“The Falcon that Flew the Ocean (Twice!)”

This hobby of ours is populated by the very best of people, never let anyone say different. Case in point the extraordinarily fine gentleman who goes by the name “Keith” and lives over the other side of the pond in a land I believe the locals refer to as “The United States of America” (Never heard of it myself, must be one of those new tiny islands out in the ocean somewhere!). Anyway regular readers may remember a few months back I re-painted a “James Bond car collection” mustang as one of my “Forgotten Heroes” entries, and during the comments that went back and forth after this Keith mentioned that he had a “Wargames Terrain Workshop” Ford Falcon (of the Mad Max variety) sat upon his desk, I then mentioned that I intended to buy that exact model to add to my “post-apocalyptic” project at some point. He then offered to send my his (are you keeping up?), anyway to cut a long story short after much to’ing and fro’ing said Falcon took its second trip across the Atlantic back to the UK and into my possession. I promised Keith that I’d have it painted by the end of the year, and as it is predominantly black, it seemed a perfect choice as one of my “Quick Fix” projects.

Now before I could start slapping some paint on it there were a couple of things I needed (well wanted) to do to it first, though the casting was wonderfully “bubble” free as you would expect from “Mr Stone’s WTW company” there was a little excess resin in a couple of the wheel arches, nothing much and something any but the more anal among us would be bothered with, but guess what? Yep out came my “Dremmel” and a small tapered grinding bit, I then had to repair the tyres a little with some greenstuff where I’d been a little over zealous. The other problem (with me not the car) was that being a one piece casting the windows were of course solid, now the example on Dave’s site has very nice “landscape” reflections painted onto the windows, but I didn’t fancy my chances on being able to do them justice myself, and they also wouldn’t match “Mary’s stang’” (OCD is a bugger sometimes!), so as I don’t actually own a “Max” figure (well I do but he’s not painted as Max), I thought I could stray a little from “cannon”, and add mesh to the windscreen and side windows (the rear two I’d paint as steel plate, glass replacements). So taking some paper and pressing it over the windscreen and side windows I drew around the apertures with a pencil’ used these templates to cut some aluminium car bodywork repair mesh I had to shape and stuck it on with a liberal amount of superglue.

Painting was in comparison pretty simple, a spray coat of matt black was touched up with a brush, then the tanks and engine block were painted dark grey before being dry-brushed with chainmail along with the back windows, mesh, exhaust pipes, wheels and the odd edge here and there. Orange was added to the indicators, dark red highlighted with bright red to the taillights and citrus orange was used to “line-in” around the headlights.

Then in what can only be described as a “Brain Fart” I decided to paint the front right hand wing (fender) in the original “MPR Interceptor” colours of yellow, red white and blue, so as to look like a new wing had been taken from another car to replace a damaged one (why!!). Anyway as soon as I started trying to apply citrus orange over the black I knew I’d been stupid! Three lumpy coats later I dry-brushed some lemon yellow over this then added the red and blue stripes in pink burgundy highlighted with bright red and royal blue highlighted with dark blue respectively. Finally here I added the while line in (you guessed it) white.

So now it was time to start the weathering, chestnut highlighted with some orange was used to add the rust (making sure to not add any to the bumpers, as these are plastic, see, thirty years in a car factory have taught me something!!!). Then the tyres were re-painted black (again as these wouldn’t rust), and the whole thing was given a coat of “Quickshade Strong tone”, then the “rusty” bits were gone over again in the same way as before, and lastly dry-brushes of saddle and Eurasian flesh were applied to add a little (a little! 😂) road dust. This unfortunately covered up most of the stripes on the “yellow” wing, should have just stuck to black (oh well 🙄) .

Again simple stuff, I think it took longer to write all this than it did to paint it (ignoring drying time of course). I might “ramp” it up a bit this week and paint three figures I’ve had my eye on for a while…

So till then, cheers Roger.