After years of recreating classic vehicles from kits Roark pondered one day, “What would this car look like if it had been abandoned in the desert for the past 30 years, full of grease, dirt, dust, rust, broken windows, flat tires and lots of dents?” Roark decided to approach his next model with this new twist and his rusted relics were born. He describes his process as building the kit backward, “planning all the way to destroy it and see how it would look all bright, shiny and new and then make it dirty, abused and distressed.” Since the 1980s Roark has spent hundreds of hours perfecting the details of his decaying vehicles so to present an authentic, albeit smaller version, of what were once elegant machines. He works with 1:24 scale plastic model kits aging the contents with paint and homemade rust. He also takes 1:32 scale die-cast model cars and literally tearing them apart then antiques them with paint and an assortment of other materials until the vehicles are in a dilapidated state. Roark imparts what he imagines these rusted relics might have lived through, and shares his remembrances of bumpy rides, oil leaks, and roaring engines. You probably have your own stories to divulge about a model you once owned or dreamt of driving.