DocRob

The Renault is coming together. Yesterday, I married the rear part with suspension and gear case to the engine and added more braided lines to substitute the ugly thick vinyl tubing, Tamiya provided. The chassis is finished, except some details and the exhaust system, I can see the chequered flag . All the parts waiting for chrome paint, were airbrushed high shine glossy black. I thinned down the Tamiya LP color with ca. 75% of leveling thinner and it gave flawless results. I have to remember that mixing ratio for my John Player Special Lotus Type 79. Cheers Rob

Thank you Craig, clean up is indeed the most time consuming task with this build. I have to pull out a feelgood kit afterwards, after the USS Arizona, the Arado and now the Renault. Surprisingly the short run Fly Arado kit, was the best of these in terms of clean up. Maybe a Tamiya P-38 in NMF, ... The detail grade of the Renault kit is not bad and I guess, even a modern kit would not be much better detail wise, but the moldings are not up to todays standards. You can endlessly hyper-detail these 1/12 kits, but I found, exchanging the tubing and connectors added a lot of realism. Cheers Rob

I think like always, the most braking power is performed by the duo calipers on the front wheels, but seeing the large air intakes, I guess, the double rear calipers are about heat distribution. Cheers Rob

The rear section was mostly finished today and is ready to be attached to the engine. Again, the moving parts design proved to be a bit fiddly, but beside some very crude moldings, which needed lots of clean up and later lots of masking, all went together well. Have I ever mentioned, that I absolutely love Tamiya's LP5 semi matte black. It sprays so evenly and has the right near no shine to replicate plastic or metal black. I added some resin connectors again, which were drilled out and added silver braided line with inserted brass rods. Since the beginning of the build, I was pondering about de-chroming the wheels and wings, a process, I never did before. With my oven cleaner stripping was easily done in a minute on a test part and were followed by the rims, which didn't look real. The wings didn't look too bad with their plating, but then I decided to strip them too. Lets hope, I can lay on a decent finish. Cheers Rob

You are absolutely right Yves. The kit helps you understand, how this car was designed and build and often you can contemplate about used materials and function as well. You can clearly see, how the turbo chargers influenced the layout of most of the main components with the Renault. Cheers Rob

The first half of the day was very frustrating. The exhaust to turbocharger tubes were the worst fitting parts, I ever have seen on a Tamiya kit. After two hours of nerve wrecking test fitting, I decided to glue them step by step into place as best as I could, using CA for a fast bond. Some tubes, I heated a bit with a flame and altered the radii to fit better. All in all, it looks horrible, but that's the way it is. The tubes were painted matte black and then received a misted coat of Extreme Metals jet exhaust, followed by metallic blue. The better part of the day was used to marry the engine section with the firewall to the front body. Here the fit was surprisingly good, given the amount of parts, which had to fit at his step simultaneous. After dry fitting three times and looking for all the connections, I finally glued everything together with CA-glue. Afterwards, I connected some hoses and dry fitted the whole assembly into the chassis, to check if everything fits, which it luckily did after some wiggling. Cheers Rob

Glad to be of help. I profited often from the experiences others documented in their build threads, I be lucky to give something back. I wish you luck with your New Jersey build and hope you do a WIP. Cheers Rob

The engine is now permanently attached to the fire wall and then I started adding some silver braided lines instead of the large diameter black tubes, supplied by Tamiya, which looked downright horrible. To attach the braided lines, I inserted 0,2 mm nickel silver rod into the ends and secured these with a tiny drop of CA. Then these rods were inserted into pre drilled holes. I also started to make some order to most of the fuel lines and added the oil tank (?) to the firewall, which was before fitted with pre painted and pre drilled resin connectors, instead of the simple lug, Tamiya provided. Cheers Rob

I have not much of an expertise, but recently finished the USS Arizona in 1/350 with loads of PE and a wooden deck. I pondered about the best practises like you in advance. Your second option worked for me. I assembled and painted the hull with plastic decks and separately all the superstructures guns and cranes, etc. Then, I added the wooden deck and last added the pre-painted railings afterwards glued in place with CA. I made sure, they were pre bent to the best of fit, before priming and painting. I was a bit afraid of the adding of the railings, but was amazed, how easy it was, especially the larger parts around the main deck. The tiny sections around the superstructure were a bit harder to do. Cheers Rob

As mentioned before, it was time to get some sub assemblies off the bench and I installed the air coolers and turbo chargers. You have to have an affection for clean up, if you build such an old kit of a turbo charged car. Lots of tubes and connecting parts with ill fit and lots of flash and burr. For the air coolers, I added some resin connectors which were drilled out and inserted brass rods, but they are buried under the air ducts, out of sight. I glued the turbo charger units to the air intakes and engine and fitted everything into the chassis for a test. With a bit of tension, everything snapped into place without braking luckily. The chassis gets more and more cramped, to maintain the real car couldn't have been an easy job. Cheers Rob

Thank you Egilman and Ken, a fast search showed what I have feared, There are no quickly accessible sources for either or, it seems. I will look a bit deeper into the glue subject. It needs to be a relatively thick glue, so that the braided line not get soaked. Cheers Rob

Thank you Craig, I would prefer to have a fixed and glued in place suspension. I doubt, that the Tamiya construction has the correct setting in the end and the steering, well, I wrote about it. The extra work is very time consuming for exampl, I added 'blue anodized' resin connectors for the cooling circuit. Where I failed, was to attach silver braided line to these connectors. None of my CA-glues would bond. If anybody has an idea, how to achieve this I would be thankful. I may try to insert a 0,5mm brass rod and hope the braided line bonds with this. Cheers Rob

Today it's about 40° Celsius with a humidity of 10 percent, yesterday it was 22° Celsius with 95 percent humidity, what better to do than spent some time in the relatively cool cave, instead of getting a heart attack. My worktop is absolutely cramped with half build sub assemblies, pre-painted parts, so I need to get a bit of order into the mess and assemble some of these. I started with the seat belts. The kit supplied ones look good, but I had a set of Hiro belts and decided to use them. Some of the buckles are cast white metal, the rest is made from PE. Assembly is a lot easier than 1/32 seat belts from HGW, but I had difficulties to find a CA glue adhering to the ribbon. Later, I realized, that the ribbon parts should have been glued with the supplied two sided adhesive tape. Would have been great, if that would have been mentioned in the manual. The seat looks super cool now and again I have to say, I really love the semi matte black from the Tamiya LP range. Next were the front suspensions with many snap fit parts. naturally one of the arms broke, but it could be repaired easily. The steering does not work like suggested in the manual, but I think it's impossible to get it working at all. The Tamiya approach with working steering and suspension is until now the area of the build, causing the most problems. On to some detail work. I butchered an old laptop, which was waiting to get binned to get fine electric cables and added some to the instruments and racing computer. Cheers Rob

Thank you Kevin, besides the dust issues, it's being fun seeing the paintjob develop from primer to finish. I don't have great expertise when it comes to high shine paintjobs and therefore, I learned a lot. Cheers Rob

I finished the body parts, with a generous coat of clear coat. To be precise, one fast drying very thin coat, to protect the decals from the thinner and then a heavier coat of GX-100 for the deep shine. The clear coat sprayed very well and I figure, my bad results with GX-100 resulted in mixing the stuff with thinner in a plastic jar, which may got spoilt by the thinner. Reminder to myself, always use a glas jar for adding the leveling thinner. After a proper curing time, I used the three differently grained Tamiya polishing pastes and finally the Tamiya polishing wax and got a near perfect surface. Near perfect, because I had some dust issues during spraying, something I never had before, given the normally high humidity here. There is nothing, I can do about it, but I will look a bit deeper into the subject, to see, if the new compressor might be involved into the issue. There is always a hair in the soup, literally . Cheers Rob

Thank you Gary, the clear coat will remain another phew opportunity hopefully. I plan to apply a layer of MR. Hobby GX-100 as a protective and unifying coat and to give the paint and decals some depth. GX-100, is used by many fellow modelers to great satisfaction, but I had mixed results, or being moe precise, fantastic ore terrible results, so i long for a 'phew'. Cheers Rob

Thank you Craig, there is one tiny fold remaining after a day of drying, with the application of a strong solvent. In all, it loos nice, given, that decaling is one of my most dreaded tasks in modeling. Cheers Rob

Phew, decals are on and I, as an old decal coward have to say, these Cartograph decals are the real deal. They are very opaque and fit like a glove, if you made a precise masking job between yellow and white. Even the superfine pinstripes fittet, bordering the yellow. For the first time, I used Tamiya Decal adhesive and so far, I have no complaints. The standard one was used on flat surfaces and the additional softener type was used on contours. There is one tiny fold on the curved front black stripe, but I hope with some stronger softener this will vanish. Before decaling, I wet sanded all the body parts with 6000 and 8000 grit and the surfaces were absolutely smooth and the color borders got rid of the tiny edge from masking. The rear wing was resprayed, because I polished through the edges on a tiny spot. I painted all the rivets on the body with a precision brush for a little bit more detail. Cheers Rob

Thanks Ken, it went on surprisingly well, with very light coats first, building up opacity and a final slightly flooding layer to achieve a super smooth surface. Cheers Rob

My new compressor arrived after a long week of making up the engine and cleaning parts. A task, not to underestimate wit this kit. Every part has to be inspected, sanded, scratched with a blade, the age of the mold forms is obviously. I will show you a total un-Tamiya look with lots of scratched off material only from the turbo system and gear housing . Finally I had to test my new Sparmax compressor and what better to try is spraying yellow onto the body parts. I really like the result, where only minimal polishing will be needed before I apply the decals. I sprayed the heavy thinned Tamiya LP8 with low pressure at about 13 psi or 0,9 bar. Next test was spraying lots of the innards with different metallic colors, AK's Extreme Metal Aluminum and from the Tamiya LP range titan gold, titan silver, gun metal, pearl silver and finally semi matte black for the air intakes on the upper body. Cheers Rob

Thank you Kevin and Mike, the engine is a little kit in itself with the Renault. The detail and fit is not exactly up to Tamiya's standards as of today, but it's a solid base. Yesterday, I prepared the exhaust, and this is a completely different story. The nicely matte chromed plastic has terrible parting lines and defects and the fit isn't perfect as well. I needed to scratch away lots of the plating and later repaint everything. There are times, where you feel, you're working on a dinosaur kit. Cheers Rob

Thank you gentlemen, after getting rid of the idea, applying 0,2 mm rods as tube connectors and gluing the tubes directly onto the plastic, it took me only about two hours, to finalize the refinement. Means, I should always request my shortcuts, specially when a better solution is simple to achieve. Wine cap foil is a great material for modelling. I used it not only for clamps, but for flags and towels as well, not to mention tie down straps. Like you mentioned Gary, it has the right rigidity for many purposes and you can fold it to taste without a spring. The other benefit, you have to open a bottle of wine, to get some and if you are clumsy and waste the cap, a second one Cheers Rob

I know, I know, I promised you a pause from my efforts, but today, while cleaning the bench, I thought about my desire to change the engines fuel tubing. I cut off the plastic connectors and glued on sections of clear brown tubing with an outer diameter of 0,4 mm and 0,6 mm. The first one, I pre-drilled and inserted 0,2 mm micro silver rod, but that proved tedious and simply butt gluing the tubes did the job. Then I painted all the tube connection points titan silver for contrast and all the screw heads around the engine in silver and sparkling silver. Last but not least, I found my cylinder head detail work showing not enough contrast, with the pencil onto the anodized blue. I carefully scratched the pencil and blue color away with a blade and voila, now it looks much better. Finally, I shortened the yellow ignition wires and bundled them with clamps made by tiny strips of wine cap foil. Now I feel good about the engine. Only for comparison, how it looked before: Cheers Rob

Unfortunately this build is paused for a while, because my trusty old airbrush compressor, which I bought in 1989 passed away yesterday. I hope the new one arrives soon. Cheers Rob

Very nice display OC, the models are splendid themselves, but the dio with the figures make it perfect. Cheers Rob