The Lincoln Futura concept car of 1955

The Batmobile on the set of the TV show, 1966

    I got Aurora's 1/32 scale Batmobile kit when it came out in the late 60s as part of a promotional tie-in. I don't remember how many Chips Ahoy proof-of-purchase seals I mailed in, but I put my heart and soul into building and painting that model. The paint was heavily slopped on by hand and the color scheme was nowhere near accurate (my sole knowledge of the look of the car was from watching the show on a 17 inch black & white TV) but I was busting with pride over it. That is, of course, until the Fourth of July fireworks season the following year when I discovered how far Batman could fly if you placed an M-80 in just the right place. (If I knew then . . . Un-built Aurora Batmobile kits are now worth hundreds of dollars.)
 

Aurora's Batmobile kit saw a very limited production run. No other major kit was ever released except for a few un-licensed Japanese kits which looked more like toys than Aurora's kit did. There have been a few resin "Garage Kits" sold, with names like the "Batura" and the "Batcar," but most of them were crude and required a lot of work to create a good model with. If a modeler wanted to build a good replica of the famed car, the number one option was to be creative.    (As a side note, a new company called Round2 has re-released Aurora's 1/32 kit under the "Polar Lights" label.)

    An extreme example of this creativity can be found in the December 1988 issue of FINE SCALE MODELER magazine in the article "To the Batmobile." Steven Silvia builds an 18-inch long Batmobile by converting a 1/16 scale kit of a Pontiac Firebird. The results is stunning but Silvia's building process and the skills needed are out of reach of all but the most skilled modeler. For the less ambitious model builder (this can be described as "the rest of us") this was just not happening.

    In the late 1990s, Revell re-issued its 1956-vintage kit of the Lincoln Futura, the concept car that George Barris customized to become the Batmobile of the TV series. Many modelers, including myself, bought the model with the intention of doing their own conversion to the Batmobile. It was a task much easier than trying to convert a Camaro. The Futura required much less modification - the basic shape was already there. Still, this was a job for an advanced modeler with the time and the drive to do some work that may be more of a challenge than the typical modeler is willing to take on. I wanted to take on that challenge. At least my intentions were good. All I needed was the motivation.

    That motivation was, to be kind, elusive. Having been an avid modeler suffering from AMS (Advanced Modeler's Syndrome) I already had several large, labor-intensive, long-term modeling projects in the works and I just wasn't up to taking on another one. The Futura kit sat on the shelf.

    In 1999, Skyhook Models, A manufacturer of polyurethane resin garage kits released a conversion kit designed to turn the Futura into the Batmobile. The kit is a collection of replacement parts designed to fit perfectly with the Revell parts. While not complete, it provides an excellent start to an accurate conversion. I was familiar with the quality of Skyhook's kits, having purchased from them before. I ordered the conversion kit direct from Skyhook without hesitation.

Revell's Lincoln Futura is a simple kit, featuring an interior and exterior, no engine or trunk. Construction is strange for a car kit. Instead of the body being a single piece that's placed onto a chassis, the body has 4 separate pieces that make up what is actually the upper portion of the body. This then fits on top of the chassis "pan" which also includes the bottom-half of the body. A strip of chrome covers the seam in the Futura model.    Some of the parts including the wheels and tires and the front and back bumpers would not be needed, replaced by parts from the Skyhook conversion kit (below).     Skyhook's kit was not a disappointment. The parts are beautifully cast with no visible pinholes. Some cleanup will be necessary but the kit, without a doubt makes the job of building the Batmobile much easier than it would be otherwise.     The kit arrived bagged without a header or instruction sheet. (An instruction sheet would be included with later pourings of the kit.) Fortunately, the parts are easily identified and the kit was designed well enough that instructions should not be needed.

The Skyhook kit does not include tires or wheels. The tires and hubcaps in the Futura kit are a far cry from the Batmobile's chrome mag wheels with bat-spinners. Looking for accuracy, it was important that I build the Batmobile with the correct hardware.     During most of the show's run, the car had Firestone tires on "Single Rib I" wheels by Radir. No aftermarket sets exist of the Radir wheels. I did find that there was only one model kit that accurately depicted these five-spoked mags, AMT-Ertl's Fireball 500, which happens to be a kit of another car customized by George Barris. The photo at right shows the kit's wheels on the sprues.     Tires were another issue. The Fireball 500 came with tires that are clearly marked with the Goodyear logo. I found "Firestone Style" tires from a company named Plastic Performance Products, a car model aftermarket company.

The Bat Spinners on the wheels are photo-etched brass "Bat Hubs" provided by a Canadian company called Millennia Models International. These tiny things are beautifully detailed.

I decided to begin the conversion by modifying the fins on the Futura to become the car's trademark Bat-Fins. I was surprised that Skyhook neglected to include modified fins in their conversion kit. From available photos, it appears that material was added to the existing fins to create the Bat-Scallops. Adding material to the Futura kit's fins would be a bit more complicated than just scalloping out the fins as they were. The Revell kit's fins were molded with ribs for gluing the Futura's tail lights (left). On the actual car, the entire tail light housings were removed from the fins completely. (The tail-lights were installed back onto the car years after the show was canceled, probably to make it "street legal" - left, bottom). Since I wanted to model the original Batmobile (also known as "Batmobile #1") as it appeared on the show, I decided to remove those ribs with an X-Acto chisel blade and leave the tail lights out.     The sequence of images below shows the addition of .040" thick sheet styrene to the fins and shaping the Bat-shape first with a rotary tool and then with Bat-tail files.

    This may be due to the fact that the Futura kit was developed in the very early days of model kit molding. Molding a car body in one piece, if possible at all, would be very costly. Only years later, would car kit makers be able to mold single-piece car bodies by using more sophisticated injection molds capable of producing more complex shapes.

    Complicating things is the fact that the top and bottom halves must be assembled after the interior is assembled into the bottom half. It will be necessary to assemble and paint the interior first and mask it off before painting the body.

Few of the Futura's chrome parts were needed. The ones I did need, the steering wheel and the side trim, needed the chrome stripped off. I decided to try a method that was supposed to be both environmentally friendly and was guaranteed not to stink up the house. Don Schmitz has a "How-To" and Tips page on the Ninfinger.org website detailing, among other things, how to remove chrome with a variety of household chemicals. I selected Formula 409 because I had a bottle under the sink and it doesn't create nasty fumes like oven cleaner, bleach or brake fluid.  (One online article recommended Coca-Cola to remove the paint.  All it did was give the chrome plating a very strange, unpleasant smell without removing anything.)

The parts were placed in a plastic container. Spring clamps were clipped to the parts to weigh them down and keep them from floating. 409 was then poured over the parts, just enough to cover. About a half-hour later, the chrome was gone. No scrubbing was needed - the chrome plating just dissolved off of the styrene. All that showed was the bare plastic in the same pale turquoise as the rest of the Futura kit. An overnight soaking in water removed any Formula 409 that may still be on the plastic. The photo to the right is a close-up of the steering wheel.

The Futura / Batmobile Home Page

The Original 1966 Batmobile website

"BATMOBILE 1966"