North America’s most popular car became a truck this year.  Who remembers the car that was overtaken?  Was it the Chevy Cavalier or the Ford Taurus? 

I had a lot of fun duplicating one of the trucks at work, complete with dead distribution transformers on a pallet and the usual array of antennas for the then-novel radio and “cellular telephone”.  After having a few colleagues drive into walls while parking and talking, their use in moving vehicles was banned corporate-wide for a while.  Too bad this trend didn’t catch on. 

I used red and grey primers with brittle white paint (Accu-Flex), which made it easy to reproduce the wear and tear.  I detailed the side rails and spare tire with railway bolt heads.  Yes, the rails face the “wrong” way, just like the real vehicle, to clear the spare tire. 

This was the only model of mine that truly impressed my Dad, who was a model railroad enthusiast and never understood that car-modeler obsession with gloss and cleanliness.