Kup

       

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Original Kit:
Kup
Made By:
Too Many Projects
Scale:
1/24
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While some may be harder to track down than others, most if not all of the first two years of Autobot cars are available in 1/24 scale. Then along came the 1986 The Transformers: The Movie and a bunch of all-new designs created by Floro Dery to represent vehicles from the far-off future of 2005. There was a semi-continuation of the Alternators/Binaltech series with some of the early Masterpiece figures, but the line was rebooted with MP-10 and the last (semi) 1/24 scale line was over. Time to get creative!

One day I was doodling in Tinkercad and found myself making a 3D drawing of Kup. As with the other models I've done I leaned more heavily on his toy appearance, but with a few nods to the animation model. I also had to make a few educated guesses about what the truck would look like without having to turn into a robot (an easier task with figures based on existing vehicles, so I knew what the rear windows of a Nissan Vanette or the headlights of a Freightliner cabover should look like). Once I was satisfied with the design, I handed it off to Robert Burns at Too Many Projects for printing. It was done in his high-res brown resin, which needed only a light sanding to remove the print lines.

The body was first painted with Krylon's gray primer, a reasonable match to the G1 toy's gray parts. Then I hit my first conundrum: the toy and (most) animation models gave Kup a two-tone blue body, divided at the change from plastic to diecast parts. I waffled back and forth for a while on whether I wanted to try to recreate this or assume that the blue paint was supposed to be a better match to the plastic than it was. I decided to just start painting and see what I thought, and after the first coat of Tamiya TS-41 Coral Blue I was sold on going with one solid color. Well, mostly: his pickup bed was pretty consistently a darker and more green color, so I masked off the rest of the body and painted this area TS-102 Cobalt Green. Finally, the interior was painted Model Master Light Aircraft Gray to recall the white windshield painted on the original toy.

The floor and chassis were made from sheet styrene, then greebled with myriad spare parts, bits of scrap plastic laying on the bench, and some Kotobukiya detail items. It was painted flat black on the bottom and Light Aircraft Gray on top, then some of the details were picked out in BMF and paint. The front wheels were modified from a pair I had left over from repairing Slingshot, with every other slot filled in and the remaining spots covered over. This gave me the correct "domed cross" look from the original toy, and they fit the openings perfectly. The rears were a set of racing tires, chosen both to reflect the different wheels on the original toy and to fit the slightly smaller space at the rear of the vehicle.

For the interior, I sourced two seats, a dash, and a steering wheel from my parts box. I think the seats were from a diecast BMW, and the steering wheel was the stock part from Tamiya's Sierra but no idea where the dash came from. It was sufficiently "80s sci-fi" enough for my needs, and it physically fit the part. My original idea had been to use a Countach dashboard, but the angle of the dash combined with the height of the cast-in pad meant that the steering wheel would be hitting the glass and nowhere near the seats. This new dash, mounted to the underside of the pad, would both fill the area better and get the seats and controls closer to each other. The parts were all painted to match the rest of the interior, and for the small dash details I used a combination of paint and bits cut from old ToyHax sticker sheets.

I made a custom decal for the truck bed, used Dark Aluminum paint for the rear vent, and then gave everything a shot of Dullcote to seal the paint and have it better match Hot Rod's sheen.

Final details included headlight lenses from Model Factory Hiro, a windshield made from 0.005" (0.13mm) sheet styrene, and taillights made from the edge of a CD case. These were backed with silver vinyl and colored with Sharpies to match the taillight stickers on the original toy, and Kup was ready to roll out.

 

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