Lil Hot Dogger

Published on
Review Author(s)
Scale
1/25
MSRP
$27.99
Product / Stock #
AMT 908/12
Company: Round 2 Models - Website: Visit Site
Provided by: Round 2 Models - Website: Visit Site

It has been a while since AMT has issued the Lil Hot Dogger. I thought the plastic was typical to their current releases being just the right consistency for trimming, sanding, and gluing. All the clear parts were crystal clear with little flash. The white styrene molds themselves had produced small areas of flash especially around some of the larger parts and many ejector pin marks in noticeable locations.

Parts count:

  • 59 Chrome styrene on 3 trees
  • 28 White styrene on 5 trees
  • 3 Clear on 1 tree
  • 3 Clear blue on 1 tree
  • 2 Clear red
  • 6 Vinyl rubber on 2 trees
  • 1 Metal axle
  • 1 3” x 5” Decal sheet
  • 1 Fold up cardboard stand
  • 1 4 Page 5 step instruction booklet

I used Tamiya primer, paint and glue for the assembly of this kit and Bondo 907 as filler. Quite a bit of the factor chrome was unusable do to heavy chrome or very obvious mold seams. For this I striped the chrome with Purple Power and re-applied Tamiya X-1 Gloss Black followed by Alclad II Chrome with the airbrush. This included the exhaust headers, intake runners, front axle, rear end housing, radiator, head lights, radius rods, and fuel tank. The AMT plastic reacted well with all products.

Instructions follow a typical layout, engine, tires, interior, chassis with front and rear suspension and body/final assembly. These show car kits are often over simplified so I chose to add valve stems for all the tires and a MAD aftermarket distributor and wiring. I also made a coil out of sprue and added that to the engine block. As a little bonus to the kit I went out of my way and fabricated a shingle roof to the dog house using 400 grit sandpaper for the shingles. I could easily have gone a step further and added some sort of fuel delivery system.

In step #4 the chassis, you will notice that the inner portions of the frame rails are rather bloated and untrue. I took a little extra time here filling, grinding and sanding until the frame rails were parallel and of equal girth. This helps tremendously with the fitting of the engine and radius arms. When I reached this point I had finished most sub assemblies and all of my painting.

About the two piece rear tires. The pad printed lettering is very nice but the two piece design leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not sure if this is old molding or just an engineering deficiency, but the inner rubber sleeve is way too large and caused the tire to be larger in circumference on the inside. I chucked the inner sleeve in my tire grinding bit and ground the part down until it fit without causing the tire radius to change. Eventually I ended up with two tires with a somewhat square shoulder and matching perimeter.

The model seems to get a little cluttered with some of the extra items so I choose to leave off the animal box, battery, and dog name plates. This kit comes with an extremely cute dog to place in the back. Unfortunately once sealed in the rear dog pound your puppy is hard to see. Final assembly proceeded easily enough with a little extra detail painting added in. Don’t forget to paint the dog bones.

The Lil Hot Dogger took me a full 20 hours to complete, 5 to 8 hours longer than normal for a kit this uncomplicated with the extra time spent re-chroming parts and correcting those deficiencies I noted. Still an awful fun build and looks cool next to my other AMT show cars and Tom Daniels kits.

Thanks to Round 2 AMT, Dick Montgomery, Dave Morrissette, the rest of the IPMS Reviewer Corp assistants, and IPMS/USA for the chance to build and review this subject.

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