Cato

Removing resin, adding carpet and kid skin... From the previous post you can clearly see the hard-edged stock shape of the Benz seat cushion. That wouldn't do in my 'lived-in' Roller. So some reshaping was in order. But first the seat bases got a nice cover with carpet and binding: Now the dirty business of shaping. Befores and afters evident: At home in the cabin. Fronts seats now equal to rear bench in comfy style. Leather being added and hair removed from scalp as you read this...

Get some .020 sheet styrene. Make a photocopy of your number and transfer to styrene. Then cut out by hand with sharp scissors or Exacto. Use the styrene as a template for your decal paper and do the same. It will take several tries to get it right. Otherwise, search online for press-on ready made letter / number sheets.

Perfect Pocher training. You will do this hundreds of times then... It is looking better than a stock Revival kit has a right to - great job Scott and don't be concerned about going back / forth between different assemblies. Again, it's good training for any used to the 'step by step' instruction sheet method.

Outside the box. As an alternative; chrome BMF rubbed lightly with 4-0 steel wool or gray scuff pad. Let your touch determine how distressed you want it. It will have that metallic sheen coming through. Could also polish with Novus or similar if you want more sheen...

What Bill said. Also try buffing with microfiber towels.

It worked... Here's how. First, all the parts were 'kitted'. Styrene; 1/8 x 1/4 base sides, .040 base top (actually a shim to get the desired .290 height), 1/16 ID tubing. 1/8 tube bases with .015 shim to clear carpet height. Brass; 1/16 OD rod. CA and Plastruct cement. The once-glorious first carpet now sacrificed for test duty. It served a good purpose. The principle; make a 'plug in' seat by attaching tubes to floor pan styrene and brass 'prongs' to seat base. Side base onto floor FROM THE SIDE, using the nap of the carpet to provide enough friction to hold the base securely when in place but allow easy removal. It is critical to get accurate measurements for where you want the seat to be located and repeatable measurements for each component which you're making four of each of. The tubes attached to the brass prongs act as stops so the seat arrives at the correct side-to-side location every time. They also stiffen and secure the brass rods to the base frame: How it looks in place before the top is attached to the base. Base rests neatly on carpet. The current finished carpet will be cut more neatly and closer to the tubes. Again, I'm going to cut a perfectly good finished part after the fact. Not good and my luck will run out at some point. The arrows on base point forward (toward dash) but seat installs from side. This allows easy installation or removal after doors on and also because there's not enough forward or aft clearance in the cabin. Should repairs ever be needed, the whole cabin including floor can be unbolted at any time. No ripping seat glued to carpet or turning entire model upside down to access screws or bolts: Seat cushion on base and snug on carpet. The base will be covered with carpet material, the cushion gray leather. Still to come, attaching seat back cushion and shell with pivot to tip forward. All edges of base and cushions will be rounded off before covering. Now the only trick is to make an exact duplicate for the passenger seat and get it in the correct spot. I'm sure NONE of you are rushing to get these dimensions and techniques down for your Pochers; waaay to much work and fiddly stuff. But if it spawns an idea you can use on any scale you're building, I'm pleased:

Tim and Bruce, I really appreciate your support, questions and ideas. Seems like discussion is dying in this section and you guys are like oxygen. Maybe I'm going on too long with this and guys get bored.... Negative Bruce; no screws, bolts, magnets (although considered) glue, levitation or chewing gum to hang down or glop on. I've just completed the parts to install the seats and it looks like it will work - if I'm lucky. Remember, I'm making this stuff up as I go along. A little more suspense until I test it...

Thanks and good question Bruce. The seats are problematic because you either screw them in place or glue them. Their final assembly sequence plus covering with fabric makes that a tough choice. Plus you'd have to cut out the carpet under them to get a good flush connection. Also having the ability to go back and disassemble to repair something in future rather than tearing bits apart is a good thing. I'm trying to hatch an idea that does neither but still secures them firmly. If it works I'll show it - if not... back to drawing board... The overall assembly sequence had to be worked-out and I'm still making up as I go. Roughly it goes something like this: Floor painted and bolted to chassis. Toe board in. Rug covers floor. Rear seat in. Dash and wheel on. Front seats in. Main body clamped and bolted to floor and chassis. Had to dope all this out before the seat plans. Making the seats removable will make installing the headliner and rear side panels a bit easier. I'd sure rather be doing the eye wash stuff like leather but all this test-fit stuff is vital to not have an 'Oh shucks!' moment...

Final position... After much research, trial and error, here is the seat location. The mock-up needed the dashboard clamped in place and steering wheel in position. A balsa shim base for the seat has been finalized at .290" to get good height. The final will be made from styrene and covered with either leather or carpet. I'm now satisfied with the relationship of wheel / dash / seat. These are very close to the prototypes of the day where the driver had the wheel in his chest and his shoulders well above the seat back. The seat squab was very short with poor support under the knees but adequate clearance for legs under the wheel and away from the levers. Seat back height about at the top of the door line: Here is a beautiful restoration of a Gurney Nutting P II Drophead Coupe showing these relationships and generally cramped conditions in the short wheelbase cabin. I got as close as possible given the Pocher architecture. I'm working on making mounts that allow the seats to be removed easily yet fix firmly and will soon start shaping the resin cushions:

Very well done Bo.

I knew you'd be right on this with your leather hobby. Nice tool but I'd probably cut right through. And can buy a lot of 40 grit for $9...

A tip for madmen... ...like me. From the 'Crude but Effective' file. 'Skiving' is the process of thinning leather by scraping the back of the skin to thin it. Thin leather is desirable on our 1/8 scale models because it can be stretched better to go around edges and corners or fit into 1mm grooves between pleats. There are plenty of tools sold on leather working sites for this. But this is right at hand. Take a sanding block with 40 or 60 grit on it and scrape the back of the leather in one direction, holding the other end firmly. It takes patience and makes a fine powdery mess but I keep the DustBuster at hand for that. Here, the lighter area on the right side has been scraped: A very sharp knife blade can be used with or in place of the 40 grit. But I like the sanding because it's controllable; you don't gouge or cut through the leather. Here is the edge with the sanded part at the right; it's paper thin. Actually removed about .008" of thickness. That will help when two adjoining areas of applied leather meet. I have some of that coming up on the seat cushions. Admittedly, not for everyone but it works if you like really thin, workable leather:

The operative phrase is '... IF this car goes into production...'. emphasis mine.

Reply by Hornby to an email by a UK modeler: "This model is still in development and shouldn't have been on the website. If this car goes into production it will be added back to the website. I would suggest keeping an eye on www.pocher.com for further updates."

Fresh off the bandsaw... 14mm cut off the shells, seats notched, sanded and sliced. A LOT of dust. But very close to the look and ambiance I'm after. Want the same 'lived in' look as the rear sofa. In the cockpit; the major apparent thing is that the seats need a pedestal or base to raise them. In the Benz they came from there is a base. The steering column and cowl at the windshield make this evident. Being a 'make-up-as-I-go' project that's OK. You can't learn anything until the bits are made to play with each other and mocked in place. That wood block is just to prop the seat in position - nothing glued. Indeed, I may have to thin the backrest cushion to 'sink' it a bit into the shell. All trial and error. The good thing is I can always add styrene to build up any over -cutting. The pivoting brackets will work well with this look:

A dangerous habit now... Somebody take these sharp tools away from me. Once again I went back to something done a year ago, determined to 'improve' it. After completing the rear bench seat (sofa in a Sedanca) I knew I was fortunate because I'd never done big-time leather before and this came out acceptably. Home safe and dry. But immediately I realized I didn't do a center arm rest, something all the 'Advanced Guys' built into theirs. Sad but I felt it was over my skill level. So what do I do today? Take a brand new number 11 scalpel blade and slice the center pleat out of my prized furniture. Actually, I made a balsa arm rest first, leathered and piped it and THEN went berserk: I got immersed in this whole cabin area what with the carpet re-do, and front seat mayhem so the rear bugged me just enough to stray a bit from the fronts. Back to them when sanity returns. No wait - what I'm doing to them is not sanity. It's becoming a way of life:

Looks very good Bo. Glad the Future worked for you. Next time, to get level overall color, use white primer or a fine, plain silver - no metallic, as primer.

Just before I shot those snaps, I choked my DustBuster to death with shards of crumbly brown plastic. I even have to take a bath now!!

Getting nuts - again... Thanks for the good wish Hugh. You'll see that my physical condition is far better than my mental state. Sometimes I learn that some of my brainstorms are NOT worth the time and turmoil. This is one such. Not liking the bolt-upright appearance of the stock Pocher Rolls front seats, i dreamed up this wacky combination of parts and hacks. Benz resin seats into a cut-down Rolls seat shell to make a pivoting 'bucket-style' pair of fronts. How bad could it be right? Here's some before and after; the Pocher complete seat shell. Note that the sides are double thick (to support the junk stock vinyl 'upholstery') and the back has mounting pins also for the vinyl. After butchering this brittle brown plastic, here's the core of what I wanted. Note the insides cleaned and thinned so as to allow as much of the resin seat to fit (also with a bit of trimming). This involved files, 60 grit, a Dremel on high with sanding drum, blacksmith tools and a huge mess. A rough idea of where this is going. Note the seat shell back may need to be shortened a bit. Also the white resin bits need to be thinned a bit, have the back angled and the side bolsters narrowed by about 3mm per side. I'm making this up as I go (as you can tell) because there's no way to draw this up for proof of idea. If I'm all wrong, I'll have ruined a $50 pair of seats, destroyed the Pocher bits and wasted about two lightyears. Nothing new for me however...

Taking a seat... ...and carving it up! Rather than scratch build the front seats I found it expedient to buy MMC's beautiful resin seats for the Benz Roadsters. The resin and casting is very good quality and has a great pleat pattern to go with my scratch built rear bench seat. But the narrowness of the Rolls cabin dictated some surgery (I now hate that word) to the Benz seats for a fit. Wear a mask when cutting and sanding this resin!! Being excited about returning to the bench for short whiles, I again forgot to photo a 'before' snap of the seats. In the Benz, the passenger portion of the seat is wider than the driver side. To make them equal, two pleats had to come out of the wide side. The driver side has five pleats, the passenger, seven. Also seen here is the Pocher supplied seat shell for the Rolls. My plan is to hack that and use the upper (back) portion of the shell with the Benz seat back within. It will be hinged to tilt forward with Benz brackets made by MMC and chromed. The white triangle is the template for the shape of the side of the shell when the base is cut away.: Now the seats are the same width but slightly wider than the Rolls shell. That will require a bit of trimming and reshaping of the side bolsters. The base of the shell will be removed: The resin seats are cast with a dip in the center which required the pleats be removed from each side or they would be misshapen: The cut-down seat needs some trimming of the sides for a perfect fit: A mock-up in the cabin shows why the need for the cuts. The bolsters and edges will be trimmed and shaped so this is just a temporary look. All I could manage today:

Heh, heh, heh...all just preparation for the Pocher Beatings....

This Bug has 'positive camber'; the tops of the wheels tip outward when viewed from the front. Largely because of such narrow tread width. All race cars and many street cars today have 'negative camber' where the wheels tip inboard at the top. This plants wide tires more upright under hard cornering, increasing the contact patch. All are measured in degrees. Street cars are all less than 1 degree neg and racecars can be as much as 4 -4 1/2. They don't care about tire wear, only maximum cornering traction. 'Toe in' is when viewed from above, the front edge of the wheels point towards each other. This is measured usually in fractions of an inch. Neutral or 'Toe out' is used on race cars to help turn-in ability. And take better pictures so we can throw stones at your work !!!!

The white you want is called Wimbledon White. It is NOT a bright white.

A slow return to the bench... A very slow recovery has given me plenty of time to re-think some past assemblies and plan some other new ones. Not well enough to tackle the 'engineering' biggies like the door latches and window frame fitment but art / craft paper doll stuff is a start. One such project is the cabin's carpet. Much earlier in the build I showed my solution with velour doll house carpet and 'binding' I made with shrink tube. It never really suited me although it was acceptable. Fast forward nearly a year and I finally noodled-out a plan for proper binding. I came across leather piping or lacing as it's known, which was the big 'lights-on' idea. Here is the original carpet with the gray shrink edging next to the new bound edged carpet; they are EXCATLY cut from the same piece of carpet but pictures and available light make them look different colors. Each photo here is a slightly different color but the darker-looking ones are correct. It's a pretty close match for the red of the fenders / body: The big discovery was the lacing. There are several sites that sell it and I found a good one. They sell 3 meter packages of the lacing, all genuine leather. They have a large color selection but it's difficult to match on screen. I took best guess and picked two that sort of 'bracket' my rug color. The other difficult part was knowing what diameter (thickness) to be correct to scale. For the carpet I took a blind guess at 1.5mm; for seat use (gray) I chose 1mm. Better lucky than good, I came out just right. Here's the leather lacing: I made a paper template of the cabin floor and then another one whose outer edges were 1mm smaller (not 1.5) than the floor. I then cut a piece of .005 styrene sheet (which I forgot to photo!) using the floor template. The idea being to cut the carpet to its template and mount it on the styrene with a 'border' showing. This to allow the lacing a gluing surface other than just the cut edge of carpeting with a bit of overlap so the plastic doesn't show on the edge. Glued the rug to styrene using double side tape and gel CA in a couple of dots at corners. Clear as mud, right?? Here's what it looks like: http:// Here's what it looks like in place. The slight bubble on the right side is because it's just resting in place snugly. It will be completely flat when glued in, using Aileen's Tacky Glue. Also seen is the aluminum exposed panel below the foot pedals. The edge of carpet needs a tiny trimming and piping to clear the left edge of the exposed panel: http:// http:// http:// A little 'dress rehearsal' in place in the cabin. I'm pleased because it's more in scale and hardly noticeable, which is very much like 1:1. It's just a subtle neat edge and I'm pretty relieved it bugged me enough to change. More girly arts / crafts stuff until I can put 6 hours in one sitting doing the 'big stuff'. But this is a satisfying start and it's good to be back. I'm obviously in no rush or losing interest in my beloved Roller. Funny how, with the passage of time, you can look at your work and say 'I could have done that better'...

Apologize for the mistake but that photo of the seat base separate with the hole at the rear got me wondering. A pleasure to look at and follow your work. I TRY to help but you're doing fine without me..