Scale-Master

I'm noticing there are a lot of inaccuracies in the graphics and for the most part it doesn't bother me; it's what's to be expected from these kits. But the light blue stripes being printed over the Ford and Rondeau logos is too much for me, it jumps out as an error. So I will make new logos.

I figured out how to get the brass ends I added to the exhaust to work with the kit provided exhaust tips. The body fit is not all that positive, especially if you want to be able to remove the body. And it manifested in the way the pipes exited the body non-uniformly. I decided to use the kit parts to make them look the same from the outside. I shaved the insides of the kit parts down and drilled them out to receive the modified pipes. I had to file the brass tips to fit too.

The CA works great, I did a full How-To article on it but I can't share it here because I did it for a competitor magazine. If you search for "how-to/2024/07/cement-clear-parts-with-superglue-without-fogging" you will find it.

The clear parts were yellowed so I soaked them in peroxide and exposed them to the sun for a week. The leftover material in the upper left shows the" tint" from before; a nice improvement. (The kit did not provide the little window on right side near the windshield so I made one.)

I installed the windows in the Sunoco car and went for a much stronger cementing of the windshield after learning how much load the chassis puts on it from the Rain-X car.

I thought I was going to be able to finish the decaling on the Hot Wheels car, but the last decal was the Z28 & bowtie for the rear and it was printed in white. It needs to be black since the back of the car is white. I used the kit bowtie and printed a new black Z28. Finally clear coated after that minor delay...

I'm pleased with how the patch job on the paint/cracked decal issue came out on the Sunoco hood. I know where to look, but it's not easy to see if you don't…

Thanks Mark! It looks like the clear coating of the decals is going to work. Most of the pinstripes are applied as individual decals. They are all straight lines on the sheet so a bit of solvent is in order. This might take some time…

I painted the headlight decals the same light blue while they were on the sheet and then applied them.

Turns out the windshields need to be fully cemented to the opening for them to hold up to the spread of the body over the chassis. It popped out after a couple days leaving some of the black paint on the body, so that had to be cleaned up and the trim repainted. Now I know for the other two… The body & windshield did not fit well over the chassis either. The dash and windshield fight for the same real estate. So I notched the dash and trimmed the support bar to move the dash rearward.

The body doesn't fit too well over the chassis and the sides at the bottom do not want to meet with the chassis at all. I made some steel brackets and utilized more magnets to get the body to fit better and somewhat consistently line up to the chassis.

The light blue on the rear is done and the headlight covers are installed so I can apply the light blue decals to them.

No surprise that the other decals on the sheet are very brittle, although I was hoping the blue might be usable. (That was supposed to be one piece.) The rest of the sheet was clear-coated with gloss acrylic. I'll just paint the light blue areas.

These are the new wheels I made; they are painted Tamiya Gloss Aluminum. The tire decals are brittle, only one of the eight did not break into two pieces and one other broke into three. Actually that made it easier to re-arc them to fit the tires better.

The body doesn't fit too well over the chassis and the sides at the bottom do not want to meet with the chassis at all. I made some steel brackets and utilized more magnets to get the body to fit better and somewhat consistently line up to the chassis.

The wheel centers are very undersized (almost 25% too small in diameter) and missing a significant part of the wheel detail. I found some really clear photos online of the Gotti wheels for this Rondeau. Since I'm only going to make the inserts and retain the kit provided metal rim blanks I had to cheat a little, but in this scale and with the other discrepancies of the kit I'm good with them. I know I'm pushing the limits of my printer so I may go back and adjust a few things if needed… I'm surprised at what I get away with sometimes. Front: Rear:

Originally I wondered if the "pure" relates to the pigments. They have a Pure Red and Pure Yellow too, so maybe mixing them gives cleaner results? But then they came out later with the Mixing colors for that purpose... And Thanks!

The windows have been installed in the Rain-X car. They are not the best fitting even after all that sanding and trimming; the rear window is just too wide. And the windshield is a very "soft" fit with a good amount of load on it due to the flex of fitting the body on the chassis. They had to be held in place with CA.

Tamiya LP-6 Pure Blue for the base color.

Instead of building all three chassis at this point, I concentrated on the Rain-X chassis since the body was the furthest along. I needed to make the tailpipes fit on one so I'd know how to deal with the other two cars. I went ahead with painting and decaling the individual parts for the other cars though. I used the extra seat belts from the left over Sunoco sheet (after clear coating them) for the Rain-X car and printed a copy for the Hot Wheels car. The Jack Baldwin lettering for the seat was not backed in white from the kit so I made a replacement decal for that too. I painted the seats dark gray for a little contrast against the black belts.

The dashboards for the Rain-X and Hot Wheels versions came with decals. I decided it wasn't worth my time to make decals for the gauges so I just hand painted the instrument panels as they came from the kits.

There's a M379 version too, it looks a bit more conventional. As weird as the M482s look, I kind of like them; but then I had a pet sturgeon too...

Before the first sealer coat of primer I added steel pins to the rear wing too.

The mirrors come with rather larger square blocks at the base of the pylons, but they don't really match the shape of the rectangular holes in the fenders. I filled the holes and replaced the blocks with steel pins.

McCormack & Dodge 1984 Le Mans. Finished 13th place. This is a 1/43rd scale resin Starter kit from 1984. I have two of these kits and figured I'd build the one with the cleaner casting, if there was a difference. Turns out they are about the same quality, but they aren't exactly the same castings. I found photos that show the single scoop/vent is correct for this version so I'll use it, but I wonder why the difference…