It's got a cop motor, a 440-cubic-inch plant. It's got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks

And lots of other cool lines; if you're of a certain age, most of them are probably buried deep in your subconscious. But what's this got to do with slot cars?

I'm glad you asked... when I was developing the 1977 Dodge police car, one or two people mentioned that a Bluesmobile would be a cool thing to make. I'm sure we all know what it's like to have more good ideas than time to do them, so I parked that idea in the back of my head until, well, until its time came.

There's no 1:32 model of a Bluesmobile so far, or a '74 Dodge Monaco in 1:32 either. The '77 Dodge is close in terms of proportion but the front and back are quite different, and the waistline is different too. The Cadillac is being done straight from 3D CAD data and recently I managed to get hold of CAD data for the Bluesmobile. Just as with the Caddy, it needed some work to get from the surface model to something that can be made on a 3D printer. For a computer game, it doesn't really matter if there are tiny gaps in the mesh, but for a solid model it's got to be completely solid. I tried a few methods of "automatic repair" but it didn't work so off it went to be stitched together so it was suitable for printing.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's get some pictures up

The surface model


Rear view of the surface model


Rendered surface model


The bodyshell is literally a shell now it's been stitched together, 3mm thick so it's solid enough to support itself and have a silicon mould taken from it


Rear and underside


And for comparison, the same view but as a wireframe mesh


Some 3D models are quite simple in terms of their mesh, once it's in a computer game you want it as simple as possible so it can move around without crunching up all the game memory. But for making a model, the tighter the mesh the better level of detail and smoother the curves will be. As you can see, this is pretty complicated!

The wheel centres should be the same as the early ones I had on the '77 Dodge so they already exist, I'm now waiting for the 3D print to come back so I can check its quality. Then it's the long road to preparing it and getting it moulded. It's 106 miles to Chicago....