29 A roadster - budget hot rod

[RodneyBad]

WOW! I must've missed the metel body build.

Great looking Rust effect

[Gray Smith]

I think it looks great Alyn, thats some awesome rust up there.. i like the color too..always a fan of dark blue hot rods..

[cruz]

Great work on this man, all that brass work and soldering isn't easy to do, specially on this scale!

[Raul_Perez]

Alyn,

I would say that this one deserves a diorama base to set it on!!

All the weathering you've done needs a good platform to showcase the build.

Later,

[Belair2k]

I've been watching this build since the red plastic first showed up as I have a 29 to do as well.

You've done a great job on this build.

What's next?

[Brizio]

Love those kind of building! Great job!

[Alyn]

Glad to hear you guys are diggin the rust. When I was a teen, we had old 56 Chevy's and what not with a bit of rust here and there. The Chevy's in particular would rust directly above the headlights, and along the lower body, especially right in front of the rear wheel openings. The rest of the paint might still be in good shape, so we'ed still wash and wax our cars. You'd end up with a fairly shiny car with a little evidence of the tin worm here and there.

When weathering models, it very easy to go overboard. It's so easy to like the results of weathering, that it's hard to stop. I wanted this car to have the look of our old high school cars, not something that was pulled out of the bottom of Lake Erie, complete with barnicles. I am going to polish the paint. Not to get a better shine, but just the opposite; to tone it down a bit. The plan is to stop short of the finest polishing grits to give the paint a nice, but slightly used look.

May work, may not. Here's a couple more pics of the rusty areas.

and here's another showing the interior shot with matte black followed up with some powders to age the panels.

thanks for following along. I appreciate the encouraging comments.

[Jon Carr]

Ok..how did you do the rust??? pics??

[Scott Colmer]

Another masterpiece, Alyn. I really lIke how you are taking chances and experimenting with texture and patina. Great stuff!!!

Scott

Edited April 16, 2010 by Scott Colmer

[Alyn]

Thanks, Scott. Playing around with the weathering has added another dimension to an already interesting hobby. I've seen a fair number of rusty models, but seeing some of Cranky's work and his how-to examples turned on a switch in my brain.

And Jon, speaking of Cranky, search for some of his posts for some great examples of the salt method.

I generally take a lot of pictures while I'm building, but this time I figured that Cranky has already provided some solid examples of his technique, so I don't have any progress pictures of the painting phase. In a nutshell you start by laying down a base coat in a ruddy brown of your choice. I use Dupli-Color red primer followed by some random specs and patches in additional shades of brown. Sometimes a few speckles of orange helps.

Once the base colors have thoroughly dried, you can spray on some water and then randomly apply salt as a mask over the brown where you want the rust to appear. I don't like the way the water beads up, so on this car one drop of dish washing soap was added to about an ounce of water in a cup. For a little more control, I applied the water with a Q-tip rather than spraying it on. While the surface was wet in the areas to be rusted, salt is randomly sprinkled and allowed to dry. I have used regular table salt, coarse ground Kosher salt and a combination of both for different effects.

Once the water has completely dried, the salt will stay in place if you carefully handle the body. No bumping and rubbing. You can now shoot your color coat. When it's dry enough to handle. knock the salt off with a combination of fingernail scraping, picking with a toothpick and what ever else you can come up with. I have read that some guys wash the body to dissolve the salt, but I haven't tried this.

After the salt is removed, the shades of brown show through and things start looking a bit rusty. At this point, I brush on a few applications of chalk dust. Reddish browns again, but also some variations of darker grays can help. The chalks add more randomness to the colors and also helps tone down any gloss that may remain. On this car the chalk was followed by some more ruddy brown mixed with baking soda for texture. My mixture got a little too thick, so I added a few drops of Testors dull coat to the mix. This helps adhesion as well. After this mix dried, I followed up with more chalk dust.

The best advice I can give is to do this on a scrap body or piece of plastic until you are satisfied with the results. I opened a brand new Revell Ferrari and used the body for practice. this is a good way to learn what colors and what types of paint will work best for you before attempting to rust up your pride and joy. There's a certain barrier you have to break through in order to have the guts to mess up a nice shiny paint job.

Once your fellow modelers start telling you that your paint jobs look like #$#@^%, you can thank them and know you're doing something right.

Edited April 17, 2010 by Alyn

[Alyn]

I let this weekend slip by without getting much modeling done. While many of you were at the NNL East, we had a smaller show here in Liberty, Mo put on by the Central Missouri IPMS club. 400 models including ships, planes and military were entered and around 30 vendor tables. That took up my Saturday, and my wife took care of Sunday.

Tonight I wanted to get something done, so I worked on the interior. I need to do the dash, steering, shifter and pedals. At bat: shifter.

These ball top straight pins are commonly used for shifters. The ones I usually see are a bit large, and would be the size of a grapefruit on a 1:1 car. I looked around a bit and found these. They're about .090" in diameter, or about 2 1/4" converted to 1:1. I've been doing mine a bit different than what you normally see. First off, I wanted the ball to be silver. I've seen some silver ones at the fabric store, but they're the larger diameter. I scuffed up a green one with a Scotch brite pad and dipped it in some Floquil bright silver.

Then I drilled a 1/8" hole in the transmission cover on the floor. A short piece of 1/8" aluminum tube was cut to slip into the hole, but first the rough ends of the tube were filed straight and one end was rounded over and slightly polished. Then the tube was epoxied in place.

Finally, the aluminum tube and the edges around the hole where touched up with some flat black. Then the pin was inserted into the tube. This creates the look of the old style top loader tranny's which had a ball and socket pivot for the shift lever. Later on I'll decide what to use for a shift knob and glue it on the pointed end of the pin. Of course, the point will be cut off first. the leading contenders are an aluminum piston, or a plain black knob shaped similar to a mushroom (stock type).

By the way, the wear on the floor on the drivers side is on purpose. I covered the floor in BMF prior to painting it. Then knocked the paint off in this area to create the look of the drivers shoes wearing though the paint down to the metal. It doesn't look metallic in these pictures, but the actual part seen in person, looks pretty good.

Edited April 20, 2010 by Alyn

[Raul_Perez]

GREAT touch adding the ball of the shifter to the base!!

[Alyn]

Thanks, Raul. I did the same thing on my 40 Ford rat rod, but with a roof keeping the light out, you don't notice it. I figured on an open top roadster if would show up more.

The "W's" have been using up some of my build time lately (wife & work), but a few things have advanced. The dash was to have the factory center cluster, but I changed my mind and am planning an aluminum replacement. This started with a paper pattern. This was used to cut out the .015 aluminum panel. The plan is to have a large speedo in the center, flanked by a smaller guage on each side and a few switched here and there. Here's the progress so far.

Having cut the seat out of the original interior bucket, I cleaned up the sides and added a back using sheet styrene. I few coats of wine red gives it the look of basic leather. Some dark chalk provides the look of wear on the bottom cushions where the driver and passenger sit. The true color is a bit darker than shown in these pictures. More of a maroon/wine color.

thanks for looking.

[weasel]

that's coming along great man...

i really like the shifter idea..BRILLIANT!!!

[Alyn]

Thank you Mr Weasel sir.

Here's the remainder of my progress. The heat wrap is medical tape. The roll is 1 1/2" wide, so I used a ruler and Xacto knife to cut some 1/8" strips. This first go-round was wrapped front to back. I thought it looked weird, so I started over and wrapped back to front. Not sure I can tell the difference, but there isn't a third choice so this will have to do.

The finished pipes; The pipes are covered in Model Masters magnesium metalizer, and the tape is painted with Krylon matte brown. I'll be adding some chalk powders to give the pipes a bit of weathering, as well as painting the inside of the tubing ends flat black. The rear of each pipe has a small hole on the side facing the body. This will be used later on for a brace to keep the pipes up off the rear tires.

[weasel]

lookin good, i'm likeing the 'lightened' frame...

the 'wrap' looks like the real thing, all nasty and dirty!!

Edited April 26, 2010 by weasel

[Scott Colmer]

Very cool on the shifter and floor scuffing. Clever!!!!

Scott

[lanesteele240]

one word madskillz.

[Alyn]

I keep looking at my pile of parts and most of them are painted and done. This thing should be almost done, but the little things keep going on, and on, and on ...

I've also started a couple of other projects, so that's taking up some time too. But, here's a bit more progress.

I flattened some 24/26 gauge silver wire and used it to band the ends of the exhaust wrap. Seeing how the wire turned out, I have to wonder if some small staples would have done the job. It doesn't show in the pictures, but some of the paint has flaked off the aluminum tube so a little brush work is in order. Hopefully some chalk powder will cover up the brush strokes.

The most progress was on the gas tank. I wrapped some 28 gauge silver wire into some springs to strap down the gas tank. I've seen some Moon tanks (1:1 scale) done this way. The gas cap is a slice of 3/32" aluminum rod with the edges rounded over using a small file. Fuel line is in too. I wonder if my Dad's friend Gilbert thought about a firewall behind the seat?

Still to come, brake lines and battery cable. That should be about it for the rear of the chassis.

[Raul_Perez]

Looking good, Alyn!!

Yeah...we all know about starting yet another project before the one(s) on the bench are done...

Later,

[Alyn]

Happy Mothers day to you all and your families.

Dick, I haven't tried to weather the exhaust wrap yet, so I must just be a dirty builder LOL

Scott, for the record, I did come up with the idea for the shifter, but the scuffed floor is something I saw on someone elses Cobra WIP. I thought it was clever too.

Raul, so far, I've only had a couple of cars going at a time, but lately, I've had a few ideas that I didn't what to get away so I've cracked open a few more.

The motor got a little love today. Due to a lack of planning, I ran into a few problems. This particular motor has the front inlets for the radiator hoses. I like the center inlet style so I modified the heads. That created other problems. The idler pulleys no longer have a place to mount to, and the center mount generator gets in the way of the dual carbs and just plain looks too high. I don't think making some aluminum pulleys would look period correct on this car, so I had to scrounge through some other kits and boxes.

The best I could come up with is a piece of junk from a "bag-buy" 36 Ford. Someone apparently didn't realize how the belts and pulleys mounted on the motor, so they cut part of the belt off, trimmed off a bit here and there, and slopped on a ton of glue to force it to work their way. I pieced in a bit of square styrene to patch up the belt, and also added some styrene to the back of the pulleys so they'd mount to the front of the engine. A dip in some SuperClean got rid of the chrome on the generator. Maybe I can make the gloppy glue look like rust...

I also got a start on the plug wiring. The distributor had to be trimmed to work with the new belts and pulleys. This one won't get the plug wire guide tubes like my previous builds. I used heat shrink tubing to gather up the wires where they go into the distributor.

Hope you all are spending more time with your mothers today than your models.

Edited May 10, 2010 by Alyn

[Scalper]

Wow Amazing stuff. great attention to detail. This is a work of Art!

[Paul Payne]

Love all the details- a very 1940's build- would look right at home on the dry lakes. Can't wait to see it finished!

[Alyn]

Thanks, guys!

Paul, the one and only picture I have of this car is probably from that era. I'm guess it was just before my Dad went to Korea, so the latter part of the 40's. I'm fudging on a few of the details, but trying to keep it fairly close to the original (what I can see of it).

I'm mixing up some epoxy right now to glue in the spark plugs. Should have a bit of progress posted tomorrow evening.

thanks for checking it out.

[Alyn]

This may not seem like much of an update, but there's a bunch of time in these little buggers. I had thought the plugs and wires would be done by tonight, but I can't settle on a way to attach the plug wires to the plugs. The wire could just be slipped into the hole in the end, or stripped bare at the end and then slipped into the hole, or maybe some right angle plug boots...

The way to scratch building parts; you decide what you want something to look like, then you figure out a way to get there.

Round aluminum tubing, filed into hex tube. I tried to polish out the scratch marks from the file as best I could, then I used the hex tube to make hex nuts for the base of the plugs.