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This is the original Ertl International Transtar cabover, a kit I first built rather poorly in the late '70s (even driving it around in the carpet if I remember right), which I rebuilt as you see here in June 1982, with substitutions of the steerable front axle, engine and front turn signals which went toward my Ford CL-9000. The engine, front axle & wheels likely came from an AMT Peterbilt COE I scrapped, but I can't ID those improper turn signals. The rooftop A/C is a cut-down one from the AMT Peterbilt 359. Originally I had the thing painted black with red stripes that were just the bare plastic, using the simple instruction sheet stripe templates. But in 1982 I liked the basic look of the 'team color' stripe option for Toyota 4x4 trucks, so I adapted that concept here, adding a third color in the stripes. I still like that look, that's how hopelessly stuck I am in the '80s. The New Mexico plate is a hand-lettered bit of yellow paper. I thought the rear axle caps in the Ertl kit looked quite flat, so I substituted some two-level ones from the AMT Diamond Reo kit. In the interim time between 1982 and now, the blue trailer connection hose went springing off to places unknown, so I remade the hose just a couple of days ago from copper wire wrapped around a file handle, painted with a thin acrylic blue color. Got it pictured in Scale Auto's October 1986 issue, in the Model Truck Lines column when Don Shenk was writing it. There are two of my other models in that same column, but I'll show each of those in different posts later. These days I could do better by making the fuel tanks out of aluminum tube and lathe-turned end caps, to avoid having those unsightly lines, and I'd polish the paint flat before finishing the model, along with adding basic wiring and a few other details to really crisp-up the model even more. However, it is still not half bad after all these years just the way it is.