassis was 180 degress opposite. VERY SIMPLE. VERY POOR! I
did the best that I could with what I had, but I just couldn't motivate myself
to put any more effort than this into it. And no matter what I did, I could not
get the headers and the exhaust dumps to match up
properly.
Prologue
Nearly the entire experience
with this kit was a cluster.From Model Maxx, where I bought the kit, who took 4
weeks to finally decide, after my threatening them to cancel the order to ship
it, to the building of the kit, which I must admit looks good on the outside,
but was not much of a challenge.
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