Scale-Master

The chassis for the Sunoco car is done.

And now the Rain-X car is done.

The Rain-X car is done. WIP Thread:

The chassis for the Rain-X car is finished.

Originally I was going to make all three cars have matching tire lettering as each kit has variations of the Goodyear Eagle decals. The Rain-X and Hot Wheels have lettering for radials, but they are not exactly the same size and the Sunoco has bias ply lettering. None of the decals match the molded in raised lettering so I applied them to what should be the inside walls. I wasn't in the mood to print two more sets of the bias ply versions so I went with the kit decals from each kit; inaccurate or not. The Rain-X ones had so much extra clear it was a requirement to trim them, but they went on well. The Hot Wheels also needed the clear trimmed because it was poorly registered to the white letters, and they went on almost as well. Neither of those set work with decal solvents. The Sunoco ones required no trimming and worked well with decal solvent. Rain-X on the left, Sunoco on the right.

The tires needed to be sanded and when I first got my lathe back in the 90's I made this nifty fixture that came in handy. I was surprised at how different the rears were in diameter when I trued them up prior to hitting them with a sanding stick. At least they were fairly round.

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.