Hello,
This here is the most annoying and the most irritating model that I ever put together. It’s the Escort Mk1 Rally from Belkits, converted to a street version with help of some stuff by Scaleproduction from Germany, and Highlight Model Studio bits by Eero Kumanto from Finnland.
When Belkits annouced the kit I got tons of mail from friends. Me, the Ford nut will sureley be happy about it? No. Not really.
The kit shows the bubble flared version on minilites (which I can’t stand) and I’d much rather have normal car (actually it’s very sad that it needs a sports version to make a very popular family car like the Escort).
However, on my daily hunt for old junk I found an ad, someone was selling a really evil looking Escort that had the wide wheelarches, shortly after I found the kit for cheap and I got it thinking that it will be a nice break from my usual rusted out junk.
My initial plan was to build it OOB and just to paint it like the real thing. Heard much good about the kit, the car I wanted to put together is gutted, how hard could it be?
The conversion was basically closing the many holes for lights in the front, after that I primed and painted the body in the original Sebring Red, the doors and wings in TAMIYA matt black and the rear arches in primer grey. Then I mocked it up... And decided that it looks soooo cool that I scrapped the idea of a rally car and went for a full replica of the real thing instead. The result of that late change of plans are the rally gas caps instead of a stock gasfiller, and two or three other details that are not 100% accurate to the real thing.
Knowing what I need I went shopping. The rims are 13” Ford RS which are white metal and aluminium items by Scaleproduction, just like the Raid steering wheel, the Recaro seat and the boot tie downs. The tools, wheelweights and some other tiny bits are photoetched and from HMS.
The kit itself is a fairly new one by Belkits. The body is superb, nice cast, not much work to clean up. It also looks like an Escort, even though I have my doubt about the angle of the rear pan.
The interior is sadly mostly made up (floors are flat, wrong dimensions), and it’s quite a job to make it look like it should. My plans were big, but the kit is so frustrating to build that I skipped some things and concentrated on correcting only the most obvious mistakes. One of them is the wall between the passengers compartment and the boot that was scratchbuild, I added groves and some structure bits to the floor, added bezels around the instruments and general scratchbuild junk that could make out on the pics of the original car.
The rest is more or less as Belkits wanted.
Everything that I touched on this model was cursed. I polished thru the paint multiple times, broke the wheels, lost hoodpins, scratched the glass, broke the grille, I cut apart the window piece as it did fit in place only with brute force, but then the side windows don’t fit propperly. As a result of that the sidewindows broke during final assembly and I had to redo everything. Even today, while retouching the white letters on the tyres a drop of paint landed on the rear window...
The result is by far not the worst model I ever put together, but it isn’t the best either. At least it’s an interesting item, and you probably won’t see another Belkits Escort without the rally trim anytime soon.
Enjoy!
I'll race you...