Scale-Master

Those mirrors were fun… The bodies are resin and the kit provided tiny thin PE posts. The resin parts were not painted and the PE ones were, but they were very undersized so I made new posts from thin strips of styrene. I found a fluorescent orange Tamiya paint pen that did not need a white base to cover well and brush painted the mirror parts. Chrome silver paint will have to do for the mirror faces…

Got the wheels, Gurney flap and wing installed. There's even a little PE tow ring for the front.

The interior is one piece of resin. I cemented it to the PE chassis. The steering wheel is PE too with a pin for the steering column.

The rear wing is PE, I think it's maybe made of nickel, it is not brass. It comes pre-stamped to give it an airfoil of sorts. The wing tips are brass PE. All the decals have been applied. There were a couple tiny green areas that I touched up with X-28 Park Green. I was pleasantly surprised at how close it matched these decals, but then it did a good job in the same application on the Tamiya kit of the same car…

The two side graphic decals were laid out on the sheet on the wrong sides. The other decals are laid out on the sheet as they should go onto the car. After a little head scratching I figured it out. These were even more difficult to get to conform than the previous ones. Even on the correct sides, they were a bit short in the rear areas. Fortunately the kit includes a small section of green decal to patch with. It also provides a section of white dotted lines. It took two pieces of the green to fix each side.

Four more decals applied. A good 90 minutes for them. The two around the headlights were more work than the first one. There are a few nice little PE parts for the rear end. This is the first to be installed. I still need to trim/touch up the decal before fitting the Gurney flap.

This is the first decal for the body graphics. It took about 30 minutes to apply.

The clear is Valspar AC2100 two-part urethane. The hot weather today worked well in having it kick off faster than normal. What a difference the clear makes in the color… Almost like it got turned up to eleven.

After almost 38 months of working on this project, the body is finally getting painted. This is the base coat. It's a color I had custom mixed in DuPont ChromaSystem called Violent Blue. As many of you know, without the clear the color is very muted and appears darker.

The resin wheel centers for the front fit very well. The photo-etched rears on the other hand took a good amount of sanding and shaving of the rims to fit as deep into the rims as they should. Decals are provided for the fronts. The Dunlop tire lettering is included too.

The tires are soft and rubbery, which on the other cars I've built in this series works out as a nice feature. But these rims are a larger diameter and the tires look to be the same stock as used on the smaller wheels. Unfortunately they don't stay concentrically round when stretched over the wheels. Additionally they began to split after being on the rims overnight. So I machined a new set of tires.

1991 Le Mans winner. This is a 1/87th scale LeMans Minatures resin kit produced in '91. The bodies on all the kits in this series I've seen were pre-painted, which makes touch up of the fluorescent colors a bit of a challenge. (And it does need touching up.) The kit is packaged like a multi-blister Hot Wheels card and the clear vacuum formed plastic was super brittle. So the first step for me was to cut out the windows and headlight covers from the exact same material to see where that went. Thankfully the kits usually provide two sets of those parts. The clear was equally brittle as the packaging and the windshield split in two places while I was cutting the side windows out. So I used the second pull for the windshield. The headlight covers were surprisingly the easier parts to trim to fit. Before installing the clear parts the interior and headlight buckets needed to be painted. The clear fits pretty well especially considering the size. The kit even provides a decal for the dashboard.

I textured and finish painted the valve covers. These are also fully scratch-built items.

The left bank of carbs has been installed and the linkages made and hooked up. Connecting them to the bell crank wasn't too hard, but getting the tiny keepers on the carb ends of them was a challenge. I also added the fitting for the vacuum advance line.

That was fun. Now it's done: