Harry P.

Well, today is definitely a "good news, bad news" report. Let's start with the good news... I managed to glue the body to the chassis without breaking anything! Actually the body fits pretty precisely... it can only go on one way, so there is no possible way you can glue it on in the wrong place. Also, something that I thought would be a problem turned out not to be: the external exhaust pipes. The interface of the three engine exhaust manifolds, the three "flexible" exhaust pipes, the three vertical fillers under each pipe, and the hood side panel has to be perfect. The hood panel's cutouts have to perfectly match the location of the three vertical filler strips (which fit into slots on the fender and can't be adjusted), and the three exhaust pipes have to meet the engine exhaust manifolds, fit the hood side panel cutouts, and fit perfectly into the "3 into 1" collector under the fender. That's a lot of potential mismatches, but everything fit about as perfectly as could be expected:

Pink Geo Storm or Metro. Does it get any girlier than this?

On the body, that thin little lower strap connecting the front and rear of the body gets glued flush against the floorboard sides, so I can't add anything on the inside, because the body rear wheel cutouts rest in grooves on the rear fenders... if I added thickness inside those lower connector straps it would throw off the width of the trunk sides and they wouldn't fit into those rear fender slots. I'm calling it a day. I don't want to keep pushing ahead and wind up getting frustrated and making a stupid mistake. Back at it in the morning. I'll make it work somehow...

Said in my best Wizard of Oz voice... "very resourceful!" And the license plate graphics are all one decal, I assume?

This kit is giving me a huge headache right where I knew it would: the doors. Because of the way the kit is engineered, you have to mount the metal hinge arms to the body (upper arm) and inner door panel (lower arm) first, then glue the inner and outer door panels together, basically trapping the lower hinge arm, then glue the chrome trim onto the outer doors (this trim piece has the upper hinge knuckle attached to it at the front end), then attach the doors to the body by somehow managing to get the tiny hinge pins of the upper and lower hinge knuckles into the holes of the metal upper and lower hinge arms... then gluing the lower hinge knuckle in place on the inside of the body. All of this has to be done on a body that is about as limp as cooked spaghetti, because the only thing that connects the cowl section to the rear trunk section of the body are the very thin strips along the lower door openings. And because of how the parts are engineered, there's really no way to adjust the fit of the doors. The tiny hinge parts go into very specific spots with no wiggle room. So what I'm saying is that you just have to hope that everything falls into place perfectly and the doors will ultimately line up ok once you glue the body to the fenders. As if that wasn't complicated enough, the tiny hinge pins are molded into the tiny hinge knuckles, so obviously they are very thin and very weak. Needless to say, I broke a few of them while trying to finagle the hinge knuckles into the metal hinge arms. Sigh... So I finally decided to break them all off, drill through the hinge knuckles, and insert sewing needles as hinge pins. Now I have hinge pins that won't break off. Of course that doesn't do anything to help the fit of the doors themselves. If I get the doors installed before I completely lose patience and throw this kit against the wall, I'll post some photos later and you'll see what I'm talking about. And here I thought that since I had already built six or eight Pocher kits, I had this "kit building" thing down cold–when along comes a much simpler kit that makes assembling a Pocher seem easy!

I think you may have done so in another thread a while back, but could you explain how you get the "embossed" look to the license plate numbers/letters?

I tried fooling with the camera settings. This is a much more "true-to-life" shot of how the fender trim looks in reality: The camera doesn't see the difference between the shiny metal wire and the white paint the way the human eye can, so in photos that white trim looks much wider than it really is because the white and the chrome wire sort of blend together.

I managed to add a few more lines and linkages. Man, this thing is killing me! It may be 1/16 scale, but I am working at just about my limit for smallness. I don't know how guys who do in-scale carb linkages in 1/25 scale do it!

I finally got the fenders glued to the frame. It tool a lot of small spring clamps to make sure the tops of the frame rails were in contact with the underside of the fender unit all the way from front to back, because the chassis was slightly warped (twisted). But enough clamps, liquid glow flowed into the joint, and overnight drying and all is well... For some reason that white trim along the wheel openings looks way thicker in photos than in real life. In reality the white trim is thinner than the chrome wire. Weird...

Nice work, Rich. But as you know, that floating convertible top boot just doesn't cut it. I'm sure you'll work out a fix. Nice model of a car that we rarely see built.

What we need to do now is convince Skip to jump in the pool and join us. I know you have this kit, Skip...

I needed two coats to get full coverage. I'm sure the paint doesn't stick particularly well to the gloss black, and if I took a piece of masking tape and put it down on the white I could probably pull it right off... but since I have no plans to do that, it'll be fine! All the white has to do is just be there. Nobody is going to touch it or try and rub it off.

Thanks, guys. I was putting off that fender detail for the longest time. I was building everything else instead, because I really had no idea how I was going to do it! The photos really don't do it justice. The trim is super crisp and sharp to the naked eye... it looks about as good as I could have hoped for. And yes, Bob.... I'm happy to have that step behind me. And I managed to do all four wheel arches and not mess up the black paint anywhere! Whew!

At first I had no idea how I was going to do the trim along the fender wheel openings. On the real car it's chrome trim with a white rubber(?) insert. First I figured I'd foil the trim and just let it go at that, as I couldn't figure out an easy way to do the chrome and the white and still keep the lines sharp. Plus I was worried that if I foil the trim and then make the slightest slip with the X-acto when trimming it, there goes the fender! So finally I decided on a foolproof method of keeping the white and the chrome separated and sharp, although the tradeoff is that the white part is somewhat wider than it probably should be... but I was willing to take that tradeoff in accuracy in exchange for keeping the lines sharp between the black fenders, chrome, and white trim. I'm happy with the result; it actually looks better in real life than the way the camera sees it. First I masked off the trim and brush painted it flat white. I used acrylic craft paint instead of "model paint" because if I got any bleed under the tape I could wash it away with water without hurting the black paint on the fenders: Then I used some silver jewelry wire (the same stuff I used to create that trim strip on the interior door panels), carefully shaped a piece to exactly conform to the curvature of the wheel opening, then super carefully glued the wire in place using tiny drops of CA and working very slowly by clamping the trim at one end, adding a tine drop of CA, another drop further along the curve, etc., until I worked my way around the entire opening. Then as added "insurance," I flowed some Future into the seam between fender and wire to hopefully lock the wire in place along with the drops of CA (the belt and suspenders approach!).

No, nothing. Maybe it's just the way the flash makes it look?

189 has been mailed out.

This week's car is 2009-2014 Ford Ka. Who got it right: GeeBee Pete J. jaymcminn carsntrucks4you MikeMc matthijsgrit Scale-Master PowerPlant vettecote bbsbase Erik Smith

I got the door skins finished. The chrome trim on the window glass is BMF.

I saw a first generation Toronado in a driveway today, painted flat black!

You can't build a Pocher "classic" kit without some re-engineering. Some of them more than others.

Yeah, it's a pain trying to work this small, even with a magnifier. There's just a finite limit to how small I can work, and this is about that limit! I can't make my fingers any smaller!

Yes, the secret is out...

It looks like leather because that's what I wanted it to look like! I painted it with brown acrylic craft paint, then added a wash of Future mixed with a bit of black craft paint. Finally I sprayed the panels with satin clear. The wooden top part was glued to the lower part using CA (crazy glue). Look at post #126 above and you can see how I used a piece of cardstock as a "bridge" on the inside of the panel. This was used to tie the upper and lower panels together. I glued that cardstock piece first to the lower panel, then glued the upper (wooden) piece to the cardstock, leaving a gap between the upper and lower panel equal to the the thickness of the silver wire. Then I ran the silver wire into that gap and added a drop of CA to each end (from tthe back side) to allow capillary action to draw the glue all along the wire, locking it in place. Finally I cut off the ends of the wire flush with the front and rear edges of the panels.

I made a fuel filter out of various bits of styrene and aluminum. The body is a piece of sprue, the top a slice of larger diameter styrene rod with the fittings made of aluminum tube and hex-shaped styrene rod "nuts." The mounting bracket is made of aluminum cut from a pie tin. I also added connectors on the top of the fuel tank so I can run the various fuel lines later. I also drilled "lightening holes" in the vertical flanges attached to the firewall.

Back to Tom Petty... Yes, technically he has a lousy singing voice. It's nasal and whiny and sort of annoying (which is odd, because his speaking voice is very different). If you can't get past the voice, then I can see how you will never like any of his music. But if you can get past his voice, and are able to enjoy the songs, then you're in for a treat because he has written a ton of great songs. And the Heartbreakers are a great band that can really play.