question about car model building

[allecb]

when i browse peoples models here, and when they take pictures of the process, i will often see people having the body of the car with only primer (or just no paint at all) completely assembled before they go on to paint. well not COMPLETELY assembled, but all the parts that will be painted the same color are already glued together.. is this the majority of the way to paint the cars?

because ever since i started building, i always paint first, THEN glue them together..is the other way easier/better? also, you dont have problems putting the chassis and all the interior..basically the complete bottom half of the car into the cars frame, without accidently popping off the bumpers or anything? because sometimes the final parts of putting my model together, its a real tight squeeze and im sure if i had every exterior part glued together first, things would be popping off..

[highway]

Allec, the reason I and probably most others here assemble bodies before paint is so that any seams between the parts that are not present on the real car can be filled and worked on. Also by assembling before painting, in the case of models that will be competing in contests especially, there is not the risk of damaging the paint from gluing the parts after the paint is on. In my honest opinion, gluing the parts together before putting any paint on is the best and only way to do it.

As for the fitment issues you mentioned, if the interior is a tight fit, it will not matter whether you have the normal front and rear parts that normally are glued on to most models anyway, 99.9% of the time the interior doesn't come close to those parts. The chassis is another story though, there are some that fit up under a bumper and may just not go in without cutting and surgery with the front and/or rear bumpers installed. The best advice I can give is if you have a doubt whether or not a chassis will fit after you glue the front and/or rear bumpers on to the main body, use some masking tape and tightly tape the bumpers in place as test fit the frame fitment. That way you know the frame will go in after you've painted the body and not ruin the paint job by needing to remove a bumper.

[GOTH KUSTOMS]

Well I like to paint last, test fitting everyrhing as I go along, the minor body work I do, the alignment issues, thats with all if not most kits, i like to get them out of the way, plus the fact I have been known to change plans on a whim, not knowing which direction I wanna go.....

[Art Anderson]

Ditto to all the above. I have preassembled body panels whenever the actual car either had no seams in the area (1962-63 Ferarri 250 GTO comes to mind here), but certainly not limited to that. I've done this with more than one Corvette over time, which while having noticeable body seams for the front and rear "caps", the kits in question had severe misalignment problems.

This does take some advance planning, however: Often times, when this sort of thing gets done on my workbench, there are issues regarding installing a chassis into the body without cracking or breaking the added on lower body panels--but that's just it--PLAN ahead.

Why do model companies have to do body shells this way, you might ask? Well, simply "engineering". If there are severe "undercuts" at the ends of a body shell, it often is simply impossible to mold that body shell all in one piece without the body shell breaking under demolding, or at least suffering from cracking of the solidified plastic.

Along with this, almost any model car kit is designed to the "lowest common denominator", meaning that it needs to be buildable by modelers of all levels of skills--so making assembly simpler for the greatest number of consumers is a key issue. But that does not mean that a particular builder cannot "bypass" all this, to achieve the results he/she wants to accomplish. Therefore, a lot of us move beyond the instruction sheets, step out of the box, build it up in a sequence that makes sense to each of us, in our own way.

Art