The Last of Us Chevrolet S-10 Crew Cab

Original Kit:

1995 Chevrolet Blazer/
1995 GMC Sonoma SLS

Made By:

AMT (promo)/
AMT (kit #1168)

Scale:

1/25

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As I was watching The Last of Us, I was struck by an interesting parallel to Black Mirror. While one is a series and the other an anthology, they both are (generally) set in dystopian futures where moments of levity and cheerfulness are few and far between. Then, out of nowhere comes a story of two people who find something worthwhile in defiance of the rest of the world - "San Juniperno" in that show, and "Long, Long Time" in this one. Both shows also included a minor but important vehicular co-star, and for The Last of Us it was Bill's Chevy S-10. Based loosely on the design from the game, the truck had a few modifications but was generally a stock early-2000s crew cab.

Unfortunately, crew cabs simply don't exist in scale. There are lots of options for second-gen S-10s (along with the related Sonomas and Blazers), which is where I started. I figured by using the front half of an SUV with the rear half of a pickup, I could get a reasonable four-door cab pickup. Purchased for their cost and availability than anything else, my donors were a '95 Blazer promo and '95 Sonoma kit.

My first cuts were to the bodies. The Blazer was sliced at about the middle of the rear doors, and slightly further back on the roof. The Sonoma cab was cut in the equivalent places, and the two were fixed together with lots of plastic weld and a couple of plastic straps for extra strength. The joints were pretty close, needing only a skim coat of body filler to smooth the transition between sections. The box was cut just ahead of the rear wheels, and the header panel was removed from the cut off piece and reattached to the front of the now shorter box. The "Isuzu Bumps" over the rear wheels were made by laminating thin sheets to the sides of the box and sanding them down until they flowed into the kit plastic. The new fuel door was cut directly into the plastic by taping a metal washer to the panel and using the center hole as a template for scribing the line.

The chassis was made much the same way, cutting the Blazer chassis just behind the transmission crossmember and then cutting the Sonoma chassis to make up the rest. This wasn't quite as clean as the body thanks to the Sonoma's transmission tunnel, which had to be cut off and filled in with sheet styrene to better match the Blazer's flat promo chassis. Once the pieces were spliced together, the exhaust and driveshaft were lengthened to fit and the rest of the parts were installed straight from the kit. Everything was painted and weathered to reflect a used but well-maintained 20-year-old truck.

The interior was the easiest area to modify, as the bulk of it is simply the Blazer interior chopped off short enough to fit inside my new crew cab. The only real changes I made were the headrests and the dashboard. The headrests in the show were relatively small, not like what would have been in a 2001-02 model (likely a change made by the crew to not risk blocking the actors' faces when shooting), so I replaced them with a set from my parts box. The dashboard was a little trickier...as part of the 1998 refresh, all of GM's mid-sized trucks got a new more rounded dash with a grab bar above the glove box. I could ignore most of the updates since the truck had a black interior, but that bar stuck out enough that it would have been obvious if it was missing. Then I remembered that I still had a bunch of parts left over from the Chevy Avalanche that had donated its rear seat to my Zombieland Escalade. The face wasn't right, but it had roughly the right overall shape and a pretty decent but filled-in grab bar. I made a few minor alterations to fit the Blazer bucket (and open the bar), and it worked surprisingly well.

The other post-facelift detail I needed to address was the front fascia. For this I went to Canuck 3D Model Parts, who had a 1998+ grille available in their inventory (they also offer the correct updated seats & center console, but since Bill had a semi-custom interior I just used the Blazer parts). Since the parts were designed for the model kit rather than the promo, I had to chop out the panel that originally held the headlights and grille and relieve a little off the fronts of the mount posts. the Blazer's front bumper was slightly closer to what I needed, but I still had to shave off the top and remove the rub strip and marker lights.

With modifications done, it was time for paint. I put down a layer of Tamiya AS-5 Light Blue as a barrier to prevent color shift between the red and white plastics, then hit it with a few coats of white primer and TS-26 Pure White. The sides were then masked off and the top and bottom were done in TS-41 Coral Blue. The inside of the cab, window frames, and trim was done in flat black, and the grille and front bumper were trimmed with Bare Metal Foil.

This left just a few final details. The windshield was cut from the Blazer's glass, the rear window received a couple of strips to look like a sliding glass window, and the rear side windows were made from clear sheets. Wheels were also from the Blazer, painted to match Bill's truck and the rears were trimmed to fit the plastic rear axle. Finally, it received a set of custom Massachusetts license plates.