Pontiac GTO garage project

I went to a small auction once and they had a single model kit for sale, which I won for $5.  I've discovered that the less I pay for a model the more likely I am to enjoy it.  I feel free to just muck about with it and experiment with various ideas.  If I spend a lot on a model I feel pressed to do a good job and I'm less likely to try fun stuff.  This kit was no exception.  I'm not sure where I got the idea but I decided to make a diorama of the car being restored in a house garage.  This necessitated quite a bit of modifying and scratch building engine parts and furniture.

I made several decisions that would require cutting, such as open doors and trunk, so that came first.  I then closed the opening in the assembled door with matte board.

I knew that I wanted the car to be early in the restoration process and I wanted it to be quickly apparent that it was not just being serviced.  Subsequently, there are 4 body colors seen on the car.  Most of the car is a horridly home-painted blue with nicks and dings showing the "original" red underneath.  The left quarter panel and front bumper are from another car, a green one with a beauty stripe and some Bondo work, as well as the back bumper and right door which are from a black car.  

Here you can see the green and black parts.  The idea is this car was maintained in order to stay on the road, not win a beauty contest.  This whole project took me a while to finish (over a year) and I came up with some wonderful little details like chips and cracks in the windshield and holes in the trunk where the spoiler used to be (not pictured).  I made the windshield damage by very carefully scratching and scoring with a dull X-acto blade.

But since I was chopping things apart that shouldn't be apart I was exposing lots of detail not shown in the model.  Since I had to show some sort of detail here but didn't want to devote too much time to it I fell onto the box diorama excuse.  Ie. I bluff my way through the detail and point it away from the viewing window.  Examples of this are the transmission and cylinder holes.

I also made a shop table and Craftsman toolchest out of bass wood.

These got covered in goodies.  The table received all of the extracted engine parts from the model kit and tools from another kit.  Of note here: the tappets on the far left, also made of matte board.  There are absolutely no store bought aftermarket extras used.  Everything was either fabricated or kit-bashed.

The tool box has two tiny magazines on it that I cut out of an ad from a hot-rod magazine.  They had originally been used in another diorama (where they were about 20" tall in scale) but got re-purposed here.

Now all this cool stuff needs a place to live.  To make the actual garage I used 1/8" (I think) plywood which I glued and nailed together and held in place with corner vices.

Then, using flat wood, square dowel, and some tiny plastic bits I crafted a door and frame complete with hinges and a knob.  I left the door unpainted because the wood grain and knot appear to be in scale, even though they are natural.  I think this is one of the most convincing elements.

Here we see the finished room.  I added baseboard to close the gab between the walls and floor and dripped thinned black and pink paint to simulate oil and transmission fluid dripping under where the engine/transmission bay and rear differential would be as well as the eventual location of the extracted engine and transmission.  You really can't see the stains under the car but I know they are there, and if anybody ever looks for them then they will be found.

So fast forward a bit and here are all of the elements in place.  Neat bits to notice here: the magazine on the roof of the car is actually a manual for this exact model of GTO, both this and the calendar on the wall were downloaded from the interwebs and printed out to scale on my home printer (2014 is when I finished this project), the paper draped over the front bumper is an exploded diagram of a Pontiac V8.  Along the back wall you see the old hood with some poorly done racing stripes, the new aftermarket bumper (which came with the kit), and new tires with stickers still on.  (you can also notice here that I sanded the tires bald and weathered the rims to look rusty.)  On the left wall is a clock made from a hubcap, an old license plate and a picture of a dude with this year GTO when it was new.  The story I like to tell is that the guy in the picture tracked down his first ever car, bought it back and is now restoring it.

I finally finished it all off with a picture frame that was cut down to fit and filled with a piece of plexi-glass.  I also added a tiny light bulb powered by a wall plug to illuminate the tiny garage.