I purchased Italeri's 1/24 1933 Cadillac Town Car kit intent on cobbling it into a carved-sided hearse of the period. This 1933 Cunningham Eight Column Cadillac Town Car is the end result of countless hours of painstakingly intricate work.

I began by slicing away the rear passenger area of the town car, then using the pieces as patterns to cut new, elongated ones from sheet styrene. With the Italeri's driver's compartment cemented in place, I began the task of carefully mating the new pieces to the car, bending, curving, and sanding the pieces to blend into the original model. With the smooth sided box seemlessly in place, I was ready to start adding columns.

I considered a number of methods to build the columns, including using pieces of doll house furniture or columns from HO scale building facades. Ultimately I decided to build the columns completely from scratch. Using Evergreen styrene plastic strips and bar stock, I cut and pieced the column shafts together, building each one in place on the car. How to make the ornate capitals and bases of the columns did pose a unique problem. During a trip to the craft store, I purchased several packages of large decorative plastic buttons, then carefully trimmed out sections and cemented them into place, blending away the seams with putty. The next in a long list of challenges in this scratch building project was to replicate the carved draperies common on funeral cars of this style. This task, though tedious, was accomplished by simply trawling some Milliput modeling putty into place within the panels and sculpting it into shape using a toothpick.

While I had chosen a coach design that had small windows in the casket compartment, I still wanted the interior to be more view able. To do this I decided to equip the car with an opening rear door. Monogram's 1939 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery model has an opening rear door very similar to one found on a hearse. I simply used the door hinges from the Chevy to make my door operable.

Cunningham carved coaches traditionally had decorative wood paneled casket compartment interiors. I wanted to build a complete interior because, quite honestly, this model was proving to be such an endeavor that I believed I would never attempt to build another one. For my scale version, I cut interior panels from sheets of balsa wood, then scribed in patterns with an ebony pencil before staining them in multiple shades. I painted some of the smaller areas of the interior, such as the wheel wells, rear door frame, and partition frame, in a woodgrain pattern with acrylics, then cemented the panels in place. For casket rollers, I cut small sections from strips of styrene, covered them with Bare Metal Foil, and glued small pieces of styrene half-round, painted black, into place.

This was a remarkably tedious project, made more so by experimenting with materials for the columns, and my desire to build a rear interior and opening door. Still, the end result of hundreds of hours of meticulous effort is this striking, one of a kind scale model of a hearse from an era of design and excess long gone.