Ready Player One Knight 4000 (Ecto-88)

       

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Original Kit:
Back to the Future: Part II Time Machine Mark II
Made By:
Polar Lights (kit #925)
Scale:
1/25
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After building Aoshima's updated Back to the Future time machine, I found myself with boxes of spare DeLorean parts that were originally slated for my "someday" project. There's not a whole lot of call for cars that looked like Doc's car without being Doc's car, but one good candidate was the Ecto-88 from Ready Player One. I decided to go for the book version over the movie version because I like the look of it wearing Ghostbusters markings.

Most of the build is based on Polar Lights' Part II kit, but I did use the original release's silver plated body. Not only was it a nice looking part, the lack of grille badge made it easier for me to add the Knight Rider scanner. After adding one of Evan Designs' light-up scanners to KIFT, I wanted to try that again...but this time I went with the smaller 3V battery option. Installing it was pretty easy: a thin slit cut near the top of the top of the grille and filled with a section of clear red parts tree, the LEDs glued in sequence to the underside of the hood, and the switch and wiring hidden in the floor. The switch was as simple slider I picked up with the LED kit, but the battery box was something I found on Amazon. It holds two LR44/A76 button batteries to give me the needed 3 volts and was small enough to fit in the car's fuel tank. I trimmed back the plastic of the housing a hair and fed a ribbon through the box to help get the batteries out. It won't pass CPSC guidelines, but for a fun light-up display it works just fine.

The interior was also modified to include KITT's dashboard. This wasn't for strict accuracy, but it felt like a good idea and when I compared the sizes of the DeLorean and MPC KITT dashboards it was too perfect to pass up. I trimmed back the top of the DeLorean dash, relieved the underside of KITT's dash, and fixed the two together with liquid cement. Once set, I filled in the gaps with Bondo and styrene stock. It - and the rest of the interior - was painted semigloss black and the buttons and gizmos were picked out in various colors.

Similarly, the rear deck, wiring, and conduit were not painted in strict adherence to the vehicles from Back to the Future or Ready Player One, but were instead done in a way that looked and felt "right" for the car. Polar Lights' kit was a lot simpler than Aoshima's, and I kind of ran with that by using a simpler color palette that suggested the OASIS rendered the car with simpler details in nonessential areas.

The body itself was masked off and the nose, tail, lower panels, side mirrors, and windshield surround were all painted with shades of black and gray. The panel breaks were outlined, and it was finished with a set of custom decals I drew up. The lights were all cast in chrome-plated plastic, and while the taillights looked fine with a little paint the headlights still looked flat. Just for grins I cut out some window tint to see what the headlights looked like with KITT-style smoked lenses, and it worked surprisingly well. Pulling together the subassemblies was pretty straightforward, though I did some things out of order and cut off most of the kit's mounting tabs so that I could test fit the parts around my custom wiring.

 

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