Let’s face it, up to this point I have a black and white Dodge Monaco that could be any cities or counties squad car in the United States from that era. Then what makes a Dodge a Bluesmobile?
Well there are a number of things that go into making a 1974(ish) Dodge into a Bluesmobile, but the most prominent in my mind are the “Mt. Prospect” police car markings.
Everyone does theirs slightly different, and really their is no right or wrong way. It’s what makes you happy.
As I was scouring the internet for ideas I came across a screen capture file that someone made for use on either a scale model or slot car. I can’t really remember which, but I remember the details were spot on. Best of all it was a .PNG file!
You’re probably thinking, PNG file? whats the big deal about that? Well PNG is a graphical file, that unlike a bitmap or jpeg, can be enlarged as big as you like without getting distorted or pixelated.
I broke out this single file into multiple pictures based on location of where they go on the car. After getting the measurements from the bluesmobile.proboards.com I used Publisher to import the images as the correct size.
This is the part of the story where I say I took those Publisher files to any number of printing places and get expensive prints from plotters on fancy paper or better yet, sticky stencils.
Nope. I’m too cheap for that. If I can do it myself, I will. I printed them out on normal 8.5X11 paper and the pieced them together like a puzzle.
After taping all of the pages together (correctly) into a template, I used a yellow highlighter around the edges of the letters and numbers to find shades of color I couldn’t see.
That helped me to cut off the right amount for the templates. Oh, before forget! I did tape the original printouts onto normal car masking paper for durability.
After I color sanded the car, I was ready to paint the markings. I didn’t want to complicate this too much, so all I did was look at a screenshot of a movie scene of the car and matched it to where I was placing the stencil. Used a coupe of pieces of tape to hold the stencil in place so I could stand back to make sure it looked right and then masked it up better.
Then I went to town with the spray paint!
