Built by: Scott Colmer

Tom Daniel kits have been favorites of mine for as long as I have been building models. I have very fuzzy memories of building a T’rantula when I was maybe 5 or 6. It must have been a real glue bomb. I know I built another one later, because I still have parts of it in the scrap box. 

This T’rantula came about as an entry for the Sacramento Auto Modeler’s 1985 Contest. One of the categories was box stock. I thought that a Trantula would make a great subject because it was not too complicated and I had a reissue in the box. 

In keeping with the rules of Box Stock Builds, no detail items were added. I did want to make a clean box art build.

Body: If you build a T’rantula as per the instructions, you will end up with a horizontal seam along the roof line. The reason that the roof is a separate piece is that the seat is so large that it must be in place before the roof goes on. The solution is to cut the seat free from it’s molded floor board and insert them in two pieces after the roof has been attached and the body painted. So that’s what I did. I also slightly increased the angle of the roof for a meaner look. Is that cheating?

I used an Exacto to open up the fender louvers…one-by-one. This might also be against the box stock rules, but I think that’s a matter of interpretation.

Once all the pieces of the body were in place and the seams were molded and smoothed, a coat of white primer was applied and sanded smooth. This was followed by a base coat of white enamel. I wanted to replicate the color of the molded plastic, so I mixed Tamiya acrylics until I got a good match. After the custom green was applied, the decals were applied, then covered by Tamyia clear. The red cresent at the front was created by painting decal material then cutting out the appropriate shape.

The rest of the assembly was pretty straight forward. The now two piece seat was painted flat black with a little nose oil rubbed on for shine and then slipped into place. The windshield had to be adjusted a little to fit the roof angle. All the final assembly was done with gloves as not to put marks on the chrome.