1928 Mercedes Benz SS

[Harry P.]

I managed to add a few more lines and linkages. Man, this thing is killing me! It may be 1/16 scale, but I am working at just about my limit for smallness. I don't know how guys who do in-scale carb linkages in 1/25 scale do it!

[Harry P.]

I tried fooling with the camera settings. This is a much more "true-to-life" shot of how the fender trim looks in reality:

The camera doesn't see the difference between the shiny metal wire and the white paint the way the human eye can, so in photos that white trim looks much wider than it really is because the white and the chrome wire sort of blend together.

[sjordan2]

Unbelievable. And I'm coming around to the yellow paint, which is common to prewar classics like the Bugatti T50 Atalante, Rolls Phantom II ("The Yellow Rolls-Royce" movie) and the Rolls from "Goldfinger."

[imatt88]

Super work!

[sjordan2]

What we need to do now is convince Skip to jump in the pool and join us. I know you have this kit, Skip...

Working on it. Check in next year.

[Harry P.]

This kit is giving me a huge headache right where I knew it would: the doors.

Because of the way the kit is engineered, you have to mount the metal hinge arms to the body (upper arm) and inner door panel (lower arm) first, then glue the inner and outer door panels together, basically trapping the lower hinge arm, then glue the chrome trim onto the outer doors (this trim piece has the upper hinge knuckle attached to it at the front end), then attach the doors to the body by somehow managing to get the tiny hinge pins of the upper and lower hinge knuckles into the holes of the metal upper and lower hinge arms... then gluing the lower hinge knuckle in place on the inside of the body. All of this has to be done on a body that is about as limp as cooked spaghetti, because the only thing that connects the cowl section to the rear trunk section of the body are the very thin strips along the lower door openings.

And because of how the parts are engineered, there's really no way to adjust the fit of the doors. The tiny hinge parts go into very specific spots with no wiggle room. So what I'm saying is that you just have to hope that everything falls into place perfectly and the doors will ultimately line up ok once you glue the body to the fenders.

As if that wasn't complicated enough, the tiny hinge pins are molded into the tiny hinge knuckles, so obviously they are very thin and very weak. Needless to say, I broke a few of them while trying to finagle the hinge knuckles into the metal hinge arms. Sigh...

So I finally decided to break them all off, drill through the hinge knuckles, and insert sewing needles as hinge pins. Now I have hinge pins that won't break off. Of course that doesn't do anything to help the fit of the doors themselves.

If I get the doors installed before I completely lose patience and throw this kit against the wall, I'll post some photos later and you'll see what I'm talking about.

And here I thought that since I had already built six or eight Pocher kits, I had this "kit building" thing down cold–when along comes a much simpler kit that makes assembling a Pocher seem easy!

[Cato]

Very similar logistics to my RR which compounds the issue with hinge positioning tabs in the wrong places. Difference is yours is much smaller.

Choose your poison.

Can you run some brass rod inside that under-door body connector? To stiffen it?

SKIP; DO NOT READ THE NEXT LINE.

I've seen some guys put 3 hinges on the Sedanca doors; would that help strength and alignment?

[Harry P.]

On the body, that thin little lower strap connecting the front and rear of the body gets glued flush against the floorboard sides, so I can't add anything on the inside, because the body rear wheel cutouts rest in grooves on the rear fenders... if I added thickness inside those lower connector straps it would throw off the width of the trunk sides and they wouldn't fit into those rear fender slots.

I'm calling it a day. I don't want to keep pushing ahead and wind up getting frustrated and making a stupid mistake. Back at it in the morning. I'll make it work somehow...

[bobthehobbyguy]

Harry have full confidence that you will get this worked out.

[sjordan2]

On both my partly built (by someone else) reference kit and unbuilt kits, the bottom door opening area attached to the cowl appear to be slightly warped, probably by the body's molded-on sprue brace that's supposed to prevent that. Most obvious on the right side.

I figured it was something like your problem that inspired the builder of my reference build to glue the doors shut, as well as the guy in the step-by-step Korean build journal on the CD. Martin Swire, however, seems to have had no problem, though he said he had to add pins to a lot of butt joints elsewhere. But he built his kit many years ago.

http://www.freewebs.com/martsmodels/1928mercedesss.htm

Edited November 2, 2014 by sjordan2

[Harry P.]

Well, today is definitely a "good news, bad news" report. Let's start with the good news...

I managed to glue the body to the chassis without breaking anything! Actually the body fits pretty precisely... it can only go on one way, so there is no possible way you can glue it on in the wrong place. Also, something that I thought would be a problem turned out not to be: the external exhaust pipes. The interface of the three engine exhaust manifolds, the three "flexible" exhaust pipes, the three vertical fillers under each pipe, and the hood side panel has to be perfect. The hood panel's cutouts have to perfectly match the location of the three vertical filler strips (which fit into slots on the fender and can't be adjusted), and the three exhaust pipes have to meet the engine exhaust manifolds, fit the hood side panel cutouts, and fit perfectly into the "3 into 1" collector under the fender. That's a lot of potential mismatches, but everything fit about as perfectly as could be expected:

[Harry P.]

More good news: I'm finished with the engine! Got all the various lines hooked up. That was an adventure... The only way to do it is after the body and firewall is in place, and the engine is mounted in the chassis. So you have to sort of snake the lines around all the existing stuff, working sometimes from the top side and sometimes from the bottom. It's tedious... like trying to thread a piece of wire through a maze! You have to thread the lines through where they are supposed to go while at the same time shaping them and getting the curves right. I used thin solder for the lines because it's very easy to bend, yet holds its shape after. I needed a very soft and flexible material to be able to get around all the various engine components while still being able to make the bends as I went, and the soft solder worked perfectly.

[Harry P.]

And now the bad news: the doors.

I have had them on and off three times already, but it's no use. The way the hinges are engineered, there's really no way to adjust anything. You just have to assemble everything and hope for the best. This is as good as I could get it on the left side... it's not exactly a perfect fit. The lower front corner is in too far, and the upper rear corner won't close flush with the rest of the body. And because there's really no way to accurately test fit the doors until the body is firmly glued in place, by then it's too late to do any sort of surgery on the hinges (if that would even be possible in the first place).

I'm just going to have to live with it.

[Harry P.]

Oh, almost forgot. More bad news...

The side windows are supposed to be glued in place in the full "up" position, which is what I did. There are locator pins on the inside of the door panel and corresponding holes in the "glass." Again, no way to make any adjustments, and even if there were, you can't see the final interface between the side glass and the windshield until after the body is glued in place and the doors attached. That's when I found out (while test-fitting the windshield) that there are huge gaps between the windshield posts and the leading edge of the side glass. Obviously, in reality the front edge of the side glass would butt up tightly against the rubber gasket on the windshield posts.

So I had to remove the doors, pry off the inner door panels, pry off the glass, and then cut the glass down so that I can have it in a rolled-down position... eliminating the huge and unrealistic gaps between side glass and windshield posts. All this while trying to not mess up the paint on the doors, or to scratch or break the "glass," or to break the inner door panels.

But I managed to get it done without any catastrophe... Now I'll just place the cut-down side windows into the slot at the top of the door (no glue needed).

[Cato]

This is exactly how Italeri engineered the 1/16 300 Gullwing. The door fit killed me, even after extensive test fits and alterations.

My only choice was to pose them up (open), ruining the gorgeous lines of the car. That's your choice too.

I chose to start the Rolls instead.

Nit to pick: I'd run a little Smoke or wash on those corrugated pipes to tone them down a tad.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Cato

[Ramfins59]

Harry, I can relate to your hassles with the door and windows.

It totally sucks to have to disassemble parts of a model to fix a fit problem that shows up after everything is painted, detailed and assembled. I'm going through that right now with the '51 Chevy Fleetline Custom model that I put back in its box back in April. Although my model is in a smaller scale, the aggravation is no less annoying. Our perseverance ultimately wins out in the end, one way or another. Keep up your fine work.

[Harry P.]

Nit to pick: I'd run a little Smoke or wash on those corrugated pipes to tone them down a tad.

I did. The flash kind of blows out everything... things look a lot different in real life.

[sjordan2]

The left door fit looks just fine, but you may have more problems with the right door fit. I have no intention of building mine with full-up windows.

[Harry P.]

The left door fit looks just fine, but you may have more problems with the right door fit. I have no intention of building mine with full-up windows.

If I had known about the gaps, I wouldn't have done it either.

[Harry P.]

I solved the door problem! The problem was that the upper rear corner of both doors wasn't closing tightly... there was a gap there between door and body. So what I did is make a very simple "latch" by drilling a small hole into the rear upper edge of the door and inserting a piece of wire, with just a small amount sticking out... less than 1/16". Then I drilled a corresponding "receiver" hole in the body door jamb. So now, to close the doors I snap the door shut, and that little tip of wire sticking out on the rear of the door fits into the receiver hole on the jamb and holds the door shut tight. Alignment is still not perfect, but pretty good:

The "sweep" part of the fenders between the front and rear fender are separate parts, because there is the option of building the car without that piece, and just a small step plate instead of the full running boards. The curve of that sweep piece looks awkward IMO... where it joints the rear of the front fender, the curve looks clunky. So I decided to leave those parts off and go with the small step plates instead. I think the car looks sportier that way. The "chrome" trim around the step plates is silver wire (same stuff I used on the fender wheel openings, but a thinner gauge), super glued in place and the tread area painted flat black.

I also cut down the side windows and made them look like they are rolled partway down. They aren't glued in the doors, just placed in the slot between inner and outer door panels. The kit windshield had heavy distortion; I replaced it with a piece cut from Lexan.

Now on to the next big problem area: getting the hood panels to fit tightly, both up against the cowl and against the radiator shell.

[bobthehobbyguy]

Nice work. Any pictures of the right door after the fix?

[Harry P.]

No, but it's just about exactly the same.

[Deathgoblin]

Looks really nice! Good solution on the door problem. I really love the amount of detail work you've done on this kit.

[sjordan2]

Fabulous. It's going to take me a while to absorb your door fix, but it gives me a lot of hope.

I think the last major challenge you have will be the headlight bar. The bar is incredibly thin and easily breakable, and holds both the headlights and horns with extremely small contact points for glue. With just a bit of accurizing on the grille (modern MB logo badge) I think you're home free.

[Harry P.]

There's a driver side spotlight/rear view mirror that's supposed to be attached to the left side windshield post. The chrome on the kit spotlight is messed up... I'll have to see if I can find something similar to replace it with.