Darin Bastedo

This was just a quick build to have something ready for the Bay's Mountain show today. It has Cobra Colors Fiji Blue paint, and the only modifications I made was opening the side vents, scratch-built side pipe covers, lowering it and adding the Model car Garage Photo-etched set.

he's finished! see you over in the "Under Glass" Section

It will quite a while before this one gets built a lot of drawings and planning must be done first.

The corvette is polished and ready for assembly.

While the ferrari Berlinetta Lusso is a nice car it's far too common, and has no significant race history, and while I love the Ferrari GTO there are just far too many of them. This is my new #1. The 1963 Michelotti Jaguar Le Mans. A one of a kind coachbuilt show car built on the remains of a wrecked Jaguar D-type whose best Le Mans Finish was third. Fast, beautiful and rare, this baby is for me!

Since you are obviously new to scratch building let me give you some advice that is not nessesarily tool related. One of the biggest mistakes people make is in the design phaze of a scratch building project. They try to build the model the way the real one is built rather than how a model kit goes together. Let's say for instace you wanted to replace the promo style chassis in the Johan AMC marlin with a more realistic chassis. Since there is not a better amc chassis in kit form to replace it with your best option would be to build one from scratch. the first thing you have to do is decide on a design for it. you have to decide what needs to be separate pices and what components can be combined into a single assembly. the best thing to do is to look at how model companies tackle a similar type of chassis. this being a unibody design I would look at cars like the 1969 dodge charger from revell, or AMT's 1962 T-bird, and try to mimic the manner in which they go togeter. essentially work it like you are designing a Model kit rather than the real thing. you will find that much of the detail you are tempted to add will be hidden once assembled. while we are talking design, I have to say nothing beat a good set of measurements, and transfering them to a set of plans. These plans can be full drawings of each part, or simply the "hard points" (hard points are the dimensions and component locations that are required for everything to fit together and be square.) don't use only the measurements from the real car when designing you component. In the case of the Marlin chassis, you should compare the measurements taken from the full size car and adjust them to the actual scale of the model. All models are off a little due to material thickness, and tolerance stacking. be prepared to adjust your components accordingly. I was judging a contest a while ago where a guy had a beautiful scratch built engine in his Nascar stocker that he painstakingly built from measurements of the real thing. Unfortunately the hood would no longer close on the model because the plastic hood was about ten times as thick as the real thing. This wheel was one I made for my 427 Cobra project. instead of making it exactly like the real one I built it to fit the best tires avalable for my kit. It is made out of 23 seperate pieces of plastic, the first being a flat sheet of evergreen sheet stock, that I had drawn the spoke pattern on and carved the basic detail into. then I added the rim and the surface detail. Next I had it cast in resin so I only had to build one wheel. You may want to use different materials depending on why you are scratch-building the part. In the case of My cobra project I make use of a lot of .016 aluminium sheet. It's thin yet strong, and for the inner panels it replicated the aluminium used in the real car with out me having to paint it. to sum up, scratch-building can be easy, with the right tools and design work, but it is a skill you never stop learning.

Thanks. Don't worry I won't rush it. I have a production schedule worked out.

Thanks guys. I'm trying to get this done buy this weekends bays mountain contest so I should have some photos of the finished model up this weekend.

Got the body in paint and is ready to be polished out. The color is Cobra Colors "Fiji Blue" over a black base coat.

These are some strobe decals I printed on my okidata 5100n laser printer. I printed them for Marc Nellis who built this 'Cuda.

Body work is finished, and ready for me to start shooting color. I decided that since I'm going through the trouble of doing the photoetch details and such to make this look realistic, that I should replace the less than detailed sidepipe covers. One thought was to replace them with the under car system from the revell 67 coupe, but in the end I decided to simply scratchbuild new ones. I think these will look much better especially when coated with aluminium metalizer

I'm all for using bare metal foil to mask with, although I think in your tutorial it could have been used more sparingly to save the material. It conforms tight to the surface, is easy to cut and best of all is easy to remove. as for the cost, after paying $20-$30 dollars for the kit, $10 on a set of pegasus wheels another $20 on paint, and $15 on photoetch, whats the big deal about a couple of dollars worth of BMF? you will save that much just by not building the Monogram 59 caddy in your stash.

If you've ever wanted to do a realistic grill for a car but there is no photo etch available there is an easy way to scratch-build one. First you need strip styrene (I used .010x.010 from Evergreen) scissors, tape, #11 Hobby knife, a fine sharpie, and liquid glue. Using your tape create a template for your grill. Cut strips at least as wide as your grill and lay them together so they are all touching. lay your tape over the strips of plastic. Remove every other strip. add the cross bars and adhere with your liquid glue. Cut your grill to fit and add to your model. It actually took me longer to post this tutorial than it did to build the grill. I hope you guys find this helpful.

This is going to be a quick build for a local contest next month. no opening doors, no heavy scratch building just a nice clean detailed build. so far I've sanded the body and prepped it for the MCG photo-etch set later. I've also opened the vents in the fenders to give the car a little bit of zing. The body will be finished in Cobra Colors Fiji Blue with white stripes. I'm doing this as a "week two" car with Cragar Five spokes Chromed valve covers and a black interior. This will be modeled after a car that was up the street from me when I was a kid.

this might help too http://public.fotki.com/ashevillemodeler/model_car_stuff/license-plates/us-plates/

Oh good it's not me...

that is sir...sorry for the omission

I just read about this in the flyer for Kingsport TN "Fun Fest" and I'm sure it's organisers didn't think to hit the model boards so I thought I'd do a bit of promoting for them. Ist annual Bays Mountain Fine Scale Model Contest 9:30 -6pm At Bays Mountain Park Farmstead museum. Registration at the door $7 for first entry $3 for each additional. Judging at 4pm.

One thing I've fond that we truly need in Model contest is what I call a week two class. This is for people who tend to build only slightly modified cars. Take for instance you build a nearly factory stock model of the new 72 Oldsmobile 442 kit, but you just love the looks of a set of cragar five spokes on it. This model wont fit in a Factory Stock class because of the non-stock wheels, but is also likely to be overshadowed by the full on Pro-touring or Pro-street cars so often found in the street machine class. what do you guys think?

What part of CNY? I grew up in Liverpool NY outside of Syracuse.

I was thinking the other day that AMT used to make convertable versions of just about all their kits such as the 69 chevelle 66 mustang etc. I remember seeing them in my Auto World Catalogs as late as the late 1970's (yes I'm that old) why did they stop reissuing these?

For me it had to do with having been a swap meet vendor for many years. I would buy out collections and re-sell them. when I retired from the swap meet scene I still had about 5,000 kits. I've been selling them here and there over the last few years and I'm down to about 1,500. I may sometime this year come out of retirement for one show, have a clearance sale and get down to the 100 or so kits i want to keep.

Build all the ones we've already bought! I figured it out last night, the reason the model companies are experienceing lower sales is that their stiffist competition is the models they've already sold. How many of us have a stash of a hundred or more models? I could concievably build the rest of my life and enjoy this hobby without ever buying another new kit. Then look at the number of us sell our old kits on ebay emodel cars and swap meets. I bet the customers of the model companies sell more model kits in a year than the model companies do. If all of us build every model we have, there will be no more vintage kits and we would be forced to buy new. simple huh? We I better get busy I've got a lot of building to do.

Like this?

Perhaps we are going at this one all wrong. I think that a national model contest that takes place in a brick-n-mortar location is an impossible task the likelyhood of national participation on a large enough level to make it worth the effort. Why not propose the Revell/Model Cars Magazine annual nation model photo contest? it would be a photo contest where people would submit their revell based entries electronicly and a penel of judges would reveiw them and pick the winners. Revell gets 4 pages or so of contest coverage in the magazine allong with cross promotion opprtunities. Revell gets mentioned in the magazine every issue to promote the contest, Revll promotes it in their site and slips entry form / subscription cards for model Cars magazine in the kit boxes. The pizes could be Kits/gift cards, magazine subscriptions etc. in return Revell could use the photos of the winners in national advertizing similar to how featured John MacGowan's 37 Ford wooody GSL winner in their 1991 Catalog. it's a win-win for both the magazine and the model companies and would be very low cost. who knows maybe the other model companies would jump in with contests of their own.