MSRP: $16.75 USD
Anyone even mildly interested in sports is familiar with the name
Earnhardt; whether known as The Intimidator or just the "black #3 Chevy",
Junior's late dad was a legend in motor sports. Revell's kit of Dale
Earnhardt's Lumina is a re-issue and consists of 97 pieces, all molded in
black (would you expect anything else from a Dale Earnhardt car?).
I'd never before built a NASCAR subject so lots of this was new territory
for me. Before building the kit, I noted several areas to be addressed in
construction... the black plastic presented a small problem right off the
bat since I use acrylic paints and as the interior cage is red, I'd have
to prime all the interior parts with white first. All the sprues were in
one poly bag, and several parts---especially the clear ones---were marred
from rubbing together, so had to be polished out. There are several
inconsistencies in the instruction sheet, box art, and what's actually on
the sprues. Despite what the instructions seem to indicate, there's no
chrome tree in the kit. Several pieces are noted as "chrome", but in the
long run there isn't that much chrome on the car, so for those few pieces
which needed to actually BE chrome (hood pins, valve covers, air cleaner,
etc.) I used Alclad Chrome.
The engine assembly follows standard practices, with a two-piece
crankcase, separate heads, oil pan, and accessories. The distributor and
plug wires are supplied as a one-piece molding. When built up, the engine
is a nice representation of the real thing. (Photos 1, 2, 3, and 4) A
fair amount of work was needed on the interior cage parts, as they all
exhibited prominent mold lines and a little flash in some areas. After
cleaning up all these parts, they were first primed with white, and then
painted Gunze Sangyo acrylic H3 red. (Photo 5) After they'd dried, I
painted the roll padding and window safety webbing with flat black enamel.
(Photo 6) Assembly of the cage was a little interesting, as both sides
were slightly warped and didn't quite fit the floor pan. I glued up the
parts where they fit and left the questionable joints until later. The
seat has prominent and hard-to-get-at ejector pin marks, but if the window
webbing's left in place they'd be hard to see anyway. Though the
instruction sheet specifies aluminum for the instrument panel, the box art
shows it black with aluminum bezels for the gauges...I liked the
appearance of the box art rendition better so painted mine similarly. A
mix of flat, semi-gloss, and gloss black paint on various parts of the
interior gave the model some presence and cut down on the monotony of only
two colors.
All those bars and cage parts fit together into a fairly complex maze; for
strength, I used gap-filling CA to assemble the interior parts and touched
up the joints afterward. The two engine mounts are fairly small points of
attachment and weren't sturdy enough to align the drive train, so I waited
until I had installed the "Arm Assembly" from the next instructional step
before permanently cementing the engine in place. When all was about
done, I noticed there was a mismatch at the front of the cage frames;
though I lined things up as best I could, the radiator was skewed slightly
because of the misalignment. As this'll be largely unseen when the body
shell's attached, I didn't worry about it too much. The radiator hoses
have to be tweaked a bit to get them to fit. By the way, the instructions
call the coolant pump fitted to the differential as part number 29, but
it's actually part number 20...the fan's number 29. Final fitting of the
oiler tank, exhaust, and other components completed the cage and chassis.
(Photos 7, 8, and 9)
Turning to the body shell, I sanded down the few mold lines, polished out
the "box rash" blemishes, then gave it an overall spray of Testors gloss
black enamel. The shell's only real problem was that it was slightly
warped from front to back, having a pronounced twist to it which I wasn't
able to correct.
The decals were great and snuggled down to conform to the shell with no
problem...until I came to the ones for the rear bumper/fascia. After
wrestling with these two, I'm not real sure they were made for this body
shell. Both the instructions' decal placement guide and the photo of the
finished model on the box show the lower rear quarter panels to be much
more shallow than the model's---the photo of the real car on the box top
matches the kit. After lots of slicing, dicing, setting solution, and
trying to coerce these two decals to assume angles and contours they
definitely weren't agreeable to, I finally gave up, figuring I'd reached
the limit of what was possible with the decal. After some touch-up to the
decals, I over-coated everything with Gunze Sangyo H30 Gloss to protect
them.
The wheels have good detail, and the tires have a mounting boss in them so
the inner and outer wheels can only be mounted one way. The one thing
which came to mind when looking at these and the body shell was "black,
black, and more black" so I deviated from the OOB build just slightly by
using Shabo dry transfers to apply the Goodyear Eagle logos to the tires.
To further break up the black monotony, I highlighted the lug nuts with
dark gray and painted the wheel hubs aluminum per the box photo. (Photo
10). Oddly enough, the final assembly steps in the instructions show this
lettering on the tires but it's not included in the kit. (Actually, one of
the drawings is reversed so the tire reads "Raeydoog Elgae". That's OK.
I know what they meant.)
The six separate hood pins are TINY little pieces, let me tell you. I
resorted to sticking these to a piece of tape before trying any clean-up,
hoping to prevent having one or more fly off the bench and being devoured
by the rug monster. I used the Alclad Chrome treatment on these and
attached them to the body with white glue (working over a box lid so as to
contain any dropped ones.)
Assembling all the big chunks, I found things slightly off---again. The
left rear tire protruded from the well too far so I resorted to breaking
the rear axle loose and re-positioning it to center it beneath the body
shell. The car doesn't sit true---due, I assume, to the twist in the body
shell plus the mismatch in the cage, or maybe---just maybe---to the fact
that hey, I'm no car builder.
From a safe distance, the model looks pretty good. It's no contest
winner, but I'm still learning. An experienced auto modeler will no doubt
be able to overcome the small problems I encountered.
Thanks to Revell and IPMS/USA for the opportunity to review this kit, and
special appreciation to Bob Schott for his assistance and NASCAR knowledge
during the project. |