Aoshima DeLorean

This DeLorean kit was the first one I’ve worked on since I was a teenager, and it definitely brought up a lot of nostalgic feelings. Back then my skills were considerably more basic, and without the always-available YouTube learning resources you can now take advantage of I didn’t even know there were other and better ways to do things. Of course I’m still learning now, and I don’t have old work to compare with, but I feel like I’ve (hopefully!) improved since then.

The model was designed to with with both the first and second movies, with a mechanism allowing the wheels to fold under for flying-car mode. I was really only interested in a static model without all the fancy toy stuff though, and even though you can’t really see it I didn’t like having the slide knob for the wheels visible on the undercarriage, so I decided to try and remove that part. I didn’t have any spot putty at the time so I used the baking soda with CA glue trick to fill in the spots where the mechanics would go. After a lot of trimming and sanding it did work, but it was much more difficult to get a smooth seamless look than it would be with spot putty.

I think the biggest difference between this and my childhood attempts is attention to detail with painting – I used to paint individual pieces in mostly solid colour, so a lot of very small detail was lost. Now that I have more appropriate brushes for that sort of thing I did my best to capture a lot of the small wiring and rear detail. It’s definitely not screen accurate, but I like putting my own spin on things and at this scale it’s difficult to get total accuracy anyway. I didn’t have an airbrush during this build so everything is done with a brush; the body was sprayed with a can, it’s a lot harder to hide brush strokes on that large a surface. There are a few rougher lines here and there, but overall I had a much steadier hand than I expected and it turned out ok! I weathered the interior before assembling, but haven’t done any weathering on the outside yet. I do plan to return to that at some point in the future.

This would have been a great kit for lighting and I did think about it, but it wasn’t designed around lighting and with the scale I think it would have been very difficult to find a place to fit everything. All in all as a first re-entry into scale models I’m pretty happy with the result!