Tumbler

Having seen The Dark Night a couple of weeks ago and batman begins tonight (wrong order, I know) I've got a sudden urge to build a Tumbler to match the one in the film. Its not exactly a study in beauty and elegance, but it ticks all the right boxes - healthy V8 rumble, big Hoosiers and a matt black paint job.

Bandai makes a 1/35 kit of this model, which I first saw in Scale Auto a few months back, and a little digging found a whole bunch of beautiful builds of the kit in this thread. My usual stop at Wikipedia to find out more revealed that the whole design of the Tumbler owes more than a little to scale modelling techniques:

"Nathan Crowley, one of the production designers for Batman Begins, started the process of designing the Tumbler for the film by model bashing. One of the parts that Crowley used to create the vehicle was the nose cone of aP-38 Lightening model to serve as the chassis for the Tumbler's jet engine. Six models of the Tumbler were built to 1:12 scale in the course of four months. Following the scale model creation, a crew of over 30 people, including Crowley and engineers Chris Culvert and Annie Smith, carved a full-size replica of the Tumbler out of a large block of Styrofoam, which was a process that lasted two months.^"

Cool huh? Anyway, bit more inspiration here, if this has whetted your appetite. Chicks love the car.

JB