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In between work and life, I haven't managed to get very much done within the past few years. One most recently finished in the midist of all is this Revell Monogram kit (which seems to be a re boxed Revell Germany offering going by the multi color piece and the 1992 Revell AG copyright). This one was purchased in a club mtg auction for a tenner sealed in September and looked like a nice kit with hardly any flash and the quad turbo V12 pulled me in! However, it has serious, and I MEAN serious warping issues and with the blu body parts being so brittle that any slight hard twist back into the right shape always cracked. This one required a lot of trimming of the chassis/interior parts in addition to careful bending and filling of warped body sections, which took about a month to do all that before it was ready for paint. Almost OOB build with the exception of swapping out the 1930's like multi-spokes for 5 spokes from a SVT Mustang Cobra. I found the Bugatti blue a bit boring and dated, so on went Tamiya Clear Red over Rustoluem aluminum cleared with Pledge. IDK if the motor is supposed to be off center if the 1:1 is like that, or could be due to atrocious warping or bad kit design.

A great article in last month's Octane promoted this to the top of the build pile! It'll join the XJ220 and soon-to-be-built NSX in an "early 90s supercar" corner of the garage... The Revell kit is very nicely detailed, generally, but the mould is suffering, and this is NOT a car that likes to be packed in a flimsy box and sat on a shelf for years. Airfix/Heller do the whole cabin as a transparent piece that sits on top of the body, whereas Revell has gone for a roof and the flimsiest A-pillars ever committed to plastic. The body shell is also flimsy, and warped on my example, so I've assembled various "working" bits into one, much more solid, shell. The opening bonnet shows you little except the battery, but fixed in place it beefs up the front end nicely. And while it would be nice to have an opening engine cover, both it and the roof were warped. Fixing it shut lets me use the window between the cabin and engine bay as a solid "bulkhead" which pushes the roof and engine cover nicely back into shape... not quite figured out how the "wing" works yet. Heat shields covered with cigarette foil. They'll need a bit of fettling, but the texture is perfect... Wheels stripped of chrome. Lots of flash in the holes, so these are the "best of eight" -- I had a spare set from a donor kit I bough just for the tyres for £5, but the originals demonstrate how tired the mould is. It seems bizarre that they would chrome them in the state some of them were in, but there's obviously no intermediate quality check... The engine is nicely detailed, if a bit over complex -- I don't see a need to have the cylinder head in three stacked parts, especially when they don't fit very precisely, which can end up with your cam covers not aligned and not parallel, if you're not careful. If I was building another one, I'd set up (unglued) the base/sump part of the engine on the bearers in the big chassis part, and then glue on the block/head parts to the base, fine tuning their fore and aft alignment in the chassis, until I was sure that they run directly front to back, and then add the induction manifold and check that for alignment, all while the glue is soft. The blue detailing is prototypical, but there's a bit more to do to the throttle actuator rods yet... bestest, M.