I almost feel like I should start with the disclaimer that has plagued everything connected to this movie: "The driving sequences in the motion picture The Fast and The Furious were filmed with professional stunt drivers, under carefully-controlled..." Ah, forget it.
Revell-Monogram beat AMT/Ertl out of the gate with their TF&TF 1/25 model kits, and I was able to pick up both this kit and the Eclipse. Apparently R-M is taking their diecast movie vehicle line seriously; from the translucent gauge cluster to the turned metal exhaust tip, there was a lot of detail packed into this little car. Now I just had to decide what to do with it.
The model did need some detail work: I painted the inner fenders, window trim, floor, and some interior details like the door handles, comfort controls, and third brake light. I also detailed the brakes using paint and Bare Metal Foil. It looked pretty decent, but there was one other thing I wanted to try.
For some time now I've wanted to build a model with colored underbody lighting. Since it was such a prominent feature of the Civics in TF&TF, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I was originally going to create the effect using traditional lighting, but then I heard about the glow-in-the-dark powders available from Glow, Inc.
I figured I would give them a shot; if their powders worked as well as they claimed, great! If not, no real loss since it would only be the bottom of the car that was affected. Happily, the end result was well worth it - once charged, the model glows almost exactly like its 1:1 counterpart! The photo at the top of the page shows the actual model and the actual glow produced by the powder. It took about 30 shots of fiddling around with different lighting effects before I got one shot that showed both the car and the glow, but I wanted to capture the effect as close to real life as possible. Even here, the glow doesn't show up quite as nicely as it does looking at the car directly.
Since I had planned for this to be a curbside model, I was free to experiment with the glow powder. My only concern was that I didn't want it to be too thick, and make the underside of the car look runny. This wasn't a problem, since the powder worked well enough that I only needed a thin layer to produce a good glow. It took a couple of tries before I was totally satisfied with the end result, but it was well worth the effort. I already have a few ideas in the works where these powders could come in handy...
If you need glow-in-the-dark anything, I highly recommend giving the powders a try. If you want to try a few different types before buying a larger quantity, they even have a couple of sample packages. I was able to do the underside of the Civic using less than 1/4oz. of their Fast Zinc Glow Green.
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