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Jaguar XJ220 "Martini" GT, Italian GT championship 1993 (part 3)

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 first closed them with strip styrene.

After this first part of the adaptations to the lightpods, I had to remove and/or fill the ejector-pin marks that were quite visible on the bottom of the lightpods.
At first I thought of carefully scraping them away. But severel marks lay on the surface while others were below the surface. So sanding would be tough. I would have to fill first with putty and than I could sand it flat.
But that was way too much work in my eyes. So I used Tamiya masking tape to make a template and with this template I cut a new bottom from sheet styrene (0.25 mm thickness).
And I'm satisfied with the endresult.
To seal the seams between the housing and the inserts I used Tamiya thin cement to fill the seams. And it looks good so far. Maybe I may need to correct some things after the primer is on, but for now I'm ready with the lightpods.

Other minor work was done on the floorplate.
On the back of the floorplate there was a hole where the licenseplate should be mounted. But as I won't be using a licenseplate in this build I filled the hole with strip styrene.
I also made a start with converting the car to a left hand drive one. Although it's only a very minor step. I only drilled an additional hole in the windscreen for the wipers.
The original hole for the driver's wiper has been filled with Krystal Klear glue in the meantime.

The first batch of parts has been painted in the meantime, but that's not very spectacular, so pictures of painted parts will be in the next update. 

A dryfit
Because I'm using different wheels instead of the kit supplied ones, it was about time to check whether it was necessary to adapt the wheels and/or suspension.
With the aid of Tamiya masking tape I assembled the suspension of the car (including the brake discs) to check how the stance of the car would be.
In the pictures below you can see that the wheels aren't "wide" enough.
So after some more testfitting and experimenting I added spacers to the rear and the front wheels to move the wheels a bit more to the outside.
Luckily the pins with which the wheels are fitted to the car are long enough and I didn't have to make further amends apart from the spacers.

The body of the car is now almost completely ready for receiving a first layer of primer.
But the results of that can be seen in the next update.
 

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