microwheel

Nice work Richard, I've used the way you make your gauge lenses as well as Tom's above with the MS Kristal Klear as well. Both work great.

Outstanding Builds so far Tom, your taking on one heck of a challenge to build six at once and detail em in the process. My hat goes off to ya my friend.

Your Build is coming along nicely, love the mods your doing. If you don't mind, I thought you might like to know, that with the rear valance in place, your going to have a fight on your hands to get the interior and chassis to all slide in under the body. Not long ago, I built the 70 1/2 Baldwin Motion Camaro which shares the same body, interior and chassis with the Z-28 kit, and learned the hard way to leave the rear valance out until I mated up the interior and chassis. It just goes in easier when you slide it in on a upward angle from the back of the car forward. That, and the top and bottom edges of the glass need to be sanded just a tad as well as the front body edge of the dash, otherwise, with everything in place, the interior won't sit up into the body far enough to allow the chassis to sit where it is supposed to. AMT made the clearances on these kits so tight and close that these are issues that alot of us have found when building these 70 1/2 based Camaro kits. Hope the info can help you out and help you to avoid the dreaded fight to mate it together.

Nice detail work on the Engine Tim. One thing on the hood issue, just remember if you do go with a respray on it, the clear does tend to deepen the color a little, so you might want to stop your color coats just a tad lighter than the body and then clear it and see if it brings it into a match.

I think its looking great Bill. If it helps, when it comes to the chrome trim on interiors, I always BMF all the trim before painting the parts, then paint let paint dry, and clean the trim off with a tooth pick soaked in lacquer thinner. It's worked out for me even on some with really thin and shallow detail lines.

Nice project Tommy, can't wait to see more.

Joe your making great progress my friend. Get ya some rest.. I know how it goes, I sometimes loose track of time working on my projects and end up with a short night's sleep making for a tired and worn out me, the following day lol.

Love the color.

A few last engine shots Engine test fitted in the chassis.. I also cleaned up a bunch of my sub assemblies from all the handling and took time to get the radiator assembly together and painted the rear shocks.. Here is a few pics of all the sub-assemblies I've worked on to this point.. I think I'm at the point where I can finally start piecing some of this stuff together and actually turning it into a complete car lol.. There will still be alot of work tying the detail together as I join the sub assemblies, but I finally feel I'm making progress lol. If your wondering why the rear end assembly isn't on the chassis yet, it's because I want to mate the chassis to the body first, that way if the rear wheels are off centered from the body, it can be adjusted and centered at that time. Anyways, that's pretty much it for this evening's updates. Thanks for checking things out guys. I'll post more as I get it done.

Evening Guys and thanks for all the well wishes for my wife. We went to her appointment today and her oncologist said her blood work came back the best he's seen it. He feels she is in a strong remission. He wants her to go through a single dose of chemo once every 8 weeks for this year and if all goes well with that, she wont need anymore Chemo for a while or until or unless she comes out of remission. So good news again! As promised I am going to be posting a couple of updates this evening on where things are with the vette build. It may take a couple of posts so if you come on and check before I get everything posted, keep checking back until you see a post that states "more as I get it done". That will let you know Im done posting for the evening. To start with I was having a hard time trying to figure out what to use and where to get something that would look like braid coated plug wires, since these Vettes came factory with them. I wanted something in scale. I knew that most after market scale plug plug wire was usually .5mm so I started looking around on the internet for something in braided wire at that scale. To my surprise a google search turned up a product sold by Jo-Ann Fabrics. This stuff is in the bead craft section of their stores. My camera doesn't do it justice, it really has a realistic braided look. Now don't let the product name fool you.. Yes it is wire, but It is coated in nylon and that means it has a memory. It's flexible, but doesn't hold a bend on it's own like regular wire does. So make sure your wire looms are strongly secured to the motor before you use this stuff. That's why I notched the areas for my wire looms on the valve covers to start with, and then used crazy glue to tack them on before I ever painted the valve covers. And though working with this stuff is a little bit fussy, it is a perfect scale and you can get it in different sized for different uses, such as making braided fuel lines and such. Now the next few pics is the completed engine, I will try to go through what all I did and used for detailing. It also gives you a pretty good idea how the bead wire worked out and how it scaled out for the right look. I finished the intake and carbs and ran the main fuel line from the fuel pump to the carbs. I added a pvc hose on the passenger side valve cover and a breather hose on the drivers side valve cover. I added the passenger side valve cover decal as well as the air cleaner decal (you'll see it later). I installed the starter and starter cable, oil filter, exhaust manifolds, a scratch made dip stick, tranny linkage, the fan belts and the fan and fan-clutch. I also added heater hoses cut from a old hard internal hard drive extension power plug, with photo etched clamps that will get routed to the firewall later. I still have to make and route the Air conditioner lines, and paint and mount the battery and washer bottle, but these will get done later on. Here are some pics of the engine with it's detailing: Continued in post below........

I haven't on my builds, but some here on the forums might. I just haven't ever seen a need to.

Here is a link to my 70 1/2 Baldwin Motion Camaro in the Under Glass area. It's basically the same body with the BM options. http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=95918#entry1307641 It will show you how it looks using BMF and turn signal amber and stop light red from testors.

Hi Tim, I tried about everything you can think of, and in the end I just got over it and repainted it. If I would have done that to start with, I could have saved myself a ton of work and time. Mine, like yours, turned out flawless to start with.... just the wrong shade lol, that's why I tried to save it, but nooooo, the darn thing just wouldn't cooperate with me no matter what I tried, so into the purple pond it went. And the second time it turned out lighter but still too dark, so I had to strip it again. The third time, I kept the body near by, and after each color coat, I gave it a little drying time and then sat it in place, and when I had put just enough coats on to match the body, I stopped and then clear coated it. The nice thing about the hood being the problem, is, It didn't hold me up from the build as I was fixing it.

Ditto. It's what I did as well

Thanks Tom, We always get a little worried when we go to her oncologist, and so far we've come out each time with good news, hopefully tomorrow will turn out the same.

Hi Tim, what a great build. Man I've had the same issue with a few hoods I've painted, coming out darker on me as well. It happened on My 70 1/2 BM Camaro build. I ended up stripping the hood twice before I got it to cover in the same shade as the body. It turned out I was applying my final coat just a tad heavier than I did on the body. Like I said though, after 2 tries of stripping and respraying it, I finally figured out what I was doing different and got it covered the way I wanted it. I'll say this though, your Stang is looking awesome and I love the color choice you picked for it.

Hi Dave, nice subject your working with here. The Baldwin Motion version of this kit had alot of flash and clean up work as well. Don't let it discourage you though. These kits do build up nicely, just remember that you might have to do a little sanding and shaving on the dash and upper and lower edges of the front glass to get the body interior and chassis to all line up and sit correctly. Test fit everything alot for that reason and you should end up with a pretty decent build.

Beautiful!!!!!!!!!!!! and a few wows to boot.

Still got a few months to go here before spring fever hits Geoff, so I'll be messing around on the work bench for a couple more months anyways. Once spring does hit, I got to get my MG Midget ready for for the summer. The wife says she wants alot more cruses in it this year than what we had time for last year.

Thanks alot guys, just so you all don't think I have been taking time off from the build. I haven't. I have been going at the engine detailing hot and heavy and havent had time to take pics and post the past few days. But I finally got most of the engine detailing done along with test fitting and adjusting a few other things and hope to have a picture posting update for you all by tomorrow afternoon if everything goes the way I hope. I would post tomorrow morning, but I have to go with my wife to her cancer doctor for a check up and a booster chemo treatment. We hope that the doc tells us that she is doing good. Will let ya all know how it goes when I post tomorrow afternoon.

Morning From the states Geoff, I think your right about the headlights. But it sure looks better with the gap in the front fixed. I like how clean your build looks. Over all your doing one heck of a job on it. By the way how is the other one coming along?

Nice work Geoff, bet your glad to see a light at the end of the tunnel on this one. Got to be a way to adjust the bonnet fit. Bet if you give it some thought you could get it to lay like it should. I sure wish my vette build was as far along as this one of yours. But hey I keep plugging along with it.

Joe your exhaust tips came out pretty good to my eye for all the struggling you did with them. Here is my two cents worth for using BMF on small parts. On bodies I use BMF over the paint after painting like most here. But on small detail parts such as dashes and things like your doing with the exhaust tips, I apply the BMF before paint and primer and then prime and paint over the BMF, after the painted parts dry, I use q-tips and/or tooth picks soaked in lacquer thinner and clean the paint off the sections with the BMF on them. It usually turns out much better than trying to apply the BMF over the painted parts. I will even use this same process on the script of unpainted bodies as well, especially ones that I don't use after market script on at least. You can still try this on your exhaust tips if you want. To do this, just gently sand or lightly scrape the paint off the area of the tips you want to apply the BMF to and re cover them in BMF.

Great job on the interior and exhaust Joe. Man I think we both started our projects around the same time.. seems like ions ago don't it. Sometimes I ask myself, "is this thing ever gonna get done?" lol, but I keep plugin away at it. Do ya ever get to feeling that way? bet ya do lol. Anyways like I said, nice work so far my friend.

Evening everyone, This vette is starting to take way to long to get completed. Here in the next few days I'm going to try to spend more time building. that means less time spent stopping every few steps to take pics.. So if I don't post as many detailed, "how it was done", shots along the way, please understand. I'm sure many of you know, when your building and trying to post a WIP here on the site, it sometimes slows your build way down. So I may end up showing more completed steps in the near future and less detailed build process pics. I hope you all understand that I really enjoy sharing my detailed build processes with you all, but I really need to spend more quality build time on this thing as well. That being said, here is where I'm at tonight. I spent alot of time yesterday and today on the intake and carb assembly and detail. First of all let me say, the kit carbs, though nice for what they are, lacked alot of detail that Revell could have added. Soooooo, before painting and detailing the carbs and intake, I scratch made some Auto-chokes, and vacuum canisters on the passenger side of the carbs. They aren't perfect, but they show nice when the air cleaner is over the setup. I then planned out the vacuum lines and linkage and drilled the needed holes for them. Once that was done, I painted the intake metalizer aluminum plate, and the carbs were done in metalizer magnesium. I then dry brushed Tamiya's Titan gold acrylic over the carbs, and since the carbs were actually a little shallow looking on the intake, I extended the titan gold down, just a tad bit, onto the intake to make the carbs look a little taller. I then added the vacuum lines. Once that was done I turned my attention to the linkage setup. For the basic linkage, I used model car garage's photo etched linkage on all three carbs, and scratch made the linkage rods out of the core of scale detail ignition wire that was straightened and then bent to proper shapes. I made the throttle return spring with a strand of copper wire, winding it around a piece of piano wire and painted it yellow before attaching it. Various shades of metalizer was used on the scratch made parts on the carb to make them look more like they should. I also add a choke plate to the center carb . Based on the reference pics I have, this was the way most of these tri-carbs were on these vettes. Once I had the intake and carb setup detailed, I turned my attention back to the engine itself. I installed the valve covers and then I painted and attached the Air Conditioner compressor and brackets. And finally the intake and carb assembly was set into place. I mocked the engine up in the chassis to see how everything was mating up and to get an idea of how the engine was gonna look when completed. So far I think it's coming along pretty good. Still lots to do. My next update will come along as soon as get the rest of the engine detailed and ready to go into the chassis for good. Thanks for checking my WIP out and stay tuned for more as I get it done.