Matt Bacon

Thanks very much for the kind words, guys. I think it's a very nice kit, especially considering the moulds are at least 20 years old, and having that excellent Tamiya acrylic paint and a great reference article from "Classic Cars" magazine made all the difference! And here's a couple especially for Harry P... bestest, M.

Based on a recent "Classic Cars" article about the most authentic/least restored XKSS, recently returned to the road, this is Revell's ageing but still rather good 1/24 kit: The aggressive look: The family tree:

OK... I'm calling this one done: ...and since it was a compare and contrast, here are the two together: Wash-up and verdict to come, and full XKSS gallery separately... bestest, M.

Thanks, Charlie. I think I'm on the home stretch now: Just need to wait for the glue to set before cleaning up the body, then it's time for decals and number plates and then I think it'll be done. Proper photos over the weekend... it's only when you get it outside you can see what colour the Tamiya British Green really is. bestest, M.

The chromed shield around the exhaust is supposed to fit flush to the fairing at the front, and as moulded it's way too thick. I tried every which way, but in the end I cut the fairing and the exposed end of the pipes off the exhaust piece, and fitted the pipes into the chrome shield. I then fitted the fairing at the front into its slot and glued the shield and pipes in place behind it. Slow and steady progress fitting the chrome bits, and the wheels are now in place. bestest, M.

Finished the hood and sorta "tonneau cover" thingy: The fit of the windscreen is not great, but it can be improved with a bit of carving around the bottom corners. The chrome exhaust shield benefits from drilling the holes a little deeper and painting them black... bestest, M.

I'm quite pleased with this: The crucial thing is some self adhesive metallic plastic from your local art shop. We used to call it "sticky-backed plastic" in Blue Peter days! From top left: the headlights; cover in Tamiya Masking Tape and draw around the edge in pencil; peel off the tape and stick it to the self-adhesive plastic; cut inside the pencil line with a sharp knife; cut around the full shape with curved nail scissors (much easier to do when it's all attached to the sheet); peel off the frame; apply to the headlight. ... and the bonnet mountings worked: That's a relief! ...and now... I have to admit... it wasn't as easy as the neat picture made it look... bestest, M.

Thanks, guys... I think this is pretty much it for the engine: OOB except I've added a couple of pipes to the carburettors. You could spend hours detailing the engine bay if you have good photos, as I do, but I decided just to "busy it up" a little. The completed cockpit. Nice and simple, just a few parts and four decals, but it looks like the real thing... The state of play at the moment. Bonnet is set on its mountings, and is taped closed while the cement sets thoroughly, which (hopefully) will result in a bonnet that clicks shut and stays shut when it's finished.The headlight lenses are in, with the usual trimming and dry-fits. One day someone will make a car kit with faired-in headlight covers that actually fit! The windscreen is drying - the thick black rubber seal is highly visible on the real thing, and disguises the oversized chromework nicely. Hood is in primer, and that odd-shaped bit at the bottom of the picture is some lead foil which will be the leather cover behind the seats. The hole is for the filler cap. Now to figure out how to make a chrome surround for the headlight covers... bestest, M.

That looks brilliant. I didn't really care much for the 250LM until last week, when we found a Corgi Die-cast in the local charity shop for £2.99. Now I _really_ need one of those kits! Especially if it can be made to look like that! The wheels, particularly, look WAAAAY better than I expected... bestest, M.

These are the new sidescreens: The plastic is from an Easter egg package; the framing is kitchen foil bent double, with white glue to hold it together, and the "rivets" embossed into the back using a 0.25mm Rotring pen. Here's a couple of "dry fits" to see what it might look like... Lots more work to do, but I'm feeling hopeful that it will come together nicely... bestest, M.

Tamiya sprays are pretty impressive! Three coats and this is what you get. No polishing yet, this is straight out of the can... bestest, M.

Yep.. the original E-types had triple 2" SU carburettors, and about 270bhp from the 4.2 engine. Then the US emissions laws kicked in, and they ended up with twin Strombergs and 170bhp.... though that was measured slightly differently, and the real power loss wasn't quite as bad as it looks! Still means, IMHO, if you are in the market for a "proper" E-type you should look for a "Series 1.5" with the original body and the 4.2 engine, and retrofit the "faired in" headlights, which I think look much cooler... ;-P bestest, M.

Here's the body primed and "riveted". There are lots of the darn things, so this is more about impression than strict accuracy. They'll look less stark than this under a coat or two of paint. The lines of rivets are in the right places, there should just be more of them, and raised... ...and here is that coat of paint - Tamiya TS-9 British Green. It's only part-cured here, so it won't be quite that "wet-look" until I've finished polishing it, but I'm not going to do that for a couple of weeks. I can still work on the car, but it's not ready for Novus until the paint is cured cured cured... And finally the wheels. Tamiya Mica Silver on the stripped wheels to get the proper Dunlop racing look - they aren't really highly polished, except possibly on Steve McQueen's car! The knock-offs, however, ARE chrome, and although they are slightly screwy in shape, it's not that obvious, so I'm living with them. Apart from this lot, some detail bits are under way - windscreen, replacement sidescreens and steering wheel, but not much to photograph as yet... bestest, M.

Thanks, gents... yep Tony Nancy did the leather in McQueen's car, and Von Dutch also did some "adjustments" in the cockpit... This is where we are tonight: The body is firmly glued together, filled, sanded and then rescribed, to make sure that it is solidly fixed, but with panel lines in the right place. You can see my first experiments with rivets, but I decided to do the rest AFTER the primer was on. They should be raised, but I have a neat little tool for large scale rivets, and they aren't hugely visible on the real thing, so I'm going for the impression of rivets rather than an accurate "boilerplate" look... This is pretty much every kind of masking tool I have - tape, foil, cosmetic foam, pink blu-tak and even some Copydex glue here and there... ... and here is the riveter - a hypodermic needle, cut off square and sharpened on my Dremel. And finally, my answer to those "How do you strip Chrome?" questions: Caustic Soda from the hardware shop. A teaspoon of powder in a big yoghurt pot half full of water, stir and let it cool, and then dump the chromed parts in. 30 seconds to strip the chrome, a minute more to take the varnish off too, back to bare plastic...But make sure you wear rubber gloves, and pick the parts out with metal tweezers, dump in a big pot of water, and rinse very well. bestest, M.

Looks awesome, and almost believable! Though I think you shoulda given it bigger headlights... bestest, M.

Here's the cockpit going in: Those door handles facing upward on the upside-down top half are real "because God can see" details. There isn't an angle that you can see them from, even without the seats in place! But I know they are there... And a first look at those lovely curves: The back end is now very firmly glued together, and setting... bestest, M.

I’ve often wondered what you were supposed to do with the motorised version... spinning props on the big aircraft kits makes sense, but putting your huge and expensive model with fragile mudguards on the floor and watching it cruise off sedately into the distance...???? bestest, M.

Good luck, Harry! It’s hard to find remotely in-scale mesh to replace the wire parts with. If you look at the 1:1 photo Skip found, you can see that the mesh shield for the aeroscreens looks virtually like smoked glass. I have some decorative ribbon which is close, but there’s no way to get it to stay in a specific shape. There’s no metal mesh that has the right ratio of wire diameter to spacing, and believe me, I looked. The closest is something in stainless steel used for some exotic chemistry purpose, but it’s fiendishly expensive. My top tip for this kit is to get yourself some three-core 13A electrical flex (do you guys have that in the US?) and cut “inner tubes†for the tyres. The rubber parts are not strong enough to hold the weight of the kit up and they’ll look flat (or fall over sideways). If you coil the flex (cut into sections 3.14 x the wheel diameter plus half the flex diameter long) into the tyre before putting them on, it’ll look much more convincing! bestest, M.

... do you know how close Airfix came to doing a 1/12 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost? ;-( It was all designed and drawn up when John Edwards, their Chief Designer from 1955-1970 died tragically young. The management lost their nerve, since it was planned to be 650 or so parts, and it was never tooled up. http://www.vectis.co.uk/Page/ViewLot.aspx?LotId=149132&Section=2203&Start=20&Sub=0 It would have been expensive, but not Pocher money. It’s only now, with the 1/24 Mosquito, that Airfix have made a kit that complex... with CAD. In the 70s, the Rolls-Royce would have al been done by hand! bestest, M.

If the Airfix/MPC big one is too hard to get hold of/too expensive, the Heller 1/24th kit is a part-for-part half-size copy of this one. There’s almost no compromise in detail (As far as I can see from the one my small daughter is building, there are maybe a couple of parts where two pieces in the big kit have been moulded as one in the smaller, but they are few and far between) and the shapes are just as good. It’s going together really well, too, even in a twelve-year-old’s hands. The Heller kit turns up regularly on eBay for reasonable money... in the UK, anyway. bestest, M.

To be fair, they did give us plenty of warning that the previous “Homepage.mac.com†sites would disappear six months after the MobileMe relaunch. The annoying thing is that the original page is actually still there, getting indexed by Google and getting visitors who are looking for “Airfix 1/12 Bentley†but all the picture links are broken. I’m posting it up here with the new address so that if people search _here_ they should find the real one instead, and eventually Google will spider it linked from various sites like this one and boost the page rank of the new one over the old one, so that it becomes the one that people find when they search... rather than the broken one. bestest, M.

Thanks, gents... Skip... I know what you mean about the cycle-fender brackets: one of mine is welded back in place with epoxy after one too many trips to model shows (this one gets wheeled out regularly as part of our Classic British Kits IPMS SIG displays to prove that Airfix in the '70s made kits that were the equal of any in the world and better than most) I found that while the backwards decal idea was good in principle, the actual clear part had coke bottle thick “glass” and at least one big dial with a bubble in the centre, so all of the instrument “glass" in the dash here are circles cut out of a lovely clear CD case. They set flush into the holes in the “aluminium” dash, and the decal can go straight onto the back. It was not as hard to do as it sounds - I could punch out some disks, and the big ones were cut out with increasing numbers of increasingly short straight lines, and sanded circular... bestest, M.

This is an older build, but since the pages where I put it online previously have now gone to the great archive in the sky (thanks, Apple!), and I'm getting e-mails asking where it is, I thought I'd better post it with the new web address: Airfix 1/12 Bentley page There's a full build gallery and more pictures linked from the page above. bestest, M.

Here's the cockpit test assembled: The seats are meant to look like that, honest! I have a great article in a recent issue of "Classic Cars" magazine, about driving 8TXK, which is described as "the most original XKSS in existence", and I rather liked the look of the battered original seats. I was going to do the Steve McQueen car, but I decided that an unrelieved black leather interior in a very dark green exterior would look too drab. 8TXK is classic BRG with tan leather, and I think will look much more interesting. The seats aren't fixed...I'm going to leave as much as possible out of the cockpit for the moment, to making masking it easier while I fix the body seams and spray it in one piece. There's also some detail painting to do - the gear shift "glove is actually black, and I'm not quite sure what that widget in front of it is... The dashboard has come out very well, I think - it's mostly the excellent decals, which settled down very well with touch of Microsol... 8TXK also has a "shield" over the air intake stacks, so this is fabricated out of a cleaned up Stella Artois can! bestest, M.

That looks lovely so far - these vintage Matchboxes are great kits, and pack some lovely detail into a small space. The Aston Martin Ulster is well worth tracking down... One of our Classic British Kits SIG guys built this for our "101 Gems" display last year. You need to keep trialling and test-fitting the cowlings, and ideally find a way to finish the seams and paint the main body AFTER you've trapped the chassis between the upper and lower main body panels... Mark - I suspect Merit didn't do it because their kits were originally slot cars, and although they may look like vintage F1 to us, at the time they were tooled up they were pretty recent or current racers that people could see at a track near them or on the newsreels. The Auto Unions were pre-war and definitely history (they did do a Mercedes W158, so it wasn't anti-German bias...). Unfortunately only the Talbot Lago and Alfa 158 were "superkits" with engine detail - the rest are just upper and lower shells and a few bits in between. I'd still like the Lancia-Ferrari, the Vanwall, and the Aston Martin DB3S, though! Sorry for hijacking the thread! bestest, M.