I fianally got something finished. My boss of twelve years retired last week, and I had always planned to build a model as a retirement gift, Given his macabre sense of humor and a fascination with skulls and skeletons, Rommel's Rod seemed a good choice. I had bought the kit about a year and a half back, but I've been in a building funk for a while, so I didn't actually start on it until nine days before his retirement. I'm a slow builder so that was cutting it close - I finished at 1:10AM on the day of his retirement!
With the tight schedule, I didn't have time for many mods or scratchbuilding and really did only two things. The back of the convertible boot was open, no doubt to make it easier to mold the kit, but looked pretty cheesy, so I filled it in with some sheet styrene, and textured it wit super-glue to match the exterior sides of the boot.
The second issue was the tracks which were horrible. The tracks and wheels are molded in one piece, and worse is that all the wheel rims extend to the inside edge of the tracks. No doubt it made for simpler molding, but having wheels as wide as the tracks totally blows the overlapping roadwheel scheme. Lacking anything to be cobbled from my spares box, I opted to slice the excess rim from the interior side of roadwheels 1,3, and 5, and use the cutoffs to extend the rims of roadwheels 2 and 4 so that they go behind the oute roadwheels. To give myself some clearance for the surgery, I sliced off the upper track runs and replaced when finished. All told, It took me about three and half hours, but the results were worth it.
The one moment of comedy - I guess it's funny since I did make my deadline - was when I was getting ready to install the interior, I noticed the holes in the door for mounting the shovel. I wanted to mount the shovel first, but when I reached for it to finish painiting it, it was gone. That led to a complete panic as I really had no time to spare by then. I spent over two hours looking for it, completely cleening off my desk in the process, but I never did find the thing - kind of surprising since it isn't that small, a bit over an inch long.
With body already painted, decaled, and weathered there was no way to fill in the holes, so at 11:30PM when I'm mentally winding down, I'm stuck with having to scratch build one. Using sprue, number tabs, super glue and a bit wire, I got something built and painted in around hour and half.
The mad scramble for the shovel aside, it was fun build and turned out better than I was anticipating. My boss got quite a kick out of it. Below is the link to the entire PhotoBucket album of it.
Enjoy,
Andy
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v624/ABARNE/Rommels%20Rod/?start=all