SCALE MODEL NEWS

REVELL HAS REISSUED its original 1:25 scale 1957 Chevy Bel-Air kit as one of the creations of zany car customiser, Big Daddy Ed Roth, the ‘Rat Fink’ himself. Mat Irvine: Although you might think of Ed Roth as the originator of some of the wackiest custom cars ever devised - Mysterion, Road Agent, Surfite, among others - he was a painter first and foremost, and used cars purely as a canvas to show off his artwork. Colourful kit box ( below ) also shows the drag-racing version, available as a build option. Ed Roth and two colleagues - Tom Kelly and Kelly’s grandfather, Bud ‘The Baron’ Crozier - had started The Crazy Painters pin-striping business in South Gate, California, in 1957. But Ed needed a practical mode of transport, and his work with The Crazy Painters earned him enough to buy a brand-new 1957 Chevrolet, the car depicted in this Revell kit. Making the kit is generally an easy business. With gloss-black paint applied ( below ) and some of the ‘chrome’ trim from Bare-Metal Foil,...

Here’s a homage to the late, great ‘Big Daddy’ Ed Roth, king of the Customizers and creator of the bulging-eyed Rat Fink rodent. Excellent news for all custom car fans, it’s available now from Revell. Mat Irvine: The late Ed Roth (he died in 2001) is probably best known for show cars such as the Beatnik Bandit, Outlaw and Road Agent, but he started his career as an artist, painting T-shirts and applying pinstripes to custom cars. This eventually led to his own auto creations, though he originally started these as advertising vehicles to show off his artwork. Inside the box (above) with Rat Fink’s plastic parts in a polythene bag, while (below) the nine components reveal a super-simple construction job. Revell’s latest Ed Roth model kit is a card diorama of one of his early garage workshops. It’s complete with the ‘Crazy Painting’ sign over the garage and, just in case people still haven’t got the point, a free-standing sign that adds ‘The CRAZY Painter.’ Card dioramas are not new to k...

Mat Irvine goes custom crazy Although the wacky cartoonist and car customizer Ed Roth died in 2001, his legacy of amazing ideas and art - and not forgetting the infamous ‘Rat Fink’ character - lives on. Since Revell started making kits of Roth’s ideas in the 1960s, they have rarely been off the shelves.  Regular customs from Revell Revell has produced 1:25 scale kits of many of his most famous creations such as the Beatnik Bandit, Surfite, Road Agent, and Mysterion, and reissues them regularly. The Outlaw custom was one of the first kits to be made, and here it is again, now featuring new box-art, but basically the same kit that first appeared way back in 1961. Gear shift or weapon? The Outlaw was one of Roth’s very earliest designs, going back to 1956, and was originally called Excalibur because he’d used the handle of a revolutionary-period sword as the gear shift. However, urban myth has it that nobody could pronounce the name, so he renamed the car Outlaw, a story which perhaps...