stevebarry

Those early series 1/ series 1 1/2 FHCs are by far the prettiest of the E Types. The Heller kit is one I'm vaguely familiar with, but I haven't seen the Monogram. Hope it goes well for you, I'd like to see this one built.

I'll fess up here and now and admit that I'm now on my third BMW 3 Series, but I know what you guys mean about some of the idiots who "drive" them. Fortunately in this country most of them have gone over to Audis or Passats so people aren't quite so mean to us any more. Had a blitz on it today - I didn't want to spend too much time on this kit as it really isn't very nice or accurate at all. You could sort out its issues by throwing a lot of time and effort at it but this was a fun build, rough edges on my part and all. I scratched together a roof rack and gave it, of course, a ridiculous amount of negative camber. Some additional rust stains were made using ground pastels and I went round tweaking it up until I was fairly happy with the result. Forgot to do a toning down wash on the front bumper, so it looks bright orange right now. I'll deal with it in due course.

Thanks for all your comments, and Joe thanks for those pictures - for some reason that is one of the best '02s I've seen!

Thought I'd share a few pictures of the BMW I'm building for a group build on another forum. Just between you and me, I don't think they quite get the idea of the rat look scene over there... That Fujimi kit is some old motorised thing from, I suspect, the 1980s. Not a very nice kit at all, and it's recently been re-released. Just a heads up if anybody was thinking of getting one sight unseen and expecting it to be up to the standards of the better Fujimi kits.

Whilst I've been waiting for primer to go off on all the parts of the shell I've been playing with the brakes and suspension for a couple of hours. I wanted to try and make the Enzo's discs look like a carbon - ceramic disc as much as I could, rather than just spray them metallic grey. Longer than I care to remember ago, I did my Uni work placement in a company that makes and overhauls carbon brakes for aircraft, so I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted. To start with, the whole thing was sprayed dark grey, then a soft ring of Tamiya NATO black sprayed around the outer edge. Then I dragged out the secret weapons. I mixed up some MIG pigments gunmetal powder and some old Rose Miniatures bronze powder, brushed that all over the disc and then burnished it out. That looked pretty close to me, so I painted up all the details and added the Ferrari decals to the main calipers. Some braided lines were added as well. Now I had brakes, the whole rear subframe assembly could go together. Starting to feel like this is going somewhere now. The suspension really needs a revamp because the push rod arrangement that is used in the Enzo means that the springs and dampers are really laid out on show. With that in mind, I started chopping the kit's parts up. I used a piece of tube for the damper body so that a brass rod could go through the centre of the whole assembly and help line it up and put some strength in there. The springs were wound from brass wire, I cheated and wound them around a fine wood screw which meant I just couldn't go wrong with the spacing of the coils. The ends of the coils were ground flat with my motor tool and I had a dry run. Once I was happy with everything, it all got painted and assembled. I also added the hydraulic lines to the damper control units. Tomorrow is going to be a big day for spraying red, by the looks of things.

Thanks chaps, I really appreciate all your comments. What a friendly, laid back place this forum is - very cool. As for installing that motor in the kit, well, the Tamiya Enzo follows the construction of the 1:1 very faithfully, so it's possible to have it all hanging out - they even include a transparent rear diffuser in addition to the regular solid black item so you can see the underside of the motor if you want to go that route. Thing is though, that motor is so nicely done that you want to bring on your A game. Like I've said, it's a very nice kit. Even if Italian supercars aren't your thing (they certainly aren't usually my cup of tea) you should take a look at this kit, it really is quite special. The only real gripe I have is that they don't include anywhere near enough CF decal sheet to do all of the carbon parts of the car, so if you want to build one and feel you need to represent its construction faithfully, you'd better budget for at least a couple of sheets of CF decal and a pint of microsol.

I love the red oxide thing. I used to have a Jaguar XJC in red oxide, cost me £75 in 1985. Looked like a gangster car owned by an unsuccessful gangster. The metalflake block looks very sweet too.

Finally got to make a start on this last night. The kit itself is really something - one of the nicest kits to land on my bench for some time. I started simply enough by just assembling the block and transaxle and shooting that with Alclad duralumin. Then I pin washed it with Lifecolor Tensocrom just to darken the shadows. Didn't want to dirty it up because you can bet these have whole armies of people cleaning them 24/7 in the real. Now the fun really starts. The big velocity stacks were base coated with Tamiya acrylic gloss black and shot with Alclad polished aluminium, and the cam covers got a coat of Vallejo Modelair scarlet red before attaching a couple of cam sensor leads to each one. The exhaust manifolds were assembled - fiddly - and sprayed with a base of pale burnt metal and then heat stained over the top. I also wrapped the cats with foil to represent the heat shield wraps on the real thing. The inserts on the tops of the cam covers were CF decalled with some of the spare material on the sheet that comes with the kit. The air cleaner body had to be CF decalled too, which wasn't a quick job. I can't even guess how much microsol went into that. Hose clamps were made from aluminium tape, and I added a couple of coolant lines to the header tank. The braided line is the mylar shield from a miniature low noise cable with a coat of flat acrylic clear. Whilst I was tinkering, I thought I'd add the electrical lines to the MAF sensors too. Now I need to go out and fight the carpet monster. He stole one of the tiny metal Ferrari scripts that go on the cam covers. Just when it was going well.

I have a lot of Gunze acrylics and you can treat them just as you would Tamiya, so lacquer thinner or IPA for airbrushing and a drop of acrylic flow improver for brush painting is all you need. Lacquer thinner not only works, it works better than anything else. It's all I will use with both these brands now.

A spring slipped over a solder core and glued to secure it, bent to shape. Drop on some decal film - anything would do - and microsol that to conform to fill any gaps. You might need to spiral wrap the decal around it if the bend is radical but it should work. Then prime it and alclad to suit. That should give you something fairly realistic, it's getting close to the construction of the real thing if not the method. Just an idea, never tried it but I can't see how it wouldn't work. Or just grab a piece of bass string.

Thanks for your comments. The work that you guys do has been quite an inspiration during this build. Those heater lines are, to be honest, overscale but in real life it pulls off the illusion against a dark interior. If I were to do anything like that again(!) I think I'd be better off lightly scribing the lines and running an Indian ink wash into them.

Extraordinary work, very clean. This looks like it will be good.

This is the Tamiya RX-7 R1 kit, which I picked up as a change from aircraft modelling. First car model since I was 9 years old and I've made some mistakes and maybe not done a few things quite as well as I should have done, but overall I'm quite happy with it. The kit is pretty nice, but there are some fit issues with the bonnet/ hood and the front light lenses which I didn't pick up on until I was well into the home straight, I might go back and nail them some time. Thanks for looking. I'll try harder next time.

Moving on to the interior with this, I wanted to get away from the flat door card look that Tamiya had moulded. RX-7s have a dished door card that provides some much needed elbow room. I started off by cutting out the shape of the dish from the tub. The holes were boxed in with plastic card and the dishes formed from Milliput. The handles were made from aluminium tube. You won't see much of this work when it's all closed up but it's nice to know it's there. Whilst the Milliput cured, I had another go at the rear screen. The raised details were polished out and the heater lines were masked off using arcs cut from some 40mm Tamiya tape with a compass cutter. The lines were misted with Tamiya hull red, then the black graduated area was repainted and the whole thing was tinted again. The front light clusters were doctored slightly by drilling a couple of holes in each one and dropping in some old formation lights left over from a Hasegawa F-104. The clear covers weren't a great fit but it's too far along to fix that now. The grille mesh was added with some PE mesh I had, don't remember what it was for originally. Moving back inside, the tub was painted up and assembled. The seatbelts were made from pearlised art paper with Eduard buckles. The seatbelt catches are pieces of Milliput on styrene rod stalks. Everything got glued up then, and out came the good stuff for a final polish up. I also drilled holes to take the door mirrors that I modified to have a small length of rod in the bases to act as a locating pin. Last things to go on were a home brewed number plate on the back end (you don't have a front one on your RX until you're told to have one), decals for the wheels centre caps and Mazda script on the rear panel and the wipers. The front wipers needed to be warmed up in some boiling water and reshaped to fit properly. The trailing edge of the bonnet/ hood also needed thinning down to almost nothing to clear the wiper arms. The bonnet isn't a great fit and is a little bit disappointing to be honest. Maybe I should drum up the enthusiasm to strip it back, warm it up and reshape it. Still, for the first car model I've built since a Matchbox Jaguar SS-100 when I was 9 I'm fairly satisfied with it. I've learnt some new tricks and had to look at modelling in a different way, which is a good thing. Going to have to drag out that Tamiya Enzo Ferrari soon.

That's a nice job. The colour looks good, pretty close to the twilight blue '02 special edition colour.