Maranello

[mrm]

I couldn't help but notice, the ripple effect my Huayra build created on here. All sorts of exotic models found their way back on builders benches. Some beauties were shown for all to admire and inspire. And all this is great to see. That's what I love about this forum. It created quite a ripple effect on me too, however. I started it to take a break from the million Street Rod projects and ideas I had and to shut my wife up, who teased me that I can't build anything but old Fords. 🤪 However at one point I needed a brake from it too and it started raining for what seemed like forever, which kinda pulls the brake on my painting. So I looked for small projects. Some models that needed to be finished or other stalled work. This brought me to my Koenig Specials Porsche, which has been sitting with no mirrors and wipers in my case forever. While I looked everywhere for the parts, I discovered models and projects I had long forgotten about. Mainly how many Japanese Ferrari kits I had. 

 

The Ferrari F430 is almost finished. The interior is all done, suspension, engine...it's a roller. The body is also painted what looks like Tamiya gunmetal. Not a fan of the color as of now and not sure what I want to do with the model. 

The 430 Spider and the Scuderia are untouched and so is the F12 plus a couple of Daytonas and few Revell Ferraris which are not in the picture. Not to mention the half dozen F1 cars. 

One model that caught my eye tho was the Ferrari 550 Maranello. Perhaps because I just posted pictures of my diecast ones in that thread. Or because this car has always had a special place in my heart. 

Either way, when I opened it, I found a couple of the interior parts glued together, the really simple chassis plate and suspension assembled and the body primed. These models are very simple and have no engine or chassis detail. Their interiors are not the most detailed either, but with some persuasion and love they can be made to look really good. Not that I needed another project (tell me you haven't been there 😜) but I decided to give this Ferrari a go and perhaps I could time it just right and clear coat its body together with the Huayra's body panels, which drove me absolutely mad - a topic for the Huayra's thread. 

 

The plan is to replace the seats with the optional sport seats from the F430 Spider kit.

 

And use the set of wheels and tires from a  long gone Tamiya Porsche GT2, hat was patiently awaiting a worthy project in the parts box. Can't beat BBS classic LMs.

 

First thing I did was fill in the holes for the license plate in the front bumper. Front plates just ruin the design on some cars in my opinion and model manufacturers should stop making their models with holes in the front bumper. 

 

Next, as it is my habit, I rescrabed all the hood and door lines. I am not a fan of using panel liner on painted cars as I think that most of the time it looks unnatural. I would much ratter scrape some plastic and then let the paint and it's light reflections do the job. Like on the real thing. 

 

Fujimi did not even bother making the panel lines under the rear window and the bottom of the trunk. They just did the side lines, so I had to correct that. 

 

That's when I found out I am missing the side mirrors. I have no idea how or why, but the only thing missing are the side mirrors. I vaguely remembered seeing some mirrors in one of my compartment boxes I use for storing loose small details. I don't think they are from the Maranello, but they are very, very close. Actually, I know for a fact, they are not from this Ferrari, but either way, I am going to use them. Because unless you are Sergio Pininfarina you can't really tell. And he's dead. 

So, I drilled the mirrors I got and installed some brass pins to make them easier and stronger to glue. 

 

They will do, me thinks.....

[mrm]

Hey! I even managed a fresh coat of primer and a mockup before dinner. Together with correcting a little white pearl on the PH.

 

Now I have to finally make up my mind on the color. I'm leaning towards classic Rosso Corsa, aka "Ferrari Red". 

Edited August 12, 2022 by mrm

[Mattilacken]

Nice! One of my all time favorites among Ferrari!

[gbtr6]

Blue Scuro is a very nice color on these. Nice dark blue.

 

Perry

[dino246gt]

My buddy Dave MacDonald built this beauty!

 

[mrm]

2 hours ago, Mattilacken said:

Nice! One of my all time favorites among Ferrari!

Thank you. 
for me, personally, this is one of the most beautiful cars Ferrari has ever made. 

[mrm]

2 hours ago, gbtr6 said:

Blue Scuro is a very nice color on these. Nice dark blue.

 

Perry

Thank you for the suggestion, Perry. 
Ferrari has many blue colors that are gorgeous. However Scuro is not one of them. It is a nice dark metallic, but it is a Lamborghini color. I am 99.9% sure that the  beauty on your picture is wearing TDF Blue (Tour de France). I have this color and I was thinking about it. I put the color options on the table and asked the family to vote. So far it’s going towards Rosso Barchetta.

 

with interior like this or black on cream

 

TDF Blue on black and cream, the classic Rosso Corsa on black and beige, Griggio Titanio on black and red, Black on black and british green and Rosso Barchetta on black and tan/cream were the discussed options. 

[mrm]

2 hours ago, dino246gt said:

My buddy Dave MacDonald built this beauty!

 

Beautiful model. Altho, I’m almost sure that is a 575M. Which in real life is an improvement  over the 550 Maranello in pretty much every way. Mechanically that is. As far as looks go, I really prefer the 550. 

[mrm]

After the first coat of primer some things were noticed and addressed. The raised emblem on the front hood had to go and the side markers were removed and holes drilled on their places. Then everything got sprayed with a fresh coat of primer.

 

The family consensus was that the Rosso Barchetta would suit the car best. Few things were taken into consideration. The scale, was determined, would take away from the effect of a TDF Blue paintjob. Blue was the strongest contender together with the Ferrari red and the Barchetta red. The Rosso Barchetta ultimately got chosen, because it is a very classic color that suits the car well, goes great with all brown/beige/cream colors and would look really cool with the BBS LM wheels. The red also had pretty much the same things going for it, but what tipped the scales was that Rosso Corsa is the the classic red that looks good on every Ferrari, while Rosso Barchetta is definitely not the color for any of the other Ferraris I would like to build. And I don't like repeating colors on my builds. 

So the body received couple of dry coats of Rosso Barchetta, which after about four hours drying time were lightly sanded to reveal some tiny bumps and imperfections in the primer plus a couple of scratches. You can see them on the picture- the grey dots on the roof and the hood are not dust. It would have been really annoying to get the whole thing painted and cleared and then while polishing it, a grey dot to pop up in the middle of the roof. 

 

Meanwhile, I discovered that the door cards are 100% wrong, as they are the 575M design and not the 550 Maranello's. The two cars are extremely similar, almost identical. The decal sheet has decals for both and I would not be surprised if Fujimi pulled a fast one and included the 575 door cards in both. I have to admit that , when I have bought this kit I am pretty sure I did buy a 575M kit as well, which was built and later trashed. This was years ago and altho I doubt it, there is a slight possibility I had mixed up the doors of the two. 

Anyway, the door panels have a very poor unsatisfactory detail anyway, so I was going to rework them regardless. On the upside, the 550 Maranello's door panels are simpler and will be easier to replicate. 

 

The body is about to receive a couple wet and final coats of paint today and with some luck, perhaps its first clear coat tonight, together with some Pagani panels. 

Thanks for looking and stay tuned....

Edited August 14, 2022 by mrm

[mrm]

Rosso Barchetta it is.

And the first clear coat is down. It has few little dust fairies here and there, but I think it will buff out just fine and probably will not need another coat. 

 

[mrm]

Paint correction. Simple 2500 grid wetsanding to make sure the panel gaps have no pooling and any dust particles that may have stuck to the clear are gone. 

 

Next comes my most hated part - couple of hours buffing out and polishing. 

[mrm]

While the clear coat is curing some more after the wet sanding, I started addressing the interior. 

The rear package tray is molded as a separate part, which at first I found odd. But I actually appreciate it, because of how the real cars are builtAll of them have the interior tub up to the package tray in carpet. On some 550s the same carpet continues in the tray, while on others it changes color. Some cars were ordered with leather upholstered trays. Molding it separately makes it easier to detail paint. In my case the tray will not have carpet and it will be contrasting color to the carpet below it. The only thing I wanted to do to it prior to painting was to open the slots that the seatbelts come out of.

 

The interior door panels are poorly detailed even for a 575M model, but they are completely wrong for a 550. So I drilled the center of the door pull's upper attachment point, just to mark its location and eventually to provide an attachment point for a new door pull that I would have to scratch build. Then the whole surface was roughly sanded and the door pockets/arm rests trimmed. The armrests are a joke, the door panels are inaccurate and too thin and the door pulls are now gone. So basically I will be scratch building the entire panels. 

 

The interior tub is fine the way it is. So it needed just paint and some carpeting. I have quite few memories involving Ferrari 550 Maranellos. One was owned by a local guy back in Colorado. A young-ish doctor with attitude you can say. He had no cats, aftermarket exhaust, Novitec Rosso tune and wheels and the car looked and sounded just spectacular. He used to bring it to track days and put it through its paces. It was the classic Ferrari red with black on tan interior. The carpets, in other words the entire interior floor, center tunnel and the space behind the seats, were red, matching the exterior color of the car. As odd as it may sound, the color combo actually worked great in person. So I took a gamble and decided to apply the same color scheme to my build. Therefore the "carpet" in my 550 is going to match the exterior. The pedals are not drilled as they should be, but in this build you would have hard time seeing they are there at all, once everything is done. 

 

I have not painted the seats yet, because I am still on the fence what to do with them. There are plenty of 550s with those exact seats in them in the world. But technically they are inaccurate for the car, because they did not appear until the 550 Barchetta was introduced three years after the Maranello. They were an available option on the 575M and a lot of people retrofitted them in their Maranellos, but were never installed from the factory in one. The factory optional sports seats in the Maranello were of different design, first seen in the 355. Either way, if I decide to use them, I will first modify them slightly and then make molds of them, as I borrowed them from my F430 Spider model and I would like to return them to that model. 

Edited August 16, 2022 by mrm

[Funkychiken]

High quality build my friend, its looking great...

[mrm]

10 hours ago, Funkychiken said:

High quality build my friend, its looking great...

Thank you, Atin.

[Street Rod]

Great work so far! Going to be a sweet Ferrari when it’s done!

[mrm]

On 8/17/2022 at 6:37 PM, Street Rod said:

Great work so far! Going to be a sweet Ferrari when it’s done!

Thank you Doyle. I sure hope it will be nice when done. It got way more involved than initially planned. 

[mrm]

As i have said before, I am a true believer that great results can be achieved simply with care and a little elbow grease, without the need to spend money on special products or tools. A product that is simply a miracle worker and is inexpensive and readily available pretty much anywhere an automotive care island is present, is Meguiar's Ultimate Compound. One good wet sanding with 2500 and some buffing with this stuff is all it's needed to achieve a glass smooth finish. 

 

Immediately after I buff the whole body, I wash it with a clean sponge and dish soap. I use an old toothbrush to get into the body panel gaps. This way there is no dried buffing compound residue left, which is a pain to remove if left on for long time. 

 

Weirdly enough some parts were molded in red for no apparent reason. Like the upper dash (which is black on pretty much all 550s), while the lower dash half and the seats and remainder of interior are molded black (which are tan or red on most cars). I sprayed it with SEM black initially, which covered perfectly but created this weird ghost line in its shine, where the flow of the plastic could be seen. Hard to explain. so I sprayed Tamiya grey primer to rectify the issue, which will be followed by Tamiya flat black. 

 

Meanwhile I followed on the body with Maguiar's Ultimate Polish. I often skip this step as the Compound provides more than adequate shine on metallics, which is what I use most of the time. But this is a rich solid color which can benefit from some extra depth and besides, I love how the polish smells. LOL

 

The pictures can't really show it, but the polish definitely gave it an extra degree of shine.

 

Again, after polishing the body, it was washed really well. At this point it barely hold fingerprints and it beads water away. 

 

 

[mrm]

Next the window seals were masked off.

 

And the whole body was prepped to be sprayed. This is another reason to wash away the polishing paste. So paint can actually grip on.

 

I have no idea why on the picture it looks like paint bled through. There is no such thing in person. 

 

In this kit window masks are not provided. I tried to put on Tamiya masking sheet to cut my own masks, but the contours were not pronounced enough to detect through the mask. So I was left with the only other option - paint by hand. I used Gundham black paint marker, which is unforgivable on clear plastic. It was the most nerve-wrecking part of the whole build so far. 

 

The entire light assemblies forth and aft are molded in clear. The rears had their centers masked with BMF, mounted on masking tape to cover their backs, sprayed with Tamiya clear red and then had BMF circles punched and mounted inside them. The front lights had the turn signals painted from behind with clear orange, then the entire light cluster was backed with BMF and then everything was painted black by hand, leaving only the lenses clear. The big driving lights were not working out this way, so they got some chrome into them, which makes them just like the 1:1. The headlight covers received black borders and the fog-lights too. 

 

The grille is one of the parts strangely molded in red. So, primer > Matt Black > BMF for the fog lights and the lenses attached with Canopy Glue. The prancing horse emblem in the center is just a decal in the kit, which looks awful. On the real car it is a nice tridimensional metal emblem. Miraculously I found some pieces from a 1:24 Bburago diecast Ferrari 550 and the front grille was amongst them. So I cut out the prancing horse from it, sanded the back flat to thin it as much as possible and glued it in the Fujimi grille. It had to be touched up a little with chrome marker, but you can't tell. It looks perfect. The taillights also received some black seals. 

[dino246gt]

Wow, that's looking fantastic! Gorgeous!! Cheers!

 

[mrm]

Another one creeping its way back to the bench. 

The interior tub and dash are pretty much done.

 

The horrible door cards are getting redone with some sheet styrene

 

The big dilemma are the seats. They are horrible. It's like they are sculpted from a block of granite. I know I had somewhere an old Bburago 1:24 diecast 550 Maranello, but can't find it. Those little toys had far better seats than what's in this kit. The other option is to take the optional seats from a Ferrari F430 kit I have, which were available as an option on Ferrari 575s, but are regularly being retrofitted into 550 Maranellos by owners.