Dave B Posted January 11, 2014 Posted January 11, 2014 A friend of mine managed to get 3 Merit's and a pair of Chinese friction toy Lotus XI's a little while back. The Lotus were bought on the understanding that I would probably get 1 out of the 2 available. I have been working on them for a while. I used resin seats, and wheel/tyre combination that I made up using the Tamiya Lotus 7 tyre and a 60's Lotus wobbly slot car insert. Headlight buckets are aluminium tube and I vacformed the headlight covers & screens after making a mould from DF for the full screen conversion Tks for looking Dave B
PappyD340 Posted January 11, 2014 Posted January 11, 2014 WOW, Fantastic save Dave, they look great!!
bbowser Posted January 11, 2014 Posted January 11, 2014 Nice work. I wouldn't have thought you could do anything with those.
Rossa156 Posted January 11, 2014 Posted January 11, 2014 Dave, You did a great job in converting the Loti. The paint schemes look very 50-ish, too. Nice stuff my friend. Patyrick
Bernard Kron Posted January 11, 2014 Posted January 11, 2014 (edited) The Merit XI is one of my holy grails. It would actually get me to build a curbside. Yours are beautiful. And to have 2 so you could open one up! Where did you get the waffle wheels? The Merit came with their trademark wires. It seems so obvious to me that someone should take a Merit and make a resin master of it, nicely cast in that magical thin resin that Norm Veber does so well... The thinner resin would allow the more masochistically inclined to contemplate a full detail build... Ditto the Scarab Mk. 1 and (I can dream, can't I) the Devin SS. All in 1/24th or 1/25th of course! (Oh yeah and my B list would include the Sadler Mk. 1, the Lister Jaguar in both the original and streamline versions, and.... - it was such a beautiful era for sportscar design.) Edited January 12, 2014 by Bernard Kron
Silver Foxx Posted January 11, 2014 Posted January 11, 2014 Terrific work on these , they look excellent.
Dave B Posted January 12, 2014 Author Posted January 12, 2014 Hi guys, Thanks all for your kind words. Patrick, I looked at a lot of period photo's before settling on the paint schemes, only wish I had used the central roundel (on the bonnet) on the maroon/silver car and the offset roundel on the blue. Bernard, I made the waffle wheels. I used a inner wheel rim with a outside diameter that matched the Tamiya Super 7 tyre. I placed a '60's Lotus wheel insert from a slot car in it and made a mould of the wheel & tyre complete. It's not a 2 part mould, is also a little rough, but works nice under the XI's guards. It's always nice to save an old kit/toy. Thanks again Dave B
cartpix Posted January 13, 2014 Posted January 13, 2014 I can't believe those are the same models, you started with. Fantastic job. It's like you made a photograph, from a cartoon.
Speedfreak Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 Awsome work! This web site just keeps on amazing me with the work people do!
jbwelda Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 (edited) fantastic, I never thought I would see two of them together! and the open cockpit vs the closed one is interesting. did you cut that all out and construct all the detail? nice job! there was a resin kit available at one time; I bought one. it really improved over the merit kit in its wire wheels, while they weren't photo etch, they did have a good depth and look to them at least compared to the Merit kit wheels. here are a couple of photos of the resin kit, main funny thing was that on the original kit, the left side headlamp cavity was really weak on the top half of the body. whoever did the resin copy reinforced that area but made it look a little less round and it looks kind of funny. and I have had two of the merit kits and in both the top side of the left headlamp area were shaped funny, almost short-shot in the molds. the other thing was the raised panel lines, those are a real experience. you can see I didn't even deal with it, but one of these days I am thinking about laying down some decal black lines where body panels break apart. those are two really nice build ups of a model that takes some doing to do properly! Edited January 14, 2014 by jbwelda
Sixties Sam Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 Holy cow ! What a transformation. Ditto what he said! Great save! Sam
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