Billy Lehner’s 50’s Batmobile

Has anyone noticed the diecast 1950’s Batmobile that the company Johnny Lightning has put out? It is a large 1/24 scale, approximately 10-inches by 3 ¾-inches, easy to put together, car with the most beautifully painted exterior I have ever seen from a toy manufacturer. The paint on my car is a flawless black. The interior has a wealth of detail and is very well defined. The car frame is full-featured with a view of the engine and drive train. With the addition of movable wheels this is a deluxe diecast model. This all comes at a price of only about $16 at my local Wal-Mart and is quite a bargain for a model/diecast toy.

With a little detailing of the interior of the car you can have an excellent diecast model to your collection. Special details I did to this car are noted below.

The interior of the car, out of the box black, begs to be painted as the interior pieces come out of the box a single color, black. There is a wealth of little details like the dashboard, telephone, a microphone on the transmitter, gauges, steering wheel, door panels, floor and seats to paint in the front.

In the back there is the “bar stool”, desk, test tubes and tube holder, heater, television screen, microscope, a map and pencil to paint. There is no reference to the colors the car interior should be so it is up to you to decide what colors should be there.

I made the desk and cabinets a maple color. Using a brush I stoked yellow paint in the direction wood grain would look like on a real desk and left stroke marks. Then I airbrushed custom mixed enamel brown paint on the yellow until the yellow was almost completely hidden. This gave the desk a wood grain look for a very realistic effect.

The front seats seem a little strange; I think those seats were designed for a 1960’s car rather than this car. I used Model Masters French blue for the inserts in the front seats and the cushion for the rear “bar stool” seat.

The dashboard is just a matter of fine paint brush detailing and different colors of Model Master Metalizer paints. The gauges were pictures of the car instructions gauges that were shrunk using Ulead PhotoImpact computer graphics program. The needles on the gauges were redone in red then printed out using a color laser printer. After the gauges were cut and glued in place and a couple of coats of Future Floor were applied to give the gauges a glassy look.

For the interior foot wells Model Master Stainless Steel Buffing Metalizer airbrush paint was used and the matt black vinyl “rubber mats” painted with a sable brush.

At this point the interior look very nice but need a human, real, element to it. What the Batmobile needed was a little real life clutter. I designed a couple of miniature newspapers with front page “splashes” of Batman’s arch enemy, the Joker. The Joker is the top head line and Batman articles followed below. In the back of the Batmobile had another newspaper from a competing newspaper company with Joker and Batman articles. Although the newspapers look like a simple black and white paper I used my color laser printer to print them out.

Why? I wanted the paper to have newsprint color background, which is a yellowish color. I also added fold out maps of Gotham City on top of the desk and on one cabinet.

I made the newspaper by designing the pages with PhotoImpact. After the newspaper was designed I used the graphics program to shrink the newspaper to fit the seat of the car.

The maps are of New York City that I found on the Internet and changed the names on the maps to Gotham City then shrunk with PhotoImpact to the right size. Then both the newspaper and maps were printed out on my color laser printer. After the newspapers and maps were bent into the proper shape to fit in their proper spots I airbrushed those little props with Future Floor wax to seal and lock the paper in their positions. A small amount of cyanoacrylate glue permanently keeps the papers in place.

Underneath the car the frame is many combinations of polished Model Master Buffing Aluminum, Burnt Metal, Dark Anodonic Gray, Stainless Steel, Magnesium, Titanium, Gunmetal (buffing and non-buffing) paints that were brushed on.

The car really is a simple detailing job and nothing was too tricky about making it. It is a sharp looking car that people really do admire. The one part I don’t like about the model but just can’t get around the problem is that the Plexiglas windows hide a lot of the detailing that went into the interior. While the Plexiglas is flawless it does distort and hide the details in the interior of the car. But in a way the Plexiglas dome does make people look in and around the car so they can see what is inside so maybe the window problem is not really a problem after all.

I sure hope Batman had air-conditioning in the Batmobile. With that one piece windshield he sure couldn’t open a window. And with that window how did Batman pay road toll charges with no side glass to roll down?

On the same Wal-Mart shelf is also a cousin to this model, the diecast 1960’s Batmobile that is the same Johnny Lighting quality. I would recommend this car to build too.

Billy Lehner