Scott Copeland’s Bladerunner Spinner

This is a resin garage kit of the “Spinner” Police car from Blade Runner. It was a one piece solid body with two light bars. It was fairly nicely cast and a relatively straight-forward build, the pour sprue was in the rear, the exhaust was so poorly cast I sawed it off, sharp eyed modelers will spot the tread off a Thunderbirds vehicle!

The garage kit (I have no idea who made it, I bought it off ebay and it had no packaging or instructions) is 11″ long and had no decals. I wanted to improve it with lights. I found a battery operated flashing floral light set at Michaels for a couple of bucks, I snipped off all but four of of the LED lights. I cut the solid cast lights off the lightbar, filed a slot for each led, and superglued them to the lightbar. I drilled four holes thru the car body, snipped the wires in the middle, and ran them into a circular unfinished wooden “memento” box where I hid the battery pack. This gave me four randomly flashing lights on top.

Then after masking the windshield and top half of the lights, I primered her with Duplicolor sandable primer. Love this stuff. After sanding and puttying a few holidays, I reprimered it. Then I shot it with three light coats of Duplicolor Ford Dark Blue thru the airbrush, sanding between coats with a LMG polishing kit. The automotive lacquer gave a nice smooth very tough finish. I removed the mask from the lights and windshield. I masked the car, and airbrushed the resin windshield flat black. I ran a thin stripe of bare-metal foil to separate the painted bottom part of the LEDs. Then I brushed the tops of the LED’s with transparent red, blue, and yellow to match the pattern of the movie vehicles. Then the whole thing got two light coats of Future, to prepare for decals. This also gave me a glossy black tinted windshield! The wooden base got a few coats of gloss black. I intentionally didn’t sand or primer it, the gloss paint high-lights the grain and gives it an interesting texture.

Decals were a little harder. After culling thru tons of Blade Runner sites, my wife designed custom markings, thru trial & error with cheap sticker paper we finally got the sizes, fonts, and colors of the various markings good enough to print on white decal paper. Making the decals turned out to be relatively simple, print them with a laser jet printer, spray them lightly with Krylon Crystal Clear, then coat them lightly with Microscale Liquid Decal Film. They went on pretty simply with a little Microsol.

All in all, I’m really happy with how this turned out. It’s my first time lighting something without a prefab lighting kit, and I’m really pleased with the home-made decals!

Scott Copeland