Revell VW Golf 1 cabrio
Project start 2016
When I bought a new car in 2016, I decided to take it for a test run to the German town of Wetzlar. I'd driven there fifty times or more for work years earlier, and I remembered it as a beautiful drive. It still was of course, but the effect was ruined by two things: many of the bridges accross entire valleys were under heavy maintainance at the time (they still are, except for the ones that have been written off and demolished), and somewhere along the line in the intervening decade, I became vulnerable to the kind of acrophobia that turns these wide open vistas into an exercise in barely controlled terror. I enjoyed my nostalgia trip to Wetzlar and Giessen, picked up some nice kits including this one at the local hobby shop, but I drove home well after dark to ensure I could only see the road, not the drop on either side of it.
On paper and in the box, this kit looks rather nice. When I took the kit to one of the local club meets, I found out it is impossible to build as intended. I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out a way to assemble the engine block and put it into it's intended place in the engine compartment. It is just plain impossible. Sure, the assembled block will probably fit in that location, but you can't get it there because the block is wider than the gap it needs to move through. Building it in situ is also no option, as the walls of the compartment block any access to the parts. I ended up cutting away some pipes just to be able to position the block. I'm not exactly looking forward to wrangling the rest of the kit into shape; I see many opportunities for similar issues.
I have a rather interesting idea for the car, involving a bit of parking lot, a few figures, and an inside joke, but even if I ever fire up this project again, the interesting bits will have to come after I've completed the actual car. If it turns into too much of a hassle, I me end up chucking it and buying a new car as the core of the project.