Harry P.

Maybe a "wooden" rim, maybe the factory black wheel. Not sure yet.

Have a good one, Chuck! And thanks for all your help...

And here is where it stands as of right now. The body is installed, and there is one coat of Future on the bodywork so far. I'll probably add a second coat. The ribs on the running boards are BMF. On the real car, there are smaller, thiner strips of rubber inset into each chrome strip, but at this scale there's no feasible way to create that detail. I thought about slicing some very narrow strips of electrical tape and trying to do them that way. Maybe I'll still give that a try and see how it looks. Once I got some clear on that brown body, I was a lot happier with the look. It's definitely not a "normal" Jaguar color!

Before I painted the body, there were a few mold seam lines to deal with...

Here's a closer look at the engine. I used ship model rigging thread for the ignition wires, but I painted the tan thread yelloe to simulate that cloth-covered ignition wiring from back in the day...

Ok, here is the point where any Jaguar purists out there may want to cover your eyes. Or at least sit down... ... because I am about to reveal the fact that I'm painting this Jaguar brown. Yep. Brown. I know, I know... a brown Jaguar? Blasphemy!!! But I wanted to try something different, not the expected BRG or red. So I got a can of Krylon "Short Cuts"... the color is "Expresso," which is a nice, rich chocolatey brown. In the next photo you can see the seats installed, and the engine finished and installed. At this point, there is no clear coat on the body color yet:

The exhaust manifolds both had a sink mark on them . A little dab of Bondo took care of that...

First step of the seats is cleaning up the parts... there was some flash on both the bottom cushions and seatbacks, and on the pivot pins (the seatbacks fold forward). Once I had the seat parts cleaned up, I scrubbed them with fine steel wool to break the surface gloss of the plastic and give the acrylic paint I will be using something to grab onto. Then I used a drop of CA in spots where it won't be visible on the finished seats and glued the pieces to some pieces of scrap wood "handles." The seats were then painted with acrylic craft paint (color: Ocher), and when dry I dipped the painted parts into wood stain. The stain actually gets absorbed by the porous acrylic paint and gives me a nice "leather" look. I painted the back sides of the seatbacks the same color as what I used for the interior "carpet." The final step was a coat of matte acrylic spray to knock down the shine a notch. The seats were then installed:

Ok, the decal idea didn't go so well... I do want a "wooden" dash, so there are two ways to go... either cut a piece of basswood to shape, drill out for all the gauges and control knobs, sand smooth, stain, sand again, then several coats of Future. Lots of work for such a small dash. Option two: just paint the dash a "wood" color... at this scale, it would be visually almost impossible to tell if the dash was painted or real wood. I went with Option two. I simply painted the dash to look like wood, and added bezels to the main gauges made of rings cut off of aluminum tubing. The minor gauges should have bezels, too, but I don't have the correct diameter tubing on hand, so I'll add those later. I scratchbuilt all the knobs, switches, and warning lights on the dash, everything made of aluminum tubing and sewing pins. The large black knob near the center of the dash is actually a leftover Pocher breather cap! And the slot for the ignition key is a leftover Pocher screw, the slot in the screw head makes a good key slot. And yes, I know the gauge faces are not factory correct (they are the kit supplied decals)... but since my Jaguar owner switched out the stock dash and replaced it with a custom piece, he also switched out the gauges and replaced them with aftermarket ones...

So... I'm guessing my last posted lyrics aren't going to be ID'd?

A couple of unknown kids covering The Band Perry... and just about as good as the original!

I saw the Imperial Palace collection several years ago. Pretty impressive. It's still there, but the Imperial Palace is now the Linq. https://www.caesars.com/linq/things-to-do/the-auto-collections#.VSR76yjVCzc

That was in the Imperial Palace.

You're comparing a 40+ year old Charger to a new Viper????

The girl in the RR illustration looks really mad!

Who?

Rent a Viper and drive through the desert as fast as you dare...

Oh, I'm doing the wood... just in a different way... Skip's just going to have to deal with it...

Someone (I forgot who) posted that all the lyrics we're putting up are basically "oldies." True, most of the songs we're posting are "classics," so here's a new song that I really like, from a band I really like... "I want her long blonde hair, I want her magic touch. Yeah, ‘cause maybe then, you’d want me just as much"... BTW... I posted lyrics from another brand new song a few pages back and nobody answered...

But when the decal got wet, this is what happened... Time for Plan B...

Let's build the dash. The real car's dash was steel, painted body color. But the kit includes a neat "wood" decal to simulate a wooden dash, and I like that look, even though it's not technically factory correct. So Plan A was to go with the kit-supplied decal... Notice in the above photo, however, that the dash has all the control knobs and switches molded in place. Getting that dash decal to snuggle down around all of those protrusions, and then detail paitning all of the switches and knobs, would be impossible. So I decided to remove all surface protrusions to allow the decal to be used. I drilled a small locator hole where each knob/switch had been (and added a couple of locator holes for items missing on the kit dash) to guide me when I replaced them all with scratchbuilt items:

Get ready to be disappointed... The kit wires are staying. I've seen various methods of making wire wheels, including using actual individual bits of wire and drilling the rims and hubs and replacing the spokes one by one by lacing the replacements in the correct pattern with the correct overlay and spacing on the rim. And I've seen the method where you wrap a length of wire in a certain pattern around the hubs and the rims (that's actually how the wheels in the Mercedes SS I posted a while ago were made, but the kit rims and hubs were already engineered for that process))... but I am way too lazy to even think about making scratchbuilt wire wheels in 1/16 scale that would actually look good and be "in scale." Imagine how hard it would be to make 1/16 scale wire wheels with spokes in scale! That's more trouble than I'm willing to go through. If this was a 1/8 scale model, maybe. But at this tiny size the wheels are just a hair more than an inch across). No way am I going to even try that. PS: I've built my share of spoke-by-spoke wire wheels for my Pocher kits. Those are both much larger (1/8 scale) and engineered that way from the start, with pre-cut individual spokes, individual nipples, and hubs and rims with the all the appropriate connection points already accounted for... and even then, building those wheels is a huge PITA! I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to scratchbuild wire wheels at half that scale. Gerald Wingrove can do it... I pass!

Hmmm... you may be right! Exactly. I just carefully cut around it using that need-nose grinding bit in the photo.

I like to skip around when I build a kit... I usually don't do step 1, then step 2, then 3, etc. I decided to put aside the engine and chassis for a while and handle some of the details. Let's start with the radiator shell. It has the open mesh molded solid. I could have tried a black wash to bring out the mesh detail, but the mesh is so faint and shallowly molded that I didn't think a wash would do. Here's the kit piece as is... I decided I had to open up the grille shell and replace the molded-in "mesh" with real, open mesh. Also, the plating on this piece was really nice, so I wanted to save it and not mess it up while I reworked the shell. That meant cutting out the mesh area using a couple of Dremel cutting/grinding bits, and being very careful and working slowly... Once I had the shell opened up, I cleaned up the bare edges, and added a strip of foil to cover the bare edges. Then I made a template of the opening, using an old business card. I folded the card, and held it over the outside of the shell and traced the opening from the inside. I added a bit all around so that my new mesh piece would have enough edges so that I could glue the mesh in place from the inside. Then I transferred my template to a piece of foberglass window screen, cut the mesh piece out, sprayed it gloss black, then "chromed" the mesh with Spaz Stix: And here's the end result:

I made boots for the spark plugs out of bits of aluminum tube and painted them flat black before installation. You can see that I stuck them on the end of shish kabob skewers to hold them while I painted them. These skewers make great "handles" to hold various parts for painting... they have 1,001 uses!