Harry P.

These "BUGATTI" nameplates that go on the sides of the engine are really nice... metal with raised lettering. I painted them red and then sanded the paint off the raised area. Too bad that once all the engine components are added, these plates will become practically invisible...

Like I mentioned earlier, Pocher engineered their kits to be assembled using hardware, not glue. That makes for many instances where their screws are either out of scale, shouldn't be where they are, or both. Here are just a few of the engine parts where I filled in the screw holes because screw heads would not have been in those locations on the real engine. I'll glue all these parts instead of using Pocher hardware...

Hard to believe that Batgirl was 78! Yikes! I remember watching the show as a little kid. Wow, time really flies. But the good news is that Adam West is still going strong as Mayor West on "Family Guy."

Got the supercharger/dual carbs assembly built, and I will detail paint it s a unit, but first I have to take care of a small problem... the fittings for the linkage/oil lines are molded in the wrong place... So I whipped out my trusty razor saw, removed the fittings, and glued them in the correct positions...

Another beautiful Bugatti, John!

Nah... I decided against that. I know it was done on a lot of these cars, but it just looks gaudy to me. I'm just going to go with various shades and glosses of metallic colors on the engine.

There are multiple problems with the engine valley cover. Sink marks, plus the spark plugs and the flanges of the water pipe are molded in, making paint detailing them tough. What I want to do is saw off those flanges, save them, and glue them to the water pipe so I can paint the water pipe and flanges as one unit. I also want to remove the molded-in plugs and replace them with more detailed scratchbuilt ones. Step one is sawing off all the surface details. Save those flanges! Then I sanded the surface smooth to get rid of all the sink marks, and drilled out the rest of the molded-in spark plugs... And finally I used a round grinding bit in my Dremel to give those spark plug openings a chamfer...

Cam gears in the timing case...

Yeah, I know about that. Pocher screws are incredibly brittle, and the slightest torque will snap the head off immediately. Then there's the "melting" trick... you drive the screw a turn or two, just to get it to stay in the hole, then you touch the tip of a hot soldering iron to the screw head and push gently. After a few seconds the screw will get hot enough to melt the surrounding plastic and you can push it into place with the tip of the soldering iron. You have to be careful to not let the screw get too hot or it will melt the surrounding plastic too much and distort it. It takes a little practice to "get" this technique, but once you get good at it, it can't be beat for "driving" Pocher screws. Also, this method only works when the screw is going into a hole where there is a lot of plastic surrounding the hole... like into the side of a frame rail, for instance. In some cases, the screw will need to go into a hole that is surrounded by very little plastic. In those cases the melting method is no good... the surrounding plastic will get distorted. In those cases you have to use the "ream the hole slightly larger" method. What I tend to do is avoid scews when I can and just glue pieces together like a "regular" model. In some cases screws are the best way to go, but in many cases the screws are out of scale and the head is visible in places where there would not be a screw head in real life, so I fill the screw holes with styrene rod and glue the pieces in place. Perfect example of this is the engine side covers (see previous photo I posted).

That's the 1700s! You sure about that?

Well, if it's any consolation, this kit is supposedly the best-engineered of all the Pocher "classic" kits. If you have any desire to build this kit one day, and you have a good deal available now, buy it. Even if you don't build it right now, buy it now. Prices will only go up in the future. And even if you ultimately decide not to build it, you can always resell it... probably at a profit.

The first couple of Beatles albums were also mostly covers... but they went on to have an ok career... Nothing wrong with recording covers. If it was good enough for the Beatles and Stones, well...

http://secondhandsongs.com/work/3630/versions#nav-entity

Very nice! I believe this was one of the biggest cars ever made. It must have been an impressive sight back in the day compared to the "normal" cars on the street.

Good question. From what I know, Pocher used one specific 1:1 car that was being restored at that time as the reference for this kit, and they had all sorts of access to it all throughout the restoration. My guess would be that Pocher got the measurements right based on that specific car, and that there may be slight variations between bodies of different 1:1 cars. In my reference photos I definitely see two different styles of rear fenders on different cars, so thinking that the roofline and size of the rear window could have varied from car to car seems like a logical guess.

Pocher kits were engineered to be assembled using either nuts and bolts and screws, snap fit, or friction fit... no glue. Because of that, there are often instances where screw heads are visible on the model that are not there in real life. A perfect example of that is on the engine cover plates. Using the screws Pocher wants you to use to install these panels results in out-of-scale screwheads, besides the fact they shouldn't even be there in the first place. The answer is to fill in threse holes with styrene rod (yellow pointers), then just glue the parts. Also, I'm adding some details that Pocher left off, like the external engine oil lines... that means drilling holes wherever a fitting needs to be installed (white pointers)...

They were very expensive while they were being manufactured, they're even more expensive now because they aren't making them anymore... and there are only so many unbuilt kits left on the market. As more and more unbuilt kits get bought by people like me who actually build them and not just re-sell them, prices are getting crazy. I've seen prices for certain Pocher kits (usually the Bugattis and Rolls Royces) in the $2,000-3,000 range, although prices can be all over the place, depending on who is selling the kit. As the years go by, fewer and fewer kits are left and prices keep rising.

It first came out in 1980.

The box art tells you which version it is. The box of later editions is completely different... But even on many of the first editions of this kit, the differential gears were already deleted. A kit with those gears is one of the earliest of all.

And the completed heads installed on the block... Most of the real car's engine is polished metal, so this will eventually all be painted as a unit.

The engine is a dual overhead cam design, so you have to build two camshafts. The cam lobes are a friction fit on the shaft (a pretty tight fit, as they have to keep their position on the shaft when the shaft turns). Since this engine doesn't really run, the relative position of the lobes to each other doesn't matter. I just made sure no two adjoining lobes were in the exact same position. Again, none of this wiill be visible anyway once the engine is built. You can also see the installed valves in the heads in this photo...

The engine valves really work! Here they are (along with a few stray bolts that somehow snuck into this photo). The valves are machined and nickel-plated brass, and the valve springs are...well... springs.

Building the crankshaft is pretty confusing. Lots of similar looking yet different pieces that have to be in the correct sequence or the crank will be off. Also had to keep track of each piston's position relative to the others on the crank. It took me a while to finally get it all together. The cylinder sleeves are aluminum tubes, the crankshaft front and rear ends are machined and threaded brass, and the rest of the engine is plastic. Here is the basic block with pistons and crankshaft installed.

Getting the rings installed... Since none of this will be seen when the engine is built, I'm not bothering to paint any of these internal parts. Pistons will stay black... and invisible on the finished engine. The wrist pins are a very tight fit. Too tight, as I shattered two pistons trying to force the pins into place. So I glued the shattered bits of piston together, and enlarged all the holes slightly. Should have done that in the first place...

The pistons actually have metal piston rings!