I began working on the jaw-dropping 600+ part 1/35 scale Caterpillar D7 from Miniart about a week ago, and after a day spent breaking stunningly small levers and losing other nearly invisibly-small parts, I packed it up. I can’t say I’ve ever had a kit give me a headache, but this one truly did. True to the company name, it’s a miniature piece of art, but there are only so many sesame-seed sized parts I can strain to connect before I have to give in. I’m not done forever, but I needed something more simple. Enter AMT/ERTL’s 1997 Ford F-150.

I had some master plan back in 1997, because when I retrieved this kit from a stash at my parents’ house some months back, I also recovered 1997 F-150s in two other forms – one from Revell (the stepside SuperCab – which I actually owned in real life) and a Lindberg stepside 4×4 regular cab. I can’t figure out what I was going to do besides making a replica of the truck I owned, but I also found two unbuilt Bigfoot monster truck kits… so maybe I was going to make a monster truck based on the ’97 F-150? Either way, I have FIVE variations of F-150.

I opted for the AMT kit because it looked the most detailed, which is not surprising given their nice semi-truck kits that I’ve built a million of. Unfortunately, this is just a standard cab, two-wheel drive, short-bed, so I have less of an emotional attachment to it than the Revell SuperCab. The plan at the moment is to make this a work-truck of sorts, not well taken care of, bed filled with boxes, tools, etc. I’ll save the pretty presentation for the Supercab some day later on.

Fun/odd thing: the box art depicts a long-bed truck. In the box is a short bed. Weird.