Tar Eater!

My fellow CSW member, Karl, has a fun habit of just giving me stuff sometimes. (He's not the only one, either. I'm lucky enough to game with a group of guys who like giving me things. I'm certainly not going to complain.)

So when I was looking for a vehicle to use in Nuclear Renaissance and it turned out that Karl had a '57 Corvette he wasn't going to use...

I've long been a fan of Carmen's awesome custom post-apocalyptic death racers, and this was the perfect opportunity to try my hand at making one of my own.

I removed the undercarriage, which allowed me to attach the wheels directly to the body, lowering the ride sufficiently to make sure the car would scale at 28mm. Then I glued the windshield in place, fashioned blast shields from plasticard and a hood-mounted cannon from a ball point ink reservoir and the tip of a pencap. Then I started to get a little whimsical, and gave the sucker jet propulsion using the other end of the pencap glued to a superglue cap, with guitar string fuel lines.

In the above couple of pictures, you can see it primed and drybrushed in gray-scale. Here's an Amateur Tip if you decide to do one of these yourself: the wheels are made of a soft plastic that gets really sticky after spraying, so I recommend either masking or undercoating them before priming.

Painting was very basic, pretty much just covering the whole model in a diluted rust-colored glaze made from W&N inks. I then painted up the windshield, attempting to follow this excellent tutorial on SpacemanSpiff's blog, ending with a red glaze for both the windshield and the blazes on the sides—to reflect the red, glowering atmosphere of the slagscape through which this beast must hurtle.

The last step was the christening, above. Not just a name, an imperative. An expression of a need, the need for octane, the need to chew up road and spit it out in ribbons, to sear across the landscape and watch it bend and blur as though—maybe, possibly—it might not be real. In the ruined future, there's only one way to be...

...and that's fast.

Thinking of leaving a comment? Don't bother. Words are meaningless, velocity is everything. Put the pedal to the metal and fly.