Harry P.

Actually I did do all the engine internals, but yeah, I left out all the brake parts. Nobody will ever know... The only stuff I bought from Marvin is the safety wiring kit. I scratchbuilt everything else that I needed. I figured if they can make the parts, I can make the parts! And I did!

For some strange reason, the seat is molded in place on the main body section. Geez, for a megabuck kit (even when new), you'd think they could have molded the seat separately to make painting easier, but nooooooo... Obviously a molded-in seat wasn't going to cut it in my book. I used the old "back side of an X-acto blade" scribing trick to separate the seat from the body without any significant loss of plastic. Once I had the seat loose, I cut the bottom cushion away from the backrest using the same technique. I wanted the bottom cushion and the backrest separated because I wanted to upholster the seat, not just paint it. I found some "leather" material in the sewing section of Hobby Lobby (yeah, I felt a little out of place!). It's actually vinyl, but has a very realistic crinkly "leather" texture. I cut pieces of my "leather" to size with a bit of overlap, and applied it to the plastic kit seat pieces pleat by pleat... running some superglue along the first molded-in pleat on the plastic seat part and attaching the material... then glue along the second pleat and attach, glue along the third pleat and attach, etc. Finally I wrapped the excess around the seat parts and superglued the "flaps" to the back side. I reattached the upholstered seat cushion and backrest with 5-minute epoxy from behind, being careful so that no epoxy squished out to the front side of the seat where it would be visible. The reassembled seat was not attached until almost the end of the building process... after the painted body shell had been attached to the chassis. I attached the seat by gluing wooden spacers to the front wall of the rear "cone" section of the body, and spacers to the cockpit floor, then glued the seat to those spacers. It was a tricky process to get the spacers the exact right thickness so that the seat would be in the exact correct spot. Finally I added the upholstered padded roll around the seat back. I made it by cutting a length of thick aluminum rod and wrapping some of the upholstery material around it. Gluing the material along its length was a real pain, but somehow I got it to work. Once the glue dried (I used flexible craft glue), I carefully bent the rod to shape so it followed the exact contour of the seat back. That process took many tries until I had the piece bent to the exact shape needed. Since there was no way I could clamp the piece in place while the glue dried, I had to have a perfect drop-in fit, and that took some doing, lemme tell ya! The material I used to upholster the seat and the padded roll was a dark brown. It looked very much like brown leather. I went back and forth in my head over and over, but in the end I decided to paint it black. I think black just looks better than brown on this car. In this photo you get a better view of the scratchbuilt exhaust pipe mount and the scratchbuilt rear view mirror and windshield frame (more on that item later... ) More to come...

Exactly! The internet wasn't a threat to model building. If anything, it's a terrific boost to the hobby.

More... The exhaust is on the left side of the car. Once again, the infamous "Pocher fit" reared its ugly head. If I had used the exhaust manifold as is, the exhaust pipe would have touched the body (and also interfered with the placement of the rear hood latch). I had to somehow get the exhaust pipe out away from the body. That meant I had to extend the exhaust manifold so that it stuck out further away from the body side. I used a razor saw to make a straight cut right across the manifold pipes, about halfway between the mounting flanges and where the individual pipes begin to curve into the collector. Then I drilled small holes into each exposed end of the cut pipes and inserted short lengths of brass rod as "pins." I cut extensions out of styrene rod that was of the same diameter as the manifold pipes. These extensions were cut to the length I needed to get the exhaust collector away from the body side. I drilled holes into each end to receive the brass pins, then reassembled the exhaust manifold. I filled all seams with Bondo and sanded everything smooth. Now the exhaust collector was away from the body side and I could add the exhaust pipe. The heat wrap is just a strip of plain cotton cloth that I dipped into a thinned mix of water and black and brown craft paint to sort of dye it and give it an aged appearance. Then I just wrapped the kit supplied exhaust pipe (after I sprayed it a dark dirty grayish black) and attached the end of the wrapping with a dot of Elmer's glue. At the back, I added a scratchbuilt mounting bracket for the pipe. In the above photo you can also see my scratchbuilt "quick-release" gas cap that replaced the completely inaccurate kit cap, along with fittings made of hex-shaped and round styrene rod, per my photo references. Also visible is the scratchbuilt rear-view mirror, a part that was not included in the kit, and more of that aftermarket safety wire. More to come...

By the way, the model looks much brighter in the photos than in real life. It's actually a fairly dark red, not the bright tomato red that it looks like in the photos. More like this color:

I didn't keep track. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 100 hours or so total. It's hard to say... I built it in about 3 months, but not steadily. A few hours here, a few hours there, etc.

The main parts (frame rails, engine parts, body, etc.) are plastic. Many smaller bits and pieces like linkages, suspension parts, shock absorbers, etc. are metal. And of course hundreds of tiny screws, nuts and washers.

Up front, I added scratchbuilt headlight mounting hardware (the kit's interpretation is completely wrong and simplified). I made the various bits and pieces out of styrene, following reference photos. The bolt heads are all fake, they're made of slices of hexagonal plastic rod just glued in place (they're not real bolts). The kit's fender stays are also wrong... they're made of flat, stamped steel that you're supposed to bent into shape. The real car has tubular (not flat) stays, so I scratchbuilt them out of aluminum tubing with styrene mounts that connect to scratchbuilt chassis brackets (to replace the inaccurate Pocher version of things. The kit supplied fender stays are supposed to attach to the underside of the fenders with screws... on the real car they are attached by rivets that are visible on the fenders... so I cut away the mounting bosses on the underside of the fenders and drilled holes for the mounting rivets. The "rivets" are plain old sewing pins, the heads look pretty much in scale to me. I also changed the kit's radiator grille. Pocher gives you a stamped aluminum piece that has a "grille" pattern embossed onto it, along with the "Alfa Romeo" script that's also embossed. They blackwashed the part for you, and it actually didn't look all that bad, but I wanted real, open mesh. That meant I couldn't use the kit part (which had the Alfa script embossed into it). But I needed that Alfa script! I could have gone aftermarket and bought a PE stainless steel script, but I wanted to see if I could somehow "save" the script from the kit's grille insert. So I took the kit grille insert and ran the back side of it back and forth, flat, across some pretty rough grit sandpaper. Remember, that kit piece is stamped aluminum... it was pretty thin, and since it's aluminum, pretty soft. I kept rubbing the piece back and forth until the raised "Alfa Romeo" script began to be freed from the rest of the fake "mesh." I continued on until I had it about as thin as I dared to go... I didn't want to go so far and sand away so much material that the letters in the script would begin to separate. Once I had sanded off as much of the grille as possible, I cut the remaining bits away from the Alfa script with an X-acto. It was pretty tedious and delicate work! Finally, I glued a piece of mesh into the grille shell (it's actually a piece of black fiberglass window screen) and attached the script to the grille mesh by taping it in place and adding tiny dabs of 5-minute epoxy from behind. The round Alfa Romeo medallion is the kit piece... it's cast metal with all the detail included! It's incredibly fine, a real nice casting. I painted the various areas and added a "dome" of clear 5-minute epoxy. The only aftermarket bits on the model is the safety wiring, because there was no way I could create the tiny metal studs with holes in them that the safety wire runs through. In the photo below you can also see one of the infamous Pocher fit problems... notice how the hood panels don't follow the curve of the grille shell. Fixing that would have required major surgery on the hood panels. I decided to live with it. One thing I forgot to mention... the kit's headlight lenses are waaaaay too thick. They look like "coke bottle" glasses! Plus, they were too large in diameter to fit into the metal bezels. Since I couldn't enlarge the metal bezel openings, I had to reduce the diameter of the lenses. I sanded them down, checking my progress all the time, until I got them to the diameter they needed to be to fit into the bezels. But there was still that problem of thickness... the lenses actually stuck out past the front of the bezels and looked completely goofy. So to thin them down, I used the same technique that I used to "free" the Alfa script from the grille mesh... I ran then across sandpaper, this time the front side (because the pattern is engraved on the back side. I went to progressively finer and finer grits of sanpaper as I thinned the lenses. The last step was to polish them back to clear by rubbing them across a piece of plain old paper, which has just the right grit to get them back to their original clear state. Finally I attached the lenses to the bezels with Future. Obviously I could only thin down the lenses because they are completely flat... if they had been domed like on many cars of the era, I don't know if I could have fixed the thickness problem. More to come...

I finished this one a few days ago. This is Pocher's first Alfa Romeo kit, released in 1968. As with all Pocher kits, it has all the typical Pocher problems and headaches... poorly fitting parts (or even non-fitting parts), glaring omissions, inaccurate details, vague instructions, etc., etc. Anyone who has ever built (or tried to build) a Pocher kit knows what I mean. Anyway, I built this one to look as it looked when fairly new, not a restored car... so the paint was not rubbed out or cleared, just painted the way it would have been painted (I think) back in the day. In fact, I slightly "dirtied up" things to give it a slight "patina," sort of. Here's the overall view (pardon the pix... I do not have any sort of "real" photo lights, etc. I pretty much have to fake it with a combination of room lighting and the camera's flash). I gotta say, the fit of the body panels on this model is surprisingly good compared to other Pocher kits I've built. Note the pretty tight fit between main body, firewall and hood. That, folks, is about as good as it gets with Pocher body panels unless you do some surgery (which in this case I did not have to do!) The car is painted Testors "Dark Red" enamel, right out of the can, no polishing, no clear, no nuthin'. I was trying for a finish as it might have looked when the car was new, not a restored, overly shiny, glass-smooth finish. The wheels are plain old gloss black. The list of things I changed, added, scratchbuilt, whatever, is long... so I'll list things as we go. Let's begin with the heart of any car... The engine was built pretty much out of the box, but I added a lot of missing linkages, wires and cables, according to photo references. Among the things I changed under the hood: • Added correct ignition wire terminals • Added scratchbuilt distributor linkage and distributor cap hold down clips • Added misc. wiring and cables • Added a scratchbuilt ignition wiring loom and brackets per reference photos • Added electrical connections to coil • Added hose clamps made of strips of BMF and short lengths of styrene rod • Cut upper intake manifold into two separate pieces (it's molded-incorrectly-as one piece) Because Pocher kits are meant to be built using either screws or friction fit (no glue), many of the parts are assembled with screws. The problem is, many of these parts were not assembled the same way on the real car, which means there are visible screw heads in all sorts of places where they would not be on the real car. For example, the engine block halves are meant to be screwed together. Obviously the real thing was a cast metal piece that was definitely not screwed together in halves... so I filled all the non-prototypical screw holes and assembled parts using glue instead. I tried to do that wherever I came across a screw that wouldn't have been there on the real car. The fuse boxes are kit pieces, but they are positioned incorrectly, so I filled the holes in the firewall and drilled new ones for the boxes and the wiring. More to come...

We did?

What he said. There's a new coupon every week, it never expires. You just need to have the one from the current week. Around here it's always in the Sunday paper every week.

I know. What I meant was that they outsourced production to save money. I realize that they never had any US production.

Looking at the car, you would think so!

Whatever problems you had with this kit, you obviously overcame them. Beautiful model!

Thank you, Joe. No, we don't get paid, moderating is a volunteer job.

All of those parts are included with a slot car body? Amazing!

I like your purple chairs and curtains!

Wow! Excellent work, both models and photography. And all at just 15! You definitely have a bright future in this hobby and we're lucky to have you here as a member. Welcome! And as mentioned... a Pink Floyd fan. That alone makes you ok in my book!

Thanks, Skip.

That's a beauty!

Where? I can't find them.

It's ugly, but in a cute sort of way.

Wow... I would love to have that. If only I could subtract a few zeros from the price.

Looks like Casey beat me.