A secret surprise project
As a mad idea I ordered a Revell's 1:24 scale model of a Mercedes-Benz A-160 from the German ebay, to be represented as a birhtday gift. Because the details aren't mine, I'm going to omit most of them. I got the packet right after the easter vacation and thanks to the traditional slowness of post the thing had to be finished and sent around mid-May. In short: I'd have about six weeks.
The pieces
The shell was a single piece, the insides were pretty large chunks too. I was happily surprised by the tires: rubber wheels and chrome-like centers. There was a good amount of clear parts for windows and whatnot, I just didn't notice before the very end that the front door windows didn't even exist. You were supposed to see inside the car without any obstruction. Righty then.
The interior
I'm going to apologize already that I didn't take many wip pics. That's because I got carried away so many times that I just didn't remember to document most of the steps.
The assembly was started, as the instructions suggest, from the dashboard and the seats.
After a couple of sessions I had already built and painted the tubful of stuff. To decide the colour scheme I imagegoogled for the interior of an A-class Mercedes and chose dark insides with light grey seats. Not that I'd have time to work on fake wood strips and fancy stuff like that.
Btw, you can osmehow see the dashboard decal I used. The kit also included decals for the surfaces of the seats but I promptly ignored them, as they sounded like an idiotic idea to me.
For my own sporty amusement I painted the shock absorbers yellow and both the spring coils and the front brakes bright red. All the others were painted light grey, mostly because I haven't the faintest clue of how cars are painted and that's what the instructions suggested.
The exterior
When I was done with the insides and the base of the car, I allowed myself to attack the shell. I had already bought some VMA metallic blue (71.071 Artic Blue [sic]) for this project, even before I ordered the model itself. The blue appearance is therefore a funny coincidence and it also happens to suit the recipient. As long as it's not red, my sources led me believe.
The shell got two layers of blue because one didn't look nearly good enough. After that I painted the window frames, the "hems" and the door handles black, again following the google image search and the box art. Personally, I'd left the handles metallic, but I wanted to follow the real world as far as possible, for a change.
As everything else was done, I glued in the rest of the chromed and transparent parts. The glasses I glued in with white glue, in my paranoia of fogging up the clear parts with anything else. I saw a problem with this, however: connecting the shell with the rest of the model had a violent stench, based on a quick and careful pre-fit attempt. If something cracked off (thanks to the easily broken white glue bond), how in the Empire could I reattach them without ruining anyhting else? And we all know how gentle the post can be...
The result
For personalization I scribbled customized texts to the register plates. I even remembered to paint the insides of the rear light covers and touch up everything I had damaged earlier. There was a good pile of photos taken, but I'll display this subset:
Final mumblings
A peaceful modern civilian car was a fun snack project! It didn't take much time but not much was left, either, as I managed to send it off with Itella in the very last possible afternoon. Had I been less slow myself, I'd ordered it in January as I had originally planned, I'd had much more time and I could've done many more details differently and maybe do the insides completely differently. But no is ano and I don't think it went badly, anyway.
Actually, as a very rare thing, I'm quite proud of it.
