It's been sitting here on my desk for too long without work, so I've decided at this stage to say AMF to both the cap and camper ideas, they may come back at a later date, but I wouldn't hold my breath. They sucked anyway.
Note: by going with a truck bed, it will NOT fit on a ZZ or ZZ-SE chassis, it will ONLY work on a ZZ-M. If I were doing it for either type car chassis, I could just slap a Tonnau cover on it, and move on.
Anyway, make cardboard templets of each side of the bed, get them fitting happily, transfer to styrene. For the best rear bulkhead, you should try filling the tailgate with putty, file smooth. I chose styrene again because it's faster, lighter, slightly easier, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. The front bulkhead of the bed should be set back slightly so it looks like there's actualy an end of the cab, and a start of the bed. If you're going to use a rollbar, it's less important, but I still would.
I'm going to be laying in the sides of the bed, but leave out the floor until body is painted. This way if I mess up and fog too heavy, it won't fill up the corners and look bad. The bed sides are about 0.040", and the floor will be credit card or thinner, so I can have it be a few thousandths deeper than on Desperado.
You might remember that I said the header panel on this one was going to be changed. The horizontal bar was shaved out of the grille, it's filed flush and filled in on the headlights. Headlights will be rescribed with higher bottom and lower top edges, probably going to put in outboard cornering lights. Grille will probably get either flat black, or a mesh insert, and have a "chrome" surround. With any luck, I'm hoping the whole effect will end up more like around a 2000 Ford F-150. I really have no idea how I'm going to change the front bumper cover around, but that'll be figured out once the body has paint squirted.
Something like this.
The taillights were filed flush with the surrounding body work just because I always hated that bulgy look that GM is so fond of now. They'll just be painted clear red on the outside, with a silver behind the plastic.
I'm gonna be spending more time working on Halloween props, model cars and a few other things, so progress may slow a bit more.
