Airfix 1/12 Bentley

[Matt Bacon]

This is an older build, but since the pages where I put it online previously have now gone to the great archive in the sky (thanks, Apple!), and I'm getting e-mails asking where it is, I thought I'd better post it with the new web address:

Airfix 1/12 Bentley page

There's a full build gallery and more pictures linked from the page above.

bestest,

M.

[sjordan2]

Great job on my all-time favorite kit.

My cleaning lady picked up mine to dust a shelf and snapped off two of the cycle fenders flush at the chassis mounting points. I'm trying to figure out how to fix that so it doesn't look like a fix.

When I built it over 25 years ago, I only had three reference photos of this now-famous car (currently in Ralph Lauren's collection), and there is now so much more information available, thanks to the Internet.

One very clever thing about the kit is that they printed the gauge face decals backward to apply on the clear gauge lenses, resulting in gauges with clear lenses in one step. You can create this method for any model but you need to paint over the back of the gauge decal.

[Harry P.]

Very nice! Love the interior details.

[Matt Bacon]

Thanks, gents...

Skip... I know what you mean about the cycle-fender brackets: one of mine is welded back in place with epoxy after one too many trips to model shows (this one gets wheeled out regularly as part of our Classic British Kits IPMS SIG displays to prove that Airfix in the '70s made kits that were the equal of any in the world and better than most)

I found that while the backwards decal idea was good in principle, the actual clear part had coke bottle thick “glass” and at least one big dial with a bubble in the centre, so all of the instrument “glass" in the dash here are circles cut out of a lovely clear CD case. They set flush into the holes in the “aluminium” dash, and the decal can go straight onto the back. It was not as hard to do as it sounds - I could punch out some disks, and the big ones were cut out with increasing numbers of increasingly short straight lines, and sanded circular...

bestest,

M.

Edited May 10, 2011 by Matt Bacon

[LAone]

hey matt,

im glad you posted this up again. i know how you feel about the apple comp thing. ours crashed out as well.

this is a great looking bently. i think my favorite part is the steering wheel. just that detail with the thread around it makes it stand out even more.

[Harry P.]

i know how you feel about the apple comp thing. ours crashed out as well.

If the web pages where the photos were posted don't exist anymore, that's not the computer's fault! That's like saying it's your TV's fault if your favorite show gets canceled.

[Matt Bacon]

To be fair, they did give us plenty of warning that the previous “Homepage.mac.com†sites would disappear six months after the MobileMe relaunch. The annoying thing is that the original page is actually still there, getting indexed by Google and getting visitors who are looking for “Airfix 1/12 Bentley†but all the picture links are broken. I’m posting it up here with the new address so that if people search _here_ they should find the real one instead, and eventually Google will spider it linked from various sites like this one and boost the page rank of the new one over the old one, so that it becomes the one that people find when they search... rather than the broken one.

bestest,

M.

[sjordan2]

hey matt,

im glad you posted this up again. i know how you feel about the apple comp thing. ours crashed out as well.

this is a great looking bently. i think my favorite part is the steering wheel. just that detail with the thread around it makes it stand out even more.

This shot of the 1:1 shows you what a great job Airfix and Matt did on the dash part. When I built mine, I thought the wrapping on the steering wheel was leather instead of this, which appears to be twine, very nicely replicated by Matt. One of these days I'll fix that, too.

Edited May 10, 2011 by sjordan2

[Harry P.]

Is this kit and the MPC one the same kit?

[sjordan2]

Is this kit and the MPC one the same kit?

Yes. I built the MPC version. (It had a General Mills logo on the box and I thought I'd find corn flakes inside.)

Edited May 10, 2011 by sjordan2

[Harry P.]

What's a fair price to pay for that kit? There's one on ebay for a $180 "Buy it Now" price.

[Matt Bacon]

If the Airfix/MPC big one is too hard to get hold of/too expensive, the Heller 1/24th kit is a part-for-part half-size copy of this one. There’s almost no compromise in detail (As far as I can see from the one my small daughter is building, there are maybe a couple of parts where two pieces in the big kit have been moulded as one in the smaller, but they are few and far between) and the shapes are just as good. It’s going together really well, too, even in a twelve-year-old’s hands. The Heller kit turns up regularly on eBay for reasonable money... in the UK, anyway.

bestest,

M.

[Harry P.]

If the Airfix/MPC big one is too hard to get hold of/too expensive, the Heller 1/24th kit is a part-for-part half-size copy of this one. There's almost no compromise in detail (As far as I can see from the one my small daughter is building, there are maybe a couple of parts where two pieces in the big kit have been moulded as one in the smaller, but they are few and far between) and the shapes are just as good. It's going together really well, too, even in a twelve-year-old's hands. The Heller kit turns up regularly on eBay for reasonable money... in the UK, anyway.

bestest,

M.

Yes, I saw those... but I'm a "big scale" guy. If I buy it, it'll be the 1/12 one. I wish there was a 1/8 version available! Oh, if only Pocher had done one...

[sjordan2]

What's a fair price to pay for that kit? There's one on ebay for a $180 "Buy it Now" price.

I would say that's at least double what you ought to pay. Just keep lurking and you'll eventually find a cheaper one.

There are many wonderful things about this kit, including very realistic molded plug wires, textured seat bottoms that look like they've been sat in, etc.

My only caveats, which are easily improved by a somewhat experienced modeler (which I wasn't at the time), include the thick gauge glass that Matt mentioned, extremely fragile mounting brackets for the cycle fenders and headlights, and many areas that should have real wire mesh have it molded onto clear parts – headlight stone guards, mesh screen in front of the Brooklands racing screens and mesh around the bottom of the fuel tank. I added flyscreen to the radiator and it looks really good.

There is a very exhaustive downloadable journal on how to super-detail this kit and I think it goes for about $70. Gerald Wingrove also has a very detailed journal on his site about how he built a 1/15 entirely from scratch.

Edited May 10, 2011 by sjordan2

[Harry P.]

I would say that's at least double what you ought to pay. Just keep lurking and you'll eventually find a cheaper one.

Will do. Seeing pictures of Matt's model makes me want one for my very own!

[Matt Bacon]

... do you know how close Airfix came to doing a 1/12 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost? ;-(

It was all designed and drawn up when John Edwards, their Chief Designer from 1955-1970 died tragically young. The management lost their nerve, since it was planned to be 650 or so parts, and it was never tooled up.

http://www.vectis.co.uk/Page/ViewLot.aspx?LotId=149132&Section=2203&Start=20&Sub=0

It would have been expensive, but not Pocher money. It’s only now, with the 1/24 Mosquito, that Airfix have made a kit that complex... with CAD. In the 70s, the Rolls-Royce would have al been done by hand!

bestest,

M.

[Matt Bacon]

Good luck, Harry!

It’s hard to find remotely in-scale mesh to replace the wire parts with. If you look at the 1:1 photo Skip found, you can see that the mesh shield for the aeroscreens looks virtually like smoked glass. I have some decorative ribbon which is close, but there’s no way to get it to stay in a specific shape. There’s no metal mesh that has the right ratio of wire diameter to spacing, and believe me, I looked. The closest is something in stainless steel used for some exotic chemistry purpose, but it’s fiendishly expensive.

My top tip for this kit is to get yourself some three-core 13A electrical flex (do you guys have that in the US?) and cut “inner tubes†for the tyres. The rubber parts are not strong enough to hold the weight of the kit up and they’ll look flat (or fall over sideways). If you coil the flex (cut into sections 3.14 x the wheel diameter plus half the flex diameter long) into the tyre before putting them on, it’ll look much more convincing!

bestest,

M.

[Harry P.]

Good luck, Harry!

It's hard to find remotely in-scale mesh to replace the wire parts with. If you look at the 1:1 photo Skip found, you can see that the mesh shield for the aeroscreens looks virtually like smoked glass. I have some decorative ribbon which is close, but there's no way to get it to stay in a specific shape. There's no metal mesh that has the right ratio of wire diameter to spacing, and believe me, I looked. The closest is something in stainless steel used for some exotic chemistry purpose, but it's fiendishly expensive.

My top tip for this kit is to get yourself some three-core 13A electrical flex (do you guys have that in the US?) and cut "inner tubes" for the tyres. The rubber parts are not strong enough to hold the weight of the kit up and they'll look flat (or fall over sideways). If you coil the flex (cut into sections 3.14 x the wheel diameter plus half the flex diameter long) into the tyre before putting them on, it'll look much more convincing!

bestest,

M.

I think the fine mesh screen that's inside the tip of a kitchen faucet (the "aerator" part) might be close to scale. I've heard that the tires can't support the weight of the model... I'll have to do something about that. Something like you mentioned would work, or even lengths of soft rope or heavy string of the right thickness would do the job.

[sjordan2]

Good luck, Harry!

It’s hard to find remotely in-scale mesh to replace the wire parts with. If you look at the 1:1 photo Skip found, you can see that the mesh shield for the aeroscreens looks virtually like smoked glass. I have some decorative ribbon which is close, but there’s no way to get it to stay in a specific shape. There’s no metal mesh that has the right ratio of wire diameter to spacing, and believe me, I looked. The closest is something in stainless steel used for some exotic chemistry purpose, but it’s fiendishly expensive.

My top tip for this kit is to get yourself some three-core 13A electrical flex (do you guys have that in the US?) and cut “inner tubes†for the tyres. The rubber parts are not strong enough to hold the weight of the kit up and they’ll look flat (or fall over sideways). If you coil the flex (cut into sections 3.14 x the wheel diameter plus half the flex diameter long) into the tyre before putting them on, it’ll look much more convincing!

bestest,

M.

Not a bad idea about the tires. However, my kit has been sitting on shelves for about 30 years (I'm looking at it right now) with no flattening of the tires. Plus I'm a little more optimistic about the mesh available for hobbyists. A replacement metal filter for a coffeemaker seems to have the right scale look for the finest mesh required.

[sjordan2]

One more thing... When Airfix originally introduced this kit, it was motorized. You can see the battery box under the rear seat. Over the years, I have only seen one of them on eBay.

Just found this from one current listing: "can be motorized using a 3 volt electric motor that was separately available from Airfix in the 1970s - part number 2010M."

Edited May 10, 2011 by sjordan2

[Harry P.]

One more thing... When Airfix originally introduced this kit, it was motorized. You can see the battery box under the rear seat. Over the years, I have only seen one of them on eBay.

I found a fotki album that has shots of all the instructions... I was wondering what the batteries were for! I thought at first that maybe the kit had working lights.

[sjordan2]

I found a fotki album that has shots of all the instructions... I was wondering what the batteries were for! I thought at first that maybe the kit had working lights.

Yeah, I found this page confusing since there was no motor and I couldn't tell which parts were accurate to the 1:1 and which ones existed only for propelling the kit.

Edited May 10, 2011 by sjordan2

[Matt Bacon]

I’ve often wondered what you were supposed to do with the motorised version... spinning props on the big aircraft kits makes sense, but putting your huge and expensive model with fragile mudguards on the floor and watching it cruise off sedately into the distance...????

bestest,

M.

[sjordan2]

I’ve often wondered what you were supposed to do with the motorised version... spinning props on the big aircraft kits makes sense, but putting your huge and expensive model with fragile mudguards on the floor and watching it cruise off sedately into the distance...????

bestest,

M.

I agree. Even if it had a motor, I wouldn't have used it. But an experience RC modeler might have some fun with it. Nothing like seeing those wire wheels turning to evoke a sense of the real car.

[funhouse1]

Wow, great build of a fascinating subject. Cool!!