Ford Zephyr Taxi (The Black Island)

The Black Island (French: L’Île noire) is the seventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from April to November 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to England in pursuit of a gang of counterfeiters. Framed for theft and hunted by detectives Thomson and Thompson, Tintin follows the criminals to Scotland, discovering their lair on the Black Island.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The story:

Since I’ve already built the DHC Chipmunk, the Loch Lomond Rail Tanker, the Motorboat, and the Jaguar Mark X – and still have plans to build several others (including the DH Tiger Moth), I really don’t have much left to talk about in regards to the story itself. Check those pages out if you want to know more about my thoughts on it.

Suffice it to say that The Black Island is one of the albums (perhaps only outdone by The Calculus Affair) which features the widest section of trains, planes and automobiles – making it a scale modeller’s paradise!

In a nutshell, this is because, when it came time to publish The Black Island in the U.K. in the mid-1960s, Hergé’s British publishers requested a major revision of the story. Since the story is set in the UK, the publishers wanted the story updated to better reflect the current local situations and thus be more palatable to then-modern readers. To that end, Hergé sent his assistant Bob De Moor to Britain on a research trip, and the revised edition in Tintin Magazine bore the fruits of that research.

The build:

I kind of see this build as “part 2” of my 1/72 scale Jaguar Mark X project. After all both cars appear together “on page”, and there’s the nice red/blue and bad guys/good guys dynamic. So, I suppose it’s only fitting that this one also be done using a Matchbox diecast metal car as the base.

For those keeping track of such things, it’s number 33 from the Matchbox series 1-75 (produced between 1964 and 1968).

One nice thing about being part 2 is that I got to learn from all the mistakes I made while building part 1 – but still get to make some new ones. The first of which was to apply too much Tamiya Metal Primer once I’d taken off as much of the old paint as I could.  I had a bottle of the brush on liquid kind, but I must’ve been overly generous, because after painting, I noticed all these weird bulges.  It was a clear coat, so hard to see until painted over, but basically it pooled in some of the corners and turned into a bit of a waxy substance that distorted the lines.  After I cleared if off and tried again, it worked much better.

One of the tricks was to get the colour “just right” (or at least “close enough”).  After a bit of experimentation, I used Tamiya X-14 “Sky Blue” and X-4 “Blue” acrylic paint in a 10:3 ratio. I’m pretty happy with the result, but one batch didn’t mix quite well enough in the airbrush cup, and I flirted with disaster after applying a bit of “too dark” paint on a small touch up area.  A bit more mixing and some feathering and it’s really hard to tell.

Another thing I avoided was scratching up the windshield too much by using my homemade dremel for the sanding.  This time, 3/4 of the clear parts were good to go after a bit of light sanding and buffing, but the windscreen itself had a giant crack in it. So, using a bit of clear plastic sheeting and a candle, I VERY carefully formed a new one.  After mainly failed attempts, I finally got one I could live with – maybe time to build that vacuu-forming machine now.

Once the blue + Future base coat was FULLY dry I carefully masked off the front grill/headlights and painted them X-11 Chrome SIlver.  I applied another coat of Future, let that dry completely, and then masked of the rear bumper area.  I repeated the process and then did the side window trim.  It was a bit tedious, but I wasn’t taking any chances. The interior was painted simply in XF-53 Neutral Grey, but since the car was missing a steering wheel, I did scratch build one quickly and paint it XF-1 Black.

I used the wheels left over from my Tintin Opel Olmpia build and painted them X-11 Chrome Silver for the rims and XF-85 Rubber Black for the tires. This time I used a bit of flexible wire to hold them in place. The don’t need to be able to turn, but this way I had some flexibility in their positioning and placement.

The final piece was just using a couple of homemade decals and some bits of polystyrene plastic for Taxi sign and the license plates, and bit of black wire for the radio antenna.

Working with the diecast metal was a bit easier this time around, so I’m pretty happy with the end result. Feel free to tell me what you think, though.