mgbdriver

The Portland Roadster Show is going on March 14th-16th. not very far away at the Portland Expo Center for those that might to make it a double header weekend!

The paint is from Model Car World #2171- Light Blue

Scale Auto Builders Association (SABA) is hosting it's 34th annual Pacific Northwest Model Car Fest. This is a judged contest featuring 22 classes plus special "Best of Awards". There is always a large swap meet area along with raffles going on throughout the day.

Phil I see others too working on this kit on some of the FB groups and think they will finish there's before mine. It's amazing the distractions summer brings that get in the way of model building time.

Couldn't resist letting the new Salvinos JR Indy 500 winning Dallara jump to the front of the line and push aside other projects I've been working on. After doing pre-assemby of major componets and pretty much test fitting and cleaning up the rest of the parts I'm fairly confident assembly should now proceed without too many issues. There are some sink marks on the mirrors and hoop area to deal with along with 4 more that would be visible on the rear topside of the floorpan.. Also there were a couple of nubs hiding in the recess of the halo that was getting in the way of a tight windscreen fit that I almost missed. I couldn't get the tight fit I wanted for the right side fuel filler planking plate. I think I solved that with a coat of putty. This part just needs to sit flush but with panel lines and not blended into the body work. I also added some plastic strip to the underside of the side pod joint where aylight was shinning through and blended in the leading edges. Like any good modeler, yeah right, I went through the instructions part by part before snipping any parts from the trees only to find a few typos in the instructions with reference to some part # call outs, shouldn't be a big issue if you're paying attention!

Even though most of the decals used where sourced from Indycals, some of the Goodyears came from my decal stash which is the case for the front wing end plates and windscreen. The driver/mechanic callout on the upper cowl are from the actulal original AMT set as the Indycal ones were too big to fit the area.. The AMT decals to my misbelief still were still workable after all these years being curled up in the box.

All finished!

Making some progress on the 1975 Jorgensen Eagle. My goal was to just build a nice model for the shelf and not going too crazy with rebuilding everything, which much of the base AMT kit is crying out for. The old AMT is a bit of a stinker for accuracy so I did a little bit of work to make it better but not perfect if your nit-picking. Basically recontoured the nose, the kit made it look like it was ready to plow the snow off your driveway. Also scratch built a new oil cooler fairing for the left side of the body. The decals were mostly sourced from Indycals and new resin tires from Classic Racing Resins. The decals are some of the easiest to apply that I've ever used. Only needed a touch of decal set in a few spots but overall layed down perfect

Infiniti G37 IPL,

Is my mailman hijacking my copy of #222? Wouldn't you know the issue with our club's show is MIA.

not sure what the story is with Simil'R shutting down but they only produced 3 different livery Matech GTs, 2 versions of the Focus WRC car and a Pescarlo Judd (should spell check that one).

When an American car company hires a Swiss engineering co. to have a car built in Germany to be sponsored by a Russian petro chemical co. to compete in a French race (along with some other international venues as well). So glad to get this bugger kit from the short lived French model company, Simil'R, done is an understatement. I was determined to finally see this build through after putting it aside many times in frustration over the past 10 years. Not a kit for the inexperineced. Many of the assemblies lack positive mounting points so one needs to always be a couple of steps ahead in the building process to anticapate any future fit problems. The body alone is made up of 12 panels which I got to line up pretty well but wish I could of done a better job on the door tops that curve over onto the roof. The suspension A arms are very delicate and easy to break which happened to one of mine so a bit of repair was needed to fix and to hope I made it strong enough to support the weight of the large wheel/tire. Then when I got the front suspension all assembed the track was too wide with the tires sticking out about 1/8 inch past the fenders. So more carefull shortening of the front suspension arms was required to get the roundy bits tucked under the fender lips. The paint is Zero's Matech Ford GT Blue over Tamiya primer with Zero Diamond 2k clear. The decals by Cartograph were pretty good to work with except dealing with the chrome border striping. Almost impossible to get to conform to changes of surface direction. Any of my arsenal of decal sovents had no effect. Lots of blow dryer heat with firm pursuasion got the job done over long decaling sessions. As detailed as the instructions were there was no mention of placement of the p/e rear tow hook even though it's on the p/e parts tree. The instructions also show a roof antenna appearing near one of the final steps but with no part# and not one in the kit so I grabbed one from my stash since their is already a hole in the roof to mount one. If I didn't have any other projects to finish in this lifetime it would be great to add tons of detail to this kit knowing where the shortfalls are now. I was able to find loads of reference pics of the real car and it's 3 sister racers. Those images came in handy a lot with this build. All in all with all the Matech's issues I'm now happy as a joke in a giggle factory to have completed this cool car!

Nice work! One of my favorite cars..