jbwelda

look at the bubble in the photo chuck!

nice job on the motor and the car looks awesome. there are actually getting to be some of that style running around lowly sacramento lately, a miata and a couple of datsuns that i have seen just recently. takes some getting used to but i like the look now!

they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so two ought to cover all the cussin' more to come...maybe i will fit an ed roth style bubble top to it!

well some good news: interior is near complete: as always, comments and "what a dummy"s always cheerfully accepted or at least ignored! by the way, notice the ejector pin mark on the side of the old revell parts pack master cylinder and handbrake. those darn things are everywhere! i hope that one gets a bit more hidden though i cant imagine that it will be.

well a slight setback on the "pain job"...i forgot the cardinal rule of painting: try to not drop your fresh paint job in the dirt! oh well a couple days drying up and a few minutes/hours session with some wet and dry and it might be almost like it never happened! hopefully i wont burn through the clear and the color doing so or it will be into the strip tank with ya! this was just after spraying a gloss pearl clearcoat...pay attention kids and don't let this happen to you!

excellent conversion! and for the photo thing, even a cheap tripod will help enormously. much easier than trying handheld macro shots.

dude, he is just looking around for that one irreplaceable part so he can take it off somewhere you will never find it in a million years. just look at his eyes!

ok we got color! a fairly even, well covering coat or twenty of tamiya chrome yellow! heres a shot of the body in color next to the chassis with rear suspension wrapped up: hmmm looking closely at a couple of those i hope i dont have some flaws happening on the right side...but right now i really dont feel like investigating it so i am calling it lense flair for now! finally a couple of shots of the rear suspension: half springs and friction shocks which also kinda look like traction bars. i made it look ok i suppose but theres zero travel...but the quick change rear end makes up for it in koolness: next up on the paint front is to let it gas out for a week then color sand it, a thin coat of pearl clear and then a couple coats of model master gloss clear and a final sanding/polish job on that. let me add a shot of some interior components, tonite i am going to build a pedal cluster for brake and clutch and i have a skull shift knob in the works. thanks again for looking and of course any comments/comparisons welcome!

you know what it might be, aside from the obvious JoHan kit, might be an actual from-the-factory promo or metal sculpture on a plaque or similar, to commemorate some event like the first or last turbine car being presented. Havent seen this yet and in fact it should be on in just a few hours so i will try to catch it myself. i bet they have that guy who typically appraises toys and collectibles, long hair dude who usually wears a hawaiian shirt or a tie die t-shirt. he sometimes overestimates, but generally i think he is pretty right on. really knows his music memorabilia.

well one thing for the fish: they sure are better than a cat!!!

another kudos here, that is fantastic work! thanks so much for posting those in progress photos of the body. sets a totally new bar for me seeing that. incredible.

thanks for the comments everyone! for dave, thats just normal flocking there, detail master i believe, 1:5 mix grey to black and i used diluted elmers white glue to hold it down. looks a bit "shaggy" but not too bad. and i sold my 1:1 lotus series one super seven and my mgtf so my driveway consists of pure japanese cars now. leaves a lot more time for building models, models that dont leak oil! one note to anyone thinking of building another of these, besides the ejector pin marks of course, the rear deck just begs to be opened up and/or the seats cut away from their backing and hinged to fold forward. thats what i should have done but did not...it would be an excellent place to put a spare tire and the battery, which will not be included in my build because there is no good visible place to put one. also a near-full size fuel tank would look great back there, i am going to use a machined aluminum moon tank hanging in front of the grille shell or at least thats what i am thinking at this point; may change as the rubber meets the road so to speak.

and just to show things are progressing, slowly, but progressing, heres an update! gotta love that thing about making a JDM version with a hot engine, i like that! heres some of the pieces: rear chassis and floorboards, motor, in the background you can see the front axle and the hood if i decide to use it and a couple of shots of the firewall from front and back, carpets and quick change rear end(!) hanging out back there. finally, looking at front side of firewall back into interior. theres more to do there of course, but its starting to come together. photos to come of body after its been painted...i had the color coat put on but the paint sagged a bit so i had to sand and now its ready to be reshot. i am using tamiya chrome yellow and which has a tendency to creep away from high points so i am having a problem getting a nice even color. but i think it will come around. as always, many thanks for looking!

at this point you might be able to final polish it out with a low-abrasion polish, like toothpaste. the finish with a wax or plastic coat equivalent. another way to make tiny scratches disappear is with a thin coat of future floor wax.

what everyone else said is true and also build up a couple of mist coats before really dumping it on. i have never had a problem with tamiya clear and if anything it doesnt cover as much as it should and so i often use model master clear for a final coat. sometimes tamiya clear doesnt really give enough of a "wet" look as i usually like. and i think i have only once had a problem with clear coats and that was when i used some hardware store gloss clear, krylon probably, and put on too much too soon, turned into a stripper right there in front of my eyes. pain jobs indeed

i thought i would add a couple photos from the past, one that might be of particular interest to Chuck, who expressed an interest in getting a couple of these kits. you should be prepared to deal with a few ejector pin marks, for instance: pretty scary if i do say so myself! and they are everywhere: on the finely detailed door panels, in the wheel wells, on the dashboard, oh yeah... on a completely different note, someone on my other thread mentioned that the front suspension was modeled especially correctly on this kit so i wanted to keep what i could, but still drop the front end down as much as it would go. so after thinking about it, it was direct into my parts box for a dropped front axle that was *very* narrow. no such luck, so i found one that i thought i could narrow considerably, then cut the spring and detail from the kit axle and grafted it all together. then i realized that all the detail i was after was on the piece i deleted but at least i have a usable front axle. stock front axle and suspension: and the dropped axle and suspension, in a rough state of course: finally, the wheels: thanks for looking!

your build is looking great! but i gotta say, i am flat out IN LOVE LUV with this car: that is one gorgeous ride there. i was really laughing at this one...until i realized that this is how a race interior really looks! great pics and sweet work on your build!

yes the paint really does seem like a nice match for what i remember of VW blue back in those days! excellent looking bug!

the truth is, pretty much everything will give you cancer if you are unlucky and/or have a depressed immune system. i wouldnt worry about it; and i know for a fact keith richards aint worried about it. if you dont want to be exposed to carcinogens, live in a bubble. otherwise i just dont worry because pretty much the air we breathe and the water we drink will kill us if we are susceptible. and note like someone else noted, its mainly people who are engaged in full time exposure to fumes and raw materials, like those who work with them, who are in any danger at all. take a smell of that zip kicker stuff...that stuff even smells like cancer. just dont drink it or inhale it too much and i think you will be alright or at least minimize any risk way under the risk of just crossing the street after looking both ways. life is too short, thats my motto, and i think keef agrees with me on that.

thanks for the comments folks, i am way further along than the photos indicate, there was some fairly radical stuff and scratch building i had to do to make room for the motor and stance...like find a dropped front axle that would fit and then narrow it severely, build a recess in the firewall and cut away a lot of the floorboards and refab them, plus the front subframe had to go and was replaced by some tube frame section i constructed that you can see around the motor. still more filling needs to be done on that but as photos i will post soon make clear, its pretty far along. those rear wheels look nice but they took some extreme polishing to get to that state from the raw pewter. also i am not going to detail this to the extent i do some because i have really only limited interest in this (as terror says, kinda stubby looking) and wasnt really sure until recently if i would actually go through with the build because of the limited interest but so far i am glad i did because its starting to come around. i see an aluminum moon tank hanging off the front and maybe a chopped down 32 ford grille but we shall see... charlie thats a lotus twin cam motor from a tamiya europa there. had to do a bit of mods to it since the europa is a mid engine car with a transaxle; had to chop the transaxle off and replace it with an "american" style hot rod trans, i think i may have sourced that from the blueprinter double dragster (pre-reissue). i do have to say its a whole lot easier to do that in plastic than it is to do it in real life! ah the joys of models! thanks again for looking and please keep the comments coming and also if you have built something similar, post the pics!

that really looks excellent, great clean but detailed look to the engine and compartment and realistic looking from the outside. i dont want to intrude on your thread but for robertw who thought no one else had built the kit, heres another one! i built this from the race car version along with the two other micro cars shown: again, great build there samdiego, i always love to see these almost forgotten hondas. you know they were chain drive, right? like a motorcycle! at least the 600cc versions were i forget if the 800s were. did you lower it or is it sitting out of box height? i seem to remember i dropped mine a couple scale inches. and i sculpted up a driver figure to fit in there, that was fun!

yeah i think i like it down in the weeds better too.

just some teaser photos of what I have been working on the past few weeks...some of you might recall my previous austin: well in that build thread someone mentioned the resin body i used had actually been sourced from a ROG BMW 3/15 so i had to go out in search of one: with the idea that i would build a make believe british hot rod with a more trad look: full fenders, usa vintage speed equipment, but very british wheels and a lotus twin cam motor. unfortunately i had to ditch the brit wheels aspect as i considered lotus wobbly webs, jaguar d-type drilled wheels, and my original thought, southeast finecast photoetch MGB wires. all proved too tall for the look i was after so i ended up using some pewter fenton rears from "dude tek" (love that name, mastered by bob dudek so it makes complete sense but i was practically literally lol-ing for a long while on it), and some resin halibrand spokes from reps and mins of maryland. and heres a look at the motor laid inside the body, currently in silver undercoat waiting for a chrome yellow in the next couple days: anyway i will post some more pics in the days to come, and this one ought to wrap up in another month or so if i keep at it... as always, thanks for looking!!!

looks a lot better but as the paint cures you might still see some ghosting on those gills. keep your fingers crossed!

looks excellent! i have a karmann ghia in roughly the same shape; gotta get on it this year but i am intimidated by the side chrome spears to foil.