Kit Review: "Back to the Future" DeLorean (Aoshima)

Rating: 5/5
Scale: 1:24
Purchased: April, 1994
Assembled: April, 1994

I bought this kit hoping that it would include the option of NOT building the "Back to the Future" version of the car. All I wanted was a straight-stock DeLorean. No such luck. Still, Aoshima's kit is impressive.

I'm not familiar with Aoshima as a company, but if their other kits are as well-done as this one, I won't mind throwing them some money. The BTTF Delorean has excellent detail for the most part, something I associate with more familiar Japanese companies like Tamaya.

The car can be built with the original fission reactor (as first seen), the hooked pole, or the "Mr. Fusion" setup. There's a slide lever under the completed model for moving the wheels up and down for rolling or flying modes.

The interior's good, with many of the time machine gadgets rendered as decals, but some scratchbuilding for added detail wouldn't hurt. There's even a tiny wind-up-style alarm clock. I don't like the molded-in cables running across the dash; they're very hard to paint properly.

The outside is beautiful, though again there are molded-in cables running from back to front along the sides. Painting them is even more of a hassle than those of the interior, given the need to paint the body with a "metalizer" paint to get the proper stainless steel finish. Once that's on there, doing spray-can touch-ups is a bitch.

Around back in the time machine parts, most of the pipes and hoses are molded separately and are reasonably scale-like. Good detail on the bits & pieces. Underneath, though, there's a lack of belly detail, the wheels don't align well in "drive" mode, and the mechanism that rotates the tires down into "flight" mode is clunky.

I was impatient when I built mine. I did well on the stainless steel painting and buffing, but I'm embarrassed by the brush strokes and uneven paint on the nose and tail caps (gray on the actual car) and satin-black body details. I recently took the thing completely apart with an eye toward rebuilding with much better paint and detail. All I have to do now is put it back together.

Pros: It's a DeLorean!; faithfully detailed, for the most part; several options--"original" or "Mr. Fusion" reactor, cable hook.

Cons: Gray body finish has to be painted to look like stainless steel; cables and parts molded as part of the body; no "stock car only" option; clunky "flight mode" mechanism; poor belly detail.