Foxer

Cavities are nothing now-a-days with novacane and all the modern age materials they use. The epoxies cured by light would sit in my arsenal very well! All the tools that W-machine mentions are also very nice.

a Dremel Stylus cordless. It runs at slow speed, which my plug-in Dremel says it can, but doesn't. It's very comfortable and can be held in many ways to suit the job.

I've been planning and made a list of the modifications I need to do to convert from a '66 Beetle to a '69 ... Body Vertical headlights - Revell VW Street Machine Larger Tailights - Revell VW Street Machine Fuel Door - scribe Rear Engine lid - Revell VW Street Machine Front Trunk Lid - lower edge squared off slightly Front and Rear bumpers - Revell VW Street Machine Interior Add Dash padding ... auto putty Seats from Revell VW Street Machine Suspension IRS - scratch build diagonal arms Wheels - resin castings Engine Air Cleaner - reverse inlet, add large tube Vacuum Line to Distributor Extractor Exhaust - scratch build

Thanks, Dave. I am planning to do the fuel door (closed!) but that's interesting about the release. I can't recollect how either worked ... I had both a '68 and '69, but, unfortunately, my mind is a '46. That's a nice, big photo showing the fuel door .. I saved it and might be useful to trace for the scribing.

You keep making me feel better and better about my modeling, Anne. I never finish anything because I keep coming up with another detail I should do ... now I see I'm nowhere NEAR your detail fanaticism and will never worry about it again! It's good to see you jumping in feet first and doing is so well!

This is the Tamiya 1966 Volkswagen 1300 Beetle I'm using for this build. It's 1'24. The engine is much better than Revells and the '66 body is older. What year are you making?

Hope you didn't take me wrong ... like what you did ... "what if's" are fun builds!

That color looks really good on a 944. With all that weight shift, including the loss of the transaxle, the excellent handling of this car must be like an eel now!

Welcome aboard! Sounds like I was influenced into modeling in a similar way ... my Grandfather was a ship rigger in Boston and he hand crafted models wood ships. I would just sit and stare at his wonderful models.

This tutorial is about making decals from bitmap photos. I do this often when building cars I've owned and many times I don't even have the car to reference for photographs. 1. Decide what you will need photos of and either take pictures with your camera or get on the internet and Google those you'll need. I'm going to use a 1969 Volkswagen Beetle I'm building as an example. I needed decals for window stickers, license plate, dash gauges, bumper sticker and rear lid VOLKSWAGEN nameplate. I sold this car over 40 years ago so I couldn't run to the garage with my camera. I think the bumper sticker I may be able to grab from a couple scanned slides I have. The rest came from internet images I found. 2. I use Photoshop to edit images but there are many other affordable graphic programs out there that do just as well. It is VERY helpful if the program has layers as this makes things much easier. I'm not making this a Photoshop tutorial but will give the steps I used to get things to size ... this should be easy to translate to your own program. 3. Once you have edited the image to erase backgrounds and isolate the part of the image to be used it's ready to be resized. I typically make two final files of all the decals ... one for clear decal paper and one for white decal paper. If any of your decals need white you have to use white decal paper. Hopefully these can be rectangular over all as you will have to trim the image right to the edges. I have one image, the VOLKSWAGEN nameplate for the rear engine cover that has to be on white paper and is impractical to trim. I'm going to try a trick promoted by Harry Pristovnik which entails making the background color the same as the body so only the name plate will show. I'll report later in this thread how successful I am at this! 4. To size the images to scale I first crop the image as close to the edges as possible. I then find the actual size of the decal I need in inches. This may be an actual measurement off the model with calipers or from the real world size. If you have the real world size, divide that by your scale. For instance, a US license plate is 12" wide and my model is 1/24 ... divide 12 by 24 which equals .5". So, the decal of my license must be .5" wide. When resizing images I don't "resample" the image .. I don't change the number of pixels ... just change the images size in inches ... the resolution (pixels per inch) will go up. These are Photoshop terms but yours may be the same. Just pay attention to the concept. I get all the individual decals to this point. 5. Now you have to decide at what resolution you wish to print at. Usually 300 DPI (dots per inch) is adequate for most inkjet printers. I have a very high level inkjet that will print at over1500 dpi so I usually make the decals at 1000 dpi. This also helps low resolution images that break down at 300dpi. This is personal but I find it works fine. I create a new image that is 8.5" x 11" at 1000dpi ( or the resolution you want to use) to copy all the separate images to for printing. 6. Transferring all the images you have prepared in step 4 requires making the resolution match your print resolution image ... 1000dpi in this case. I do this in Photoshop by changing the Image Size with Resample turned on. I just change the resolution to 1000 so the image dimension remains unchanged. You will have to check how your program sizes images to leave the dimensional size alone and just change the pixels per inch to your print resolution. Now when you Copy (ctrl C) the individual image and paste (ctrl V) to your "all decals" image it will appear with the size correct in relation to all the other decals and the correct size for printing. I just arrange the decals along the top of my 8.5" sheet and print. Most of the time this is only an inch or so so I trim them off and use the decal sheet for the next ones I'll make. Hopefully you can make sense of this text only tutorial so pay attention to the concept behind it all and you should have no problem sizing your decals and even using something different than Photoshop. Here's a shot of the '69 Bug white decal sheet as an example .. with license plate, fuel gauge and speedometer. I always make a few extra just in case.

oh my ... from that? You BETTER give us a step-by-step!

The interior looks beautiful!

YES YES YES! I bought a '59 Impala back in 1967 JUST because I was so in love with that gauge cluster! ..nice choice!

grabbed the link off your photo http://s8.photobucket.com/user/mercman51/library/NNL%20North%202013?sort=3&page=1

Thanks to those that explained the grill differences between the Standard and Deluxe versions. All these years ( not saying how many) I thought the Standard grill was from a '39 ... maybe AMT instructions told me that ...

I put embossing powder in the same way as flocking ... diluted Elmer's glue, powder on and pressed down a bit. I put the powder on heavy and shake off and recycle same as flocking.

Got me all worked up, Charlie ... you're gonna finish one before me! It's looking good ... I'm not even gonna ask color ... waiting till I see it!

To the engine now ... the plug wires were giving me thoughts on how to do it with the nicely detailed distributor from the kit. I did insert some phone wire insulation into the cylinder cover at the spark plugs .. this will improve the look there hopefully ... The distributor has small knobs at the wires and drilling them would be difficult. I decided to use some RB Motion Spark Plug Boots and used a trick I learned here to drill thru the center of the distributor knobs. This will let me use small wires into the distributor to receive the boots and plug wires. We'll see if all this work pays off later ... An aluminum tube drilled out on one end to slip over the knobs on the distributor and put the drill into the center ...

working jack ... OMG! I'm loving following your spectacular and VERY interesting work.

I know many of the differences from having three of them, but this one is amazing me with those I wasn't aware of until I started. I did my wife's '68 20 years ago but never saw the engine lid difference. Now she informs me her's had bumperetts ... no way I'm going back to it ... don't think. anyway. Maybe VW Dave will be checking in and let me know what I'm missing.

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Very interesting watching this.

Sorry, it's just me. I like all my builds to be one scale so they are relatively correctly sized next to each other on the shelf. It probably is greatly influenced by the fact that lately I've been building the cars I've owned. I started with AMT's 1/25 kits in 1958 so that's my preferred scale and what most are anyway that I like. I do let 1/24 in, though, but 1/20 is just too big to look right for me.

I say you've succeeded. Great bodywork!