microwheel

Great Idea on on the disc brake setup Joe. I'm sure you'll have it ready in plenty of time to take it to your show. By the way it was nice talking with you yesterday. I really enjoyed it.

Morning Tim, you should be proud of the progress you made on this one. It's looking sweet my friend.

Nice color choice Jason

Nice customizing work so far Michael. I like where your going with these builds.

Very nice start Jason, can't wait to see more of this one.

For spray cans you can use Tamiya which is a lacquer based paint and dries pretty quicky, as well as what other's have mentioned here, but if you go with automotive paints, use a good thin primer first. Most automotive paints will attack model plastic. Some here use paints like duplicolor or Krylon, you can use their primers as well. I personally air brush paint most of my models and for air brushing I like either Tamiya acrylics mixed 50/50 with denatured alcohol (which can be bought at any hardware store or walmart) and I also like the model masters line of non-acrylic enamels mixed 50/50 with hardware store lacquer thinner. Why thin it with lacquer thinner, you may ask, well it increases it's drying time to just a few days, (it can take weeks when thinned with testors enamel thinner), and even helps it to lay down alot smoother without the tons of orange peel that stardard enamels are famous for. Most of what I suggest can be bought locally if you have a hobby lobby or local hobby shop, and you don't want to have to order something like MCW's paints online and wait for days to get it in the mail.

I remember doing one of the stock versions of this kit a couple of years ago. The only dissapointing thing about the kit for me was the chrome parts were really crappy. I don't know what AMT was thinking at the time, but the some of the parts were barely chromed and the ones that were, had almost a aluminum look to them. I had to completely strip all of them down and Alclad II them. I have seen this version of the 68, but never invested in one. Did they improve the chrome tree parts on it? By the way nice work so far. Like your color choice.

Nice start so far Cory. Looking forward to seeing more. What kit you starting with?

Outstanding concept Dale, I like how youi thought through the chassis build up. This is going to be one nice model when your done with it. I can't wait to see what you come up with for the air intake and the cooling system.

Nice start on this one Tommy, I'll sure be watching as you go along.

Why thank you Carl. I'm glad I can contribute back to anyone in the hobby. When I first started out there were alot of good folks who guided me along and helped me. I just hope I can do the same for others. Thank you very much Mike. That's exactly how I aproach my projects. I brake them down into sub assemblies and treat each assembly as a seperate model. Kinda like the guys who build dioramas, build each thing as a model but plan it out so you can tie it all together. By doing that and not allowing my brain to focus to much on the entire model, I'm able to give each section of the entire model more attention.

Thanks alot Tim my friend.

Nice color Shane. Can't wait to see some clear on it

Your foil work turned out top notch Tim. Your Chevelle is really looking good my friend.

looking forward to seeing more.

Well finally got the interior for the Nova SS done today. Here is a few pics of the completed interior. Sorry about some of the lighting. Now that the interiors for both Novas are done I can finally move on to other parts of the models. I'll post More as I get things done. Thanks for looking. Feedback is always welcome.

Well thank you kindly Bruce. If eplaining things like I do helps someone else with their build, then I've done my job, lol. I had lots of help when I first started out, and I'm greatful to everyone who did and those that I still learn from. I have the interior assembly for Pop's toy almost complete, just waiting for a few things to dry so I can do a tad bit of touch up on it, then maybe later tonight or tomorrow morning I will post some completed pics of the interior.

Yup Tim, you could primer over the parts and then BMF, but primer, unless you sand it really smooth, does leave a slight bit of Orange Peel and because of how thin BMF is, the orange peel will show through it, and being so shiny as it is, the orange peel will really stand out and make the BMF look wrinkled. That's why I very seldom primer interior parts. If you use mostly flat or semi-gloss model paints, there is very seldom a real need for primer. When I did the one front seat, you notice I even used a little filler to fix a imperfection, and I didn't use one drop of primer over it, because I used a non-gloss paint, it covered it just fine.

Thanks Joe, I've always had pretty good luck with doing it this way.

Here are a few more pics of the completed dash. About all I got left to do for the interior, is to paint and detail the steering column and wheel, and make and add the seatbelts, then the interior pieces can be assebled. More to come as I get things done. Thanks for looking and all comments and suggestions are welcome.

Morning everyone. Time to get back to finishing the write up on the dash. Now that the dash it painted and the BMF foil work is taken care of, it's time to work on the dash detailing. For this I used the guage faces from http://bestmodelcarparts.com and the dash Super Sport glove box script as well as two of the key fobs from the MCG photo etched detail kit (the other two in the kit are for the outer door locks). The only thing on the 66 nova gauge faces I plan to use is the instrament gauges, I wont be using the printed heater contol or radio face. Mostly because I chose to BMF the heater controls and I only want the dial area face for the radio. So I dug in my spare aftermarket parts bin and found just a radio dial face that will work just fine for what I want. It's from a 67 corvette guage face set that I didn't use. (this is where saving leftover stuff from previous builds comes in handy lol) I cut out the radio face with my exacto knife and used gloss clear lacquer to glue it into place. (I'll clean the flat aluminum paint off from around the radio face later after the final detail is done, that area should be chrome anyways). I then cut the instrament gauge face out with my exacto knife and fixed it into place. Next I cut two of the four key fobs, the brake and clutch pedal script and the Super Sport script loose from the MCG detail kit with my exacto knife, (you can use photo etched cutters if you have them). I usually place the photo etched kit on a wide piece of tamiya masking tape, since it is a low stick tape. Doing this helps keep from loosing tiny photo etched parts as I cut them loose, hence I prefer to use a exacto knife to cut them loose with. I also place the kit in a four sided cardboard box lid so if a tiny photo etched part does go flying, when I cut it loose, I have a better chance of keeping it local enough to find it again. I then tacked these parts onto there respective places on the dash. And that pretty much completed the dash detailing. I may add the photo etched key set as I did on the wagon dash (haven's decided yet) I'll post a few final shots of the completed dash in the following post.....

Thanks aot Tyrone

Once the dash was unmasked the dash knobs and heater area was again cleaned off using a tooth pic dipped in denatured alcohol. Once that was done the original BMF was removed from the radio face. Now it was time to add new BMF to the radio face. I cut a piece of BMF and placed it loosely on the radio face. Using a q-tip I gently pressed the foil down onto the face of the radio, staring in the center and working my way out to each side, but stopping at the knobs so the foil would not tear around them. I then, gently worked a tooth pic around the detail of the radio face starting in the center and worked my way out around the knobs, making several passes so as not to press to hard as I was working with the tooth pic. Once the foil was pressed down fairly tight, the excess was trimmed away with an exacto knife and a light wash of tamiya flat aluminum was applied to the radio face plate. Next post will be about detailing out the dash with gauges and photo etched pieces. But that will have to wait till morning.. It's been a long day and the sandman is calling my name again. I hope you all are finding these extentsive write ups usefull. It takes me quite some time to write them up and also the added build time to stop during the build process and take pics for them. So if I'm posting to much here please let me know so I can adjust how often and how much I post.

At this point the dash is ready for painting. I gave the entire dash a couple of light coats of Model Masters flat black lacquer. Once the flat black dried, the knob and heater contols got cleaned off with a tooth pic dipped in denatured alcohol. They will get painted over again, but cleaning them now saves on too many coats of paint building up on them and making it harder to clean them off. Next the center of the dash was masked off using tamiya thin strip masking tape and the rest of the dash was sprayed with tamiya gloss black lacquer. The reason for the different shades of black is to give the dash a more realistic look in the car. The bottom of the dash was metal, so I wanted to reflect that with the gloss black paint. I want the glove box and instrament area flat black and the dash pad top semi-gloss black Once the gloss black dried, everything except the top of the dash was masked off and the top of the dash was painted with tamiya semi-gloss black Once the last paint had dried to the touch all the masking was removed. Continued in the next post

Well guys, I decided to start my write up tonight on how I detail my dashs. I may not get it all posted tonight, but I'll try to get a little ways with it. What I don't get posted this evening, I will try to get posted in the morning. It will take more than one post, so hang in there with me. One of the first things I do before working on my dash, is the planning stage. If I end up using a MCG detail kit for a project (as I am with this one), I look the detail kit over to see what photo-etched parts may be included for the dash. This is important. Photo-etched parts don't look their best if glued over exsisting molded on detail. After I look the MCG kit over I decide what molded on detail needs to be removed or modified so the photo-etched parts will look their best. For this project, the glove box script needs to be removed and the glove box key lock needs to be removed and indented. Also the ignition key area needs a little modifying. Starting with the glove box emblem, It will get shaved off using the exacto blade you see in the pic below. It's about the only thing I use this kind of blade for. But it allows you to nudge the blade sideways against the grain of the script and gently scrape it off. Once the script has been scraped off I go over the area with 600 grit sand papper to remove any left over scrape marks. This gives me a nice clean surface for the photo etched script to be applied to later. Next up I drill a hole through the center of the ingnition switch being careful not to drill out the outer edges of it. I want the raised area, so my goal here to to leave a ring of the molded on detail. Drilling the hole in the center, leaves me the option later to add the photo etched keys to the ignition if I decide to. Next I needed to indent the hole so the photo etched ignition switch key fob would sit in it flush. I did this by just lightly twisting a larger drill bit in the hole I made earlier. At this point I also removed the molded on glove box lock and indented the area with the same larger bit as well. This is so the photo etched glove box key lock would sit propperly. Next I applied BMF foil to the dash knobs and heater control areas. using the same process I did on the interior trim earlier. Making sure the dash was washed good and then wiped down with rubbing alcohol before doing my foil work. Now at this point, I will be foiling over the radio but it will be removed later and re-foiled, after the dash has been painted. So think of it as a tight mask. It would be to large of a surface area to try to clean all the paint off. I experimented one the first dash for the wagon and found if I tried to clean all the paint off the radio area, the only thing that would come close to working was a q-tip dipped in denatured alcohol and it made a mess of the paint surrounding the radio, and I had to redo the hole dash afterwords, so lesson learned. This is the best way I found for it to work. More of this process coming in my next post.....