Witchy Mercedes 600 by Welly

The Mercedes 600 W100 is one of my absolute favourite cars ever and the source for that can be traced to the 1987 film The Witches of Eastwick, directed by George Miller of Mad Max fame and starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon. In that movie, Nicholson's literally devilish character gets chauffered around in a gorgeous black 600, which unfortunately gets pretty badly banged up toward the end of the film in a case of voodoo and driving not mixing very well. But regardless, that movie probably features one of the most notable starring roles for that car and certainly left an impression on me as well. Heck, Nicholson himself liked the car so much that he got himself one after the movie was done.

Now, I already had three previous models of the car, two in 1:43 (by IXO) and one in 1:18 (by KK-Scale), but when I saw Welly releasing this version of their 1:24 version, which also has at least two other colour variants, I just had to get it. And more so, the combination of those thin white walls and movie accurate hubcaps, I got the idea of turning this into a Witches of Eastwick replica.

The changes needed weren't drastic, but still required a bit of effort. The big one was really those fog lamps in the front that I had to source from somewhere else, which happily worked out for me in that Model Car World just happened to have a 1:24 sale of some of the cars I had been projecting on using for this purpose, so that was a bit of money saved. The outer ones come from a 1970 Opel Commodore GS/E Coupe, while the inner ones are sourced from a 1970 Opel Kadett Rallye, both of which still work fine on their own even without their extra lights. The headlights themselves, unfortunately, I had to somewhat simplify as there was just no way for me to get the sealed headlights to work with the original covers to execute the proper U.S. style look, but this still works reasonably well for me. The actual headlights come from another Welly, a 1970 Mustang Boss 302, which isn't one of their better offerings, so I don't feel too bad for cannibalising it a bit as the Benz itself has none under those European covers. Turn signals are painted from a '58 Plymouth kit I had lying around in rather poor condition, but were the right size to be useful.

I also painted the interior a bit with a wood finish on the dash and some extra silver to simulate chrome accents. For the windows I originally wanted some kind of dark film to use, but couldn't find anything proper for this purpose. I then tried to use black marker as a test, but it wasn't satisfactory. I ended up just painting the windows from the inside in the end, but I find the result isn't really too bad (crude as that may be). Finally, I added in the New York plates and side marker lights cut from a small bit of plastic from my odds and ends modelling box that I just painted in. I don't claim to be any great modeller or customiser, but I'm quite pleased with this small transformation job. Only thing the car doesn't have is a sunroof over the driver, but sometimes you can't have everything. Anywhoo, just thought I'd share something after having not posted anything on these forums for a while now.