Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck

       

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Original Kit:
1950 Chevrolet 3100 Pickup
Made By:
AMT/Ertl (kit #6437)
Scale:
1/25
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Chevrolet Panel Truck from the movie Hell Comes to Frogtown
Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck side detail Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck machine gun Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck interior Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck engine Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck chassis Hell Comes to Frogtown Chevrolet Panel Truck rear

 
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Pitched as The Road Warrior meets Planet of the Apes, Hell Comes to Frogtown was perfectly placed at the end of the Reagan administration: it had a pro wrestler, nuclear fallout, the female lead from Conan the Barbarian, mutant amphibians, and a goofy-as-all-get-out plot. Oh, and a pink Chevy panel truck with a machine gun on the roof serving as a medical transport. It was a different time, you had to be there.

The base for this build was AMT's 3100 series pickup, a decent kit in its own right with a nice parts breakdown to allow for lots of custom options. The body is a resin casting from Star Models, and consisted of the main body shell and rear floor.

I started with the chassis, which went together easily despite the myriad changes that were needed to match the movie truck. I removed the running board supports, rear bumper brackets, and rear cab partition. The suspension and drivetrain were assembled straight out of the box. Wheels were taken from the parts box and fitted with Mud King XT weighted tires from Fireball Modelworks.

Right or wrong, I felt a post-apocalyptic medical transport should have a little extra oomph under the hood. So I replaced the kit-supplied straight six with a parts box V8. The shorter but wider engine meant that the firewall and inner fenders had to be rethought, pushing the former back into the cabin a scale 4" and leaving the latter out altogether. A couple of support rods were made to go where the inner fenders used to be, and scratch built radiator hoses made up the difference between the new engine and original radiator.

Inside, the resin floor was mated to the pickup cab floor and everything was painted black with Hasegawa's Wood Finish used for the floorboards. The door panels and dashboard were straight out of the kit, the steering wheel was modified to remove the column shift, and parts box seats were mounted to custom pedestals. The floor shift was scratch built from a pin and some plastic bits, and the gunner's perch was scratch built from sheet styrene.

The resin body was washed and the few pinholes were filled and sanded smooth. There was some flash, but nothing outrageous for an aftermarket resin body. Once that was cleaned up, it was checked against the kit parts and I was happy to see that no further modifications were needed to fit. That just left the few changes made to the movie truck, including lines of hood louvers made from Archer Fine Transfers and the roof port with gun mounts. The roof was much thicker than I anticipated, necessitating a bevel at the edge so it looked a little more realistic. This thickness also meant that I had to get clever with the gun mount, since a proper roll bar would have been sunk several scale inches into the body had I really mounted it inside the headliner. What I did instead was make a false roll cage that was just slightly longer than the roof port with the ends of the bars cut at angles to fit tightly against the beveled edges inside the roof. This got the longitudinal bars close to the roof skin, so that once I added the crossbars and mount pins they were the correct position in relation to the roof.

Speaking of the gun, that was an odyssey unto itself. There was only once source I knew of for a 1/24 scale M60, but they sold through Shapeways...and like many others, I was completely blindsided by their closure in July 2024. I finally found another option, Ringo Resin in the UK. Their version wasn't quite as accurate to the movie version, having an ammo box and different bipod, but at this point I couldn't really be too picky. The quality of the parts was excellent, and they were sold in pairs, so I took a chance to see if I could modify one of them to match the movie without breaking it. I carefully carved off the ammo box and bipod, then built a new bipod from bits of styrene and photoetch greebles. The result worked better than I could have hoped, and I'll definitely be keeping these guys in mind for future military accessories.

The final details were a Tamiya pink primer paint job, stripped and repainted chrome components, and custom printed door decals and license plates.

 

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