Scale-Master

I've always liked this year of Impala, especially the rear end and the horizontal fins. I've had a few of the kits since they came out, time to build one. First I tossed the wheels and tires in favor of something meatier and added brakes. The wheels are from a Ferrari 360 with some minor changes to make them fit in the wheel wells and the tires are from the parts box. The brakes are from a Nissan Skyline. I kept the same ride height, at least for the time being… It will be a two-tone with the main color something between Lemon and Butternut Yellow. There is a lot of prep needed to clean up this body for painting, plus it had a broken roof pillar that had to be repaired.

WIP Thread:

The decals fit well, but the silver graphics/stripes are very fragile. Several of them broke while still on the paper even though they release rather quickly. The kit provides sections of silver decal for touch-up/repair and while they work well, from some angles the repairs are evident.

The interior, engine and chassis. Ready to start accepting body panels. So far everything fits very well.

The brakes were done using the same technique as I used on the Aston Martin DBS.

The engine builds up easily; not sure how much will be visible when the car is done.

The last details to go on were the mirrors (I used the same trick on the NSX to paint them) and a custom license plate. This is a really enjoyable kit to build. If another one comes my way I'll definitely grab it. WIP Thread: https://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/topic/203273-2007-aston-martin-dbs/

These are all of the body parts that were painted LP-7 Pure Red. This paint/color is very user friendly.

Everything fits incredibly well on this kit including the clear parts and PE pieces. There are a few trim pieces that need to be foiled, but even those are not difficult to do.

Tamiya 1/24th scale. I built the LaFerrari about 8 years ago and planned to build another one because of how nice the kit is; now I'm getting to it with this version. One thing I recalled was the inner and outer door pieces require a significant amount of work before painting and the interior panels need to be painted along with the exterior parts. The outer doors are three pieces each due to the complex shape of them. This leads to some tedious sanding to eliminate the seams despite the excellent fit of those parts, and the inner door parts should be prepped differently being molded in black. I used Tamiya pink primer as a base. Last time it felt like an interruption of an otherwise smoothly going project, so this time I tackled those issues first. The tailfins and cowling parts also have to be cemented on and faired in. No filler needed on any of these parts or the doors, I just sanded the glue smooth.

Since I detailed the brakes I decided I wanted wheels that would show them off better than the stock ones, but I had nothing that would fit the tires in my stash so I designed a set and 3D printed them.

The interior builds up nicely with PE parts for the pedals and some of the trim panels. Plenty of decals for speakers and other details too. I used LP-30 Light Sand and XF-63 German Gray. The Gloss Black on the dash and console is brush painted LP-1; it flows pretty darn well.

I spent a little extra time drilling out and detail painting the rotors to look more like carbon fiber.

After the chassis is painted up it looks pretty convincing for a simple pan with suspension and exhaust components.

The engine is on the simplistic side, but once all the underhood details are added (or should I say painted) it should play the part just fine.