Axel's corner

Through the roof (well, almost) Work is finally continuing on this car. And work continues (once again) with the roof... In the previous update you could see that I glued new pieces of fine wire onto the roof. But at the ends of the wires you can also see that I held them in place with tape. So there was no glue at the ends. And at first I had a bit of a hard time getting the ends glued to the roof, but with a little help of some friends, that problem was quickly resolved. After everything was nicely glued to the roof, it was painting time. To that end I used once more semi gloss black from the Revell Aqua Color range. It dries almost instantly and gives a very smooth finish. So smooth in fact, that I could very easily see were I had been a bit "trigger-happy" with the glue. Darn. That needed to be fixed. Luckily, it just had been my birthday. And since a few days I was the proud owner of a Dremel Stylus. Niiiiice. So, I chucked in a grinding tool and grou...

Almost reached the end In the previous update you could see that I had repaired all the bad spots I had discovered in the bodyshell of the Ferrari. After that I washed the model in lukewarm soapy water with an old toothbrush to remove all the sanding residue and my fingerprints (hah, eat that CSI). After I had let the model dry in the air I sprayed the first coat of primer. This was necessary as a precaution, to prevent the Zero Paints paint I bought from "attacking" the plastic of the body. After the first coat of primer I noticed several small spots which still needed to be repaired. An example can be seen in the pictures above. So out came the putty again, to repair those final spots. After that had been done, I sprayed a few more coats of primer to get good coverage. After the final coat of primer I carefully restored and deepened several panellines of the car and after that was done I did wash the body again and it now was ready to receive the colour...

Fix that roof As the roof of this version of the car is not transparent but body colour, I decided to glue the roof to the car. For this I used the thin cement from Tamiya, which worked a dream. Sadly, after glueing the roof I noticed that the roof and body aren't flush. So I had to sand the roof part down. This operation went pretty well. Although the roof looks quite bad at the moment, I'm sure that when the primer is on, nothing can be seen of my sanding activities. Other minor work As mentioned in the previous update, the lightpods needed some work too. For the roadcar, Tamiya has made the lightpod covers moveable. But that's not necessary for the racing version I'm building. So I had to hide the holes for the mechanism. Apart from the lightpod, there was also a hole in the floorplate (right picture below) of the car (where the lever for the mechanism was situated). I used Tamiya grey putty to fill the holes and if the holes were too big, I f...