1/32 Andretti Lola Indy Car- Highly Detailed

[Art Laski]

I recently got started on a goofy little project a couple of weeks ago. I picked up this snap kit at the Citrus Nationals for 2 bucks last month. I had always wondered about these kits, but had never seen one in person. I was surprised when I opened it how detailed it was. So I thought it would be fun to see what I could do with it. I don't plan to go overboard, as there is a lot of stuff that could be "fixed", but I thought I would just add enough details to make it look good and go beyond its snap heritage a little.

I decided to do Mario's '91 Indy ride. There aren't a whole lot of pics, but I've been able to cobble together enough references to get it pretty close. Indycals' '93 Newman Haas graphics are pretty close to '91, so I'll only need to make a few little decals to get it to '91 Indy graphics.

Here's Michael's team ride:

Mario on the front row that year:

Here are some of the components of the kit:

The steering wheel was a little thick, so I replaced the ring:

Edited August 14, 2012 by Art Laski

[Art Laski]

I cut off the front suspension and pinned it so I can remove all of the seams on the tub:

There was a gap between the fuel cell and the tub so I blocked it off with some styrene. The real car has no gap, so this was the best I could do here:

More to come. Thanks for looking!

-Art

[rmvw guy]

Those photos bring back memories! It looks like a great little kit, looking forward to the finish line. I like where you are going with the mods.

[John Teresi]

Art......glad to see you at the bench again........always like to watch your builds come to life.....great start buddy.

[Art Laski]

Thanks for the comments, guys!

Just a small update on this one. I decided to cut out the molded in drive shafts and replace them with aluminum tubing. I'll paint the tubing to match the color of the real ones, but the challenge is how to fit it in there.

It seems like the only way was to drill out the axle pins molded to the car so I can slide the tubing in. I also drilled out the boot on the gearbox a little for the tube to connect to.

[Art Laski]

I also didn't like the way the center of the wheels looked with the axle pins the way they were. It lacked realism to accommodate the snap fit, but since I am going to glue the wheels on anyway, I made some simple wheel nuts using aluminum tubing and hex rod. Not pretty by themselves, but they'll look good painted with the wheels on.

[3men2s]

wow, love what you are doing with this 1/32.......will be watching this one real close.

[sportandmiah]

Very neat! 1/32 is a great sale to work with.

[Art Laski]

Thanks for the comments, guys!

I got a little more done this weekend. Actually, I spent a lot of time on it, but there's not a whole lot to show. I thought I would have had paint on it by now, but it's close!

Got the cockpit done. I added some carbon fiber decal to the side and the back of the tub and the bottom of the engine bay.

I also got some carbon fiber decal on the chassis pan and did a quick mock up.

...and made a decal for the Chevy heads. It's so small, I can't believe it's legible.

[Art Laski]

The tires are pretty good for a snap kit, but they were a little concave, so I stuck them on my slot car tire truing machine to shape them up. This thing works great because it has a variable speed controller. I probably could have gone a little father, but I knew if I messed this up, recovery would be a pain.

The trued front tire is on the left, the stock one on the right.

Here's the rear.

Here's the machine.

Then I threw a little acrylic paint on them.

Thanks for looking!

[John Teresi]

Art......you are ROCK`N this build........you are Brilliant my friend.......can`t wait for the next up-date.

[Art Laski]

Thanks, John!

[Art Laski]

Here's a shot of the cockpit and a quarter to give it some perspective.

Masked off the tub for primer and paint. Thanks to Bob Downie for publishing articles extolling the benefits of using Silly Putty for masking. Not sure how I would have done this without it.

[Art Laski]

Got the white base coat on.

Finished tires.

Thanks for looking!

[John Teresi]

Art.....those wheels look AWESOME dude.

[Art Laski]

That's the Teresi tire treatment in practice right there. Learned it from the best.

Edited July 20, 2012 by Art Laski

[Art Laski]

Sometimes things don't go according to plan when building a model, but I think it's how you can recover that matters. I've done a lot of recovering the last few years!!!

I got the black on, but I had one really crisp mask line on one side of the cowl, and a not so crisp line on the other.

Here's the good side:

...and the not so good side:

In the pics, the good side looks just OK, and the bad side doesn't look that bad, but in person there was a noticeable difference.

So I masked it off and reshot the edge:

...and got a much crisper line.

Since the were base coats of color, it's not real glossy and is a little flat. Although it wasn't as rough as it looked in the pics, it still wouldn't make a good surface for decals, so I wanted to lay down a thin clear coat before putting on the decals. That's when things went really sideways!

I'm not sure what happened, but the clear just wasn't flowing out. So what did I do? Laid more on! So much for a thin coat! (It really wasn't too thick...) But it never flowed out and left orange peel over the whole surface.

To make matters worse, the wheels really came off the bus when the bottle fell off the airbrush while shooting the cowl, and I panicked and dropped the part right onto a cloth in the booth. > > >

If you look close, you can see the junk on the side here:

so needless to say, I spent the next day watching races with a bowl of water and my polishing cloths in hand instead of cutting decals. :-[

There was a little burn-through on the thin spots where the clear hit the cloth, but nothing I can't touch up and bury under the final clear coat.

Here it is polished back up:

That line between the black and white is straight as an arrow, so I'm not sure why it looks crooked in the pic.

Thanks for looking. More to come...

[John Teresi]

Nice save ARTURO

[Art Laski]

I started to get some of the decals on. which are starting to bring this thing to life.

[John Teresi]

Art........now that is what I`m talking about.........this is looking so cool man.......nice save on the paint......

[cobraman]

You are doing so good on that model. Nice work.

[RancheroSteve]

Wow, this is coming out really nice, especially with all the extra details you're putting in.

I think I ignored these kits when they came out, even though I love the subject. I guess I must have figured they were lo-fi snap kits. I've got a small collection of 1/32 scale kits now - mostly stuff that wasn't kitted in 1/24-25.

[Art Laski]

Thanks for the comments, guys.

Steve, I've heard from a lot of Indy Car model enthusiasts who have these kits but never thought much of them, but I think it has potential. Hopefully, this one will realize some of that potential and maybe they'll think differently about them when I'm done!

I had a few more challenges since my last post. some of the fabrication I did on the back of the tub, along with some mounting pins breaking while mocking things up early on, cause a little bind in the tub. I used some epoxy to keep it in place. After I painted it and started decaling, the epoxy popped, leaving a gap in the tub that will affect the fit of the cowl. Well, it also stretched the paint in one spot on the tub, such that when it's back in place, the paint creased.

This shot shoes the gap just under the "K":

Pushing down, you can see the crease:

I epoxied it back down, this time being sure I scuffed it better and laid a whole bunch in there!

Then I sanded the crease and masked it off and shot some base coat in there.

Masked it off for the final clear coat, but... in doing so, I damaged the K on the left side handling it. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I ended up masking off the shape of the ends of the K and brush painting it back into shape. This left it without the black outline, but I happened to look at the sheet from the Tamiya 1/20 Newman Haas kit I had out ( I had to steal the Havoline logos on the side pods from it because the Indycals were tad too large) and noticed a tiny black line they used to identify the decals on the sheet. It was perfect. So I cut a few lengths and traced them around the K where it was missing, Unless yoju look WAY up close, it's really hard to tell.

I thought snap kits were supposed to be easy!!!!!!

This after I reshaped the lower left corner of the K, but before I added the outline.

Here's the Tamiya sheet. You can see the line running across it:

Here it is repaired and cleared:

Here's the rest of the body after decals and clear was completed, but not yet polished out where needed:

Edited August 6, 2012 by Art Laski

[Art Laski]

Did a little heat staining on the headers.

And a little detail painting on the shocks and upper rear A-arms, etc.

And I also added a tube from the turbo to the plenum that can be seen in these mockup shots:

Thanks for looking!

[Rob Hall]

Pretty cool...I've never built an Indy Car in that scale..