Pete75

Beautiful subject. Looking great!

Amazing detailed work. Will enjoy watching!

Excellent tip. Thanks!

Nice work. I really love that interior detailing. Is that painted-over embossing powder painted for the carpet? Great effect!

Excellent work. First rate. Must confess, the subject is new one on me - good to broaden one's horizons! The front end reminds me of a Fiat X19 and a Toyota MR2. Don't know what "influenced" what?!

Looks great!

Beautiful work. Love it!

Nice looking kit this. My favourite era of Range Rover too. Interior detailing looking sweet. I think you chose the right colour in the end. I'm no expert, but I do have a fair amount of experience with Tamiya TS-13 clear coat... and fixing problems with it! My vote - if you have the time and/or energy - would be to sand the bulk of the orange peel out with, say 800/1500 grit. You'd probably touch the colour coat here and there, but be slow & careful. Finish off with, say, 2000 and clean-up well. Then do the clear again - 3 light coats (TS-13 loves to run if applied to heavily). I normally wait a week, then sand & polish starting at 1500 grit. Of course, you may just be sick of the sight of it and just wanna have done with it!

OK. Got the primer on, and was very pleased with the contours until I noticed the bolster cushion was several scale inches short! It should come to the line of the seat, so it was back to the putty... I am now a devotee of Green Stuff. As long as your not in a hurry it is almost idiot proof... luckily! Considering this is the back seat of a closed door coupe with an all black interior, I'm saying good enough! Scale modelling, when I do it, often feels like firefighting a string of mishaps. While the styrene gods can often seem angry, I just wanted to share a moment of serendipity. It goes like this... First, in the year since I painted the tele-dial wheels, I've been bugged by the fact that the ancient, tiny, centre cap decals fell to pieces. Additionally, the dashboard decal looked like it had faded beyond all recognition, and the options for finding replacements weren't only marginally more appealing than omitting the decals altogether. Finally, the kit-supplied, slick, track tyres were not only not road legal, but looked lame on account of being too narrow... Then, in a matter of minutes the other night, I discovered (in my pretty modest parts bin) I have a set of tyres from a BMW that fit nicely, plus a four mint condition hubcap decals leftover. Furthermore, it turns out that the dashboard instrument decal looked faded because it was the reverse side showing, and that the kit requires sticking it to the back of a supplied binnacle lens. This part was is not wholly clear in the instructions, so it was a pleasant surprise, but the miraculous part is that, despite it falling to pieces and having the texture of wet sand, I just about manged to piece it together for a save! Sometimes it's the small things that make us happiest!!

Nice! A Milliput seat, cool. How did you do the piping & strap?

Looking great. Nice to know I'm not alone in touching up decals with paint!

Great setup there, Anton. It's given me an idea for my own project. I must say, your figure painting is brilliant!

Lovely stuff. Liking the shine on the Impreza!

Nice work. Well done!

Fantastic work. Simply excellent. A Martini livery would normally be the biggest part of the battle but, with this kit, it's kind of just one more aspect of an unbelievable level of detail. I've got a picture somewhere of Auriol, sat in a Toyota Corolla in a queue for a Super Special Stage at Silverstone ('99 maybe: he looks cheesed off at being a goldfish while people stick their camera flashes next to his window! Anyway, congrats on a great job.

Beautiful, super-clean work. Congrats. Will have to check out the WIP thread to see how it was done!

Some progress made on the interior. Made the centre bolster and shaped the side areas out of Green Stuff/Green Stuff Putty (there's a reference pic on the first page for comparison). It's a first for me using GS this extensively, and I must say it's been a real eye-opener; a totally different experience to using Milliput. I love how forgiving it is & that you can carve it with a blade after drying. Time to get some primer on and see if my positive feeling is actually justified!

Holy moly!! That's awesome. Love the photo-etch grill. Not Italeri, I'm guessing?

A head-turner, for sure. Nice job!

Love the '66 GTO. Great work!

Brilliant work. Love it!

Great job. Really nice paint color & finish!

Hi. There's a discussion about it here 👍

Small interlude. Haven't been in a modelling place for a while, but am now returned! Actually, I've started to get into die-cast models recently, which led to tweaking/modding them, which has led me back to the plastic. I've started back the interior on this 944, but not much to show yet. However, the exterior has progressed quite a long way. After sanding & polishing the clear coat, it turned out there's quite a lot of black trim on this thing. Getting a clean line between the tailgate and the body proved surprisingly time consuming. You can't see very clearly above, but the indicator repeaters are actually separate clear lenses that have to be colored on the backside, then glued in from the inside. They are so tiny and tricky - at one point I spent 30 mins trying to find one on carpet! Additional pain came courtesy of the fact that they didn't fit. They would've been a snug fit even if I hadn't have put extra paint on the car body, but in the end I had to slice the edges off. When I stood back to admire the final result, I discovered the effect was much like the photo above: dark and underwhelming! I realized that, unlike all other models I've done, there was no silver behind the lenses to reflect the light. This was solved by lining the lenses with Bare Metal Foil (also required for the front lights), and they do actually pop now from some angles, although you'll have to take my word for it! Above, you can also see that I've added PE locks - a process that scares me witless, owing to the need for CA glue in the proximity of finished body work! I like the effect, but I'm not sure it's really worth the stress. I elected to fix the pop-up light covers to place because I'm not crazy about how they look in use on 944s, plus the fit isn't great on the kit, so I'd rather just set them as good as they can be and have done with it. (Also, it saves me messing about with more lenses!) The road-going license plates were included on a sprue in the kit, but not the decals. I got these from a spare 1990 BMW kit, so they'll be about right. It'll just have to be registered in Munich and not Stuttgart! The back end of this car has caused the most stress. I was always concerned about how I would color the embossed "turbo" lettering. In the end, I ended up using a Sharpie, then going over it with a fine brush in semi-gloss black. I removed mistakes with micro mesh and polish compound. It came out okay, although looks a bit blurry above because of poor focus. I always like to line lights with black marker - only that's a lot of dividing lines! The only way I could do it was by painting in the clear red & orange, then doing my best with a fine point Sharpie. I found than mistakes could be repaired by scooping out the unwanted black ink, which was sitting on top of the clear paint, then patching in with more paint. Tamiya clear pots are pretty forgiving in this regard as they don't seem to ever really fully dry. Neither the black bumper, nor the lights were a great fit. The bumper was too tight (perhaps because of excess paint, again) and ended up not sitting as far in as it should go. The light covers were too small (perhaps because I'd been over zealous in cleaning the edges with sanding sticks) so I had to brush black paint down the joints after they'd been set in place to cover hairline gaps. Not textbook, but hey. Just the mirrors, rear valance, and the glass to attach now. Then a couple more panel lines, and on to the interior...

Thanks for your interest! I'm just getting ready to start up on it again...