Large scale models are simply diabolical. Models of any scale can play with your imagination, but you always know what’s real and what’s fake. When that train, plane, or car model is, say, 14 inches long–normal scale model size, more or less–your mind quickly adapts to the concept because it knows this is a model. And your mind deposits what you’re seeing into its familiar, convenient file folder called “scale models.”
Half Scale Models: Rare and Fantastic
But when the scale is large, your cognition wavers on the real vs. fake question. When your logical mind and eye look at a 1:2 (or 1/2, half) scale model, it will register the model as fake–but not as rapidly as with smaller scale models. It takes a second, and in that second your mind falls into an uncanny valley of questioning.
Half scale models of large objects like tanks, trucks, and cars are not common, as Fred Heim himself admits. Full scale (1:1) is common, but only with small items like guns.
Fred Heim’s Working Trucks and Heavy Equipment
This half-scale Peterbilt truck was Fred Heim’s first large scale model. Frame is aluminum, sides are powder coated mahogany. Since half-sized truck parts are in short supply (as in: non-existent), Heim had to make practically everything by scratch.
Without Heim and the garage acting as measuring devices, this Peterbilt could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
Ernie Adams’s 5/8 Scale Working Hot Rods
Like Fred Heim, Ernie Adams is amazingly prolific. For the rest of us, if we were inclined to build a large scale model, it might take us a lifetime. For kick-ass modelers like Ernie Adams, it’s all in a day’s work. His Dwarf Car Museum in Maricopa, AZ displays working 5/8 scale models of hot rods and sedans and all sorts of other working vehicular transport.
Giant Pitts Python RC Biplane
According to Model Airplane News:
[From] Dave and Greg Hayfield, this monster 300+ (!) pound aircraft is powered by a 650cc Hirth engine spinning a 68-inch, 3-blade carbon-fiber prop.
At 87% of the scale of the original, it begs the question: is this a model or a drone?
Movie makers have long used large scale models to substitute for the real thing, and they are perfect for the job because scale is more difficult to detect in the skies.
In the Bond film Man With the Golden Gun, an RC scale model substitutes for the “real” AMC Gremlin flying car driven (or flown?) by Scaramanga and Knicknack.
