Scale-Master

Here's all three. If I build another one of these kits it will be a curbside. I'm glad I did the full interior on these, but they are a lot easier to build as curbsides and the interior detail is just OK.

The Hot Wheels car is finally done. https://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/topic/194944-scca-camaro-trans-am-set/#comment-2925331

Last but not least, the Hot Wheels car is finished. It, like the Sunoco car, did not need the magnet treatment to get the body to fit over the chassis, just the trimming of the dash.

The chassis for the Hot Wheels car is done.

Less than one week until the 25th Annual Cruisin' For A Cure Model Car Contest in Costa Mesa at the Fairgrounds this Saturday! We are inside the Costa Mesa Building (like previous years). There have been some changes to the categories, but most are still the same. Please see the list below. A big thank you to Tamiya for again sponsoring us and providing awesome kits that will be awarded along with trophies for the winners.

The windows on the Hot Wheels were installed using the same process as I used on the Sunoco car, CA all the way. That's six windows in a row (on just these cars) and not a single smear or any fogging.

The Sunoco car is done.

And now the Sunoco car is finished. For some reason the body fit quite a bit better over the chassis than the Rain-X car did even though they are the same exact parts. I did the same adjustments to the dash on this as the last one too, but the Rain-X body just didn't fit without magnets to pull the sides in and down; I did not need them on the Sunoco car.

Thanks Mark! They are 1/25th scale.

The chassis for the Sunoco car is done.

And now the Rain-X car is done.

The Rain-X car is done. WIP Thread:

The chassis for the Rain-X car is finished.

Originally I was going to make all three cars have matching tire lettering as each kit has variations of the Goodyear Eagle decals. The Rain-X and Hot Wheels have lettering for radials, but they are not exactly the same size and the Sunoco has bias ply lettering. None of the decals match the molded in raised lettering so I applied them to what should be the inside walls. I wasn't in the mood to print two more sets of the bias ply versions so I went with the kit decals from each kit; inaccurate or not. The Rain-X ones had so much extra clear it was a requirement to trim them, but they went on well. The Hot Wheels also needed the clear trimmed because it was poorly registered to the white letters, and they went on almost as well. Neither of those set work with decal solvents. The Sunoco ones required no trimming and worked well with decal solvent. Rain-X on the left, Sunoco on the right.

The tires needed to be sanded and when I first got my lathe back in the 90's I made this nifty fixture that came in handy. I was surprised at how different the rears were in diameter when I trued them up prior to hitting them with a sanding stick. At least they were fairly round.

I'm noticing there are a lot of inaccuracies in the graphics and for the most part it doesn't bother me; it's what's to be expected from these kits. But the light blue stripes being printed over the Ford and Rondeau logos is too much for me, it jumps out as an error. So I will make new logos.

I figured out how to get the brass ends I added to the exhaust to work with the kit provided exhaust tips. The body fit is not all that positive, especially if you want to be able to remove the body. And it manifested in the way the pipes exited the body non-uniformly. I decided to use the kit parts to make them look the same from the outside. I shaved the insides of the kit parts down and drilled them out to receive the modified pipes. I had to file the brass tips to fit too.

The CA works great, I did a full How-To article on it but I can't share it here because I did it for a competitor magazine. If you search for "how-to/2024/07/cement-clear-parts-with-superglue-without-fogging" you will find it.

The clear parts were yellowed so I soaked them in peroxide and exposed them to the sun for a week. The leftover material in the upper left shows the" tint" from before; a nice improvement. (The kit did not provide the little window on right side near the windshield so I made one.)

I installed the windows in the Sunoco car and went for a much stronger cementing of the windshield after learning how much load the chassis puts on it from the Rain-X car.

I thought I was going to be able to finish the decaling on the Hot Wheels car, but the last decal was the Z28 & bowtie for the rear and it was printed in white. It needs to be black since the back of the car is white. I used the kit bowtie and printed a new black Z28. Finally clear coated after that minor delay...

I'm pleased with how the patch job on the paint/cracked decal issue came out on the Sunoco hood. I know where to look, but it's not easy to see if you don't…

Thanks Mark! It looks like the clear coating of the decals is going to work. Most of the pinstripes are applied as individual decals. They are all straight lines on the sheet so a bit of solvent is in order. This might take some time…

I painted the headlight decals the same light blue while they were on the sheet and then applied them.

Turns out the windshields need to be fully cemented to the opening for them to hold up to the spread of the body over the chassis. It popped out after a couple days leaving some of the black paint on the body, so that had to be cleaned up and the trim repainted. Now I know for the other two… The body & windshield did not fit well over the chassis either. The dash and windshield fight for the same real estate. So I notched the dash and trimmed the support bar to move the dash rearward.