Axel's corner

The Story: After two unsuccessful years at Lotus, Piquet had signed a contract with Benetton at the end of 1989. After a (according to some people surprisingly) successful 1990, with 2 wins in the last 2 races of the season, Piquet was offered a contract for 1991 by Benetton. The car I'm going to build, the B190B, ran for the first 2 GP's of 1991 while waiting for the John Barnard drawn B191. The B190B was in fact more or less the same car as Benetton had used the previous year. Only the livery was changed. Although the car wasn't new, it still was relatively successfull during those first GP's of 1991. Nelson Piquet scored a nice third and fifth place during those 2 GP's. The Project: This kit is the fifth project I'm taking on since restarting this hobby. It will be the first Hasegawa kit I'll be building. And on top of that, it will also be the first F1 kit I'm building in the "unholy" 1/24 scale. This build will be the secon...

Continuing work on the chassis After the glue on the exhaust had dried, it was time to paint the part aluminium colour. I used the aluminium paint from the Revell Aqua Color range. After the paint had dried, I glued the exhaust to the car. I also put the wheels on the car, otherwise the exhaust might get scratched. And as I'm not intending on doing further work on the bottom of the car, it was as good a moment to put the car on it's own feet. Only thing I still have to do concerning the wheels is touch up the hubcaps. Because part of the chrome layer has been removed where I had to cut the hubcaps from their sprue. Now that the car has been put onto it's wheels, it was time to put together the interior of the car. Next up were the side panels. But before I could glue them in place, I had to scratch build some seatbelts. Although the original car had only 2-point seatbelts, the car Inspector Morse drove had in fact 3-point seatbelts. So I had to make...

Clear ! It was about time that this car would get a layer of clear on. But before I could do that, I had to touch up a few spots with "Pirelli red". When I applied the decals I made some minor mistakes in positioning them. So a few spots needed some extra attention. Although I have about 6 or 7 shades of red in my paint collection, the right one wasn't there. So I had to mix the correct shade of red. That took some time, but I in the end I managed to find a shade which looked good enough. After the spots had been touched up, I let the paint dry for some more days. After that, it was time for the clear. I used the same 2K clear I used on the Ferrari F430. Thanks to my new fan (higher capacity) there were considerably less fumes inside the cabin and the room. After I cleared the car I put a cover in front of the airbrush cabin (leaving only a small opening for the air) to prevent dust from settling on the model during drying of the clear. This, the cover,...

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...