NASCAR MODELS by MR NASCAR

TERRY LABONTE'S 2000 "GRINCH" MONTE CARLO


Terry Labonte ran this festive(?) colour scheme in two races in November of 2000, Phoenix and Homestead. Now here was another challenge for the 3 Amigos! Sam started the artwork on this puppy back in January, and after a lot of blood, sweat and tears, had something ready about May of this year, which he forwarded to me. After some fine-tuning to fit the body, I printed and applied these decals about July, and threw a shot up at Randy's Forum, just for fun.

The most challenging part of this model was developing and applying the background pattern - after I'd come up with a proper underlying light green! Sam had sent a large sheet of the pattern for printing and cutting out the shapes, but I found that very confusing, so I actually printed out the sheet on regular paper, and cut shapes for the roof, deck, left rear quarters, side, front fender, etc, etc and scanned them, and converted the scanned images into a sheet. (All the right side decals were made by making reverse images of the scanned left side cutouts and adding to the sheet. There are, I think, 14 different pieces in the background decal sheet alone!)

All the other decals - hood, numbers, etc on a second sheet - were then added as per normal procedure.

After all the decals had been applied, I put clear over them. For the first time, I tried PLASTIKOTE CLEAR ENGINE ENAMEL, from the heated rattlecan, as my finishing clear. It wasn't too bad, but had a bit more heavy orange peel than I like. Next time I'll load it into an airbrush instead. Another thing different from my usual TAMIYA TS13 was it was almost a week before I felt comfy handling or polishing it - took a while to cure, it did!! But I used that time to plug away at a chassis. I had everything about 90% done by the end of July.

The kit, of course, is the REVELLOGRAM 2000 Monte Carlo. It was built box stock, other than the addition of the Earnhardt bar, coiled mic wire, and engine oil lines.

By then we'd heard that WetWorks had them coming in the lineup, and I just sat on them for a couple months, as we had other interesting projects to work on (Nesquick, BudBall...)

But we had a lot of work in this little project already, and were pretty proud of it, so I decided to finish it off and post it, once work on little E's Budball was done.

So... How did Terry do in the Grinchmobile? Started 38th in Phoenix, finished 17th...started 39th in Homstead, finished 25th.. not a great day in Whoville...

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