Axel's corner

After the best part of an evening of work I finally seemed to have get rid of the various paintdots littering the body of the Ferrari. On some places I sanded through the paint and primer layers until the bare plastic was visible again. Because of the dark and slightly flat colour I'm using I didn't reprime and just sprayed the color on. Things went very smooth. Only a few spots that needed some attention. A spec of dust got trapped in the paint on the rear of the body and I hit the bonnet a bit hard with the airbrush which means that a few runners need to be sanded back a bit. Nothing too serious though. After sanding the aforementioned spots and giving the body another coat of black I declare the body for ready. At least regarding the painting stage. Now only a few details remained on the body. Apart from applying the few decals I also needed to paint the third brake light and the reflectors present at the rear of the car. For the third brake light and th...

The interior is coming along quickly now that I have (finally) finished the seat belts and the safety net. There's only one part I need to scratchbuild now and that's the safety net at the driver's door. Building up the interior didnt'go without a hitch. My patience and steady hand was tested almost to the limit. When adding the left side of the roll cage I also had to fit the scratchbuilt piece of rollcage I made. To say that this went smoothly would be lying. A lot of fiddling, some slight swearing, and a few beads of sweat were all in order here. Problem was that the 2 shoulder straps of the seatbelt were already attached to the roll cage which made handling the roll cage a bit of a challenge. Apart from that it appeared that the roll cage didn't quite fit, so I had to trim it in several places to get it to fit properly. In the end it worked out though. I deviated slightly from the instructions here, because Revell would have you place the seat fir...

I've been working on the seatbelts lately. According to the pictures in the Auto Modélisme magazine, the seatbelts in the No. 53 car were blue (as opposed to (mainly) red for the No. 50 sister car). I had a harness set from Crazy Modeler lying around I intended to use. But sadly, the 2 mm wide blue harness material (from T2M) was too big to fit through the seatbelt hardware. I than decided to buy another set. From Corydos Design (item no. CD007) in this case. And this time the harness material fitted (only just...). Things were moving along nicely. To fix the seatbelts I used 2-sided adhesive tape from 3M. This worked perfectly with my Peugeot 307 WRC build. But here I noticed that after several days the belt material came loose again. I don't know if that's due to the age of the tape (maybe it has lost a bit of it's holding strength) or that the problem lies with the seatbelt material. It seems a bit stiffer compared to the material I used on the Peug...

With the body almost ready for decals, I stepped up my efforts concerning the interior. I made the electronics box at the passenger side. I used a small piece of styrene (Evergreen item no. 166 2.0x3.2 mm) and drilled a few holes into it so I could fix the needed wires into the box. For the wires I used 0.4 mm steel wire. To simulate the connectors I used some styrene rod (Evergreen item no. 221 1.2 mm). Using a pin vise I drilled 0.5 mm holes into the rod, so I could insert the wire. I must say the "connectors" look quite bulky in the picture. But after a coat of paint they look good enough for me. To further detail the cabling I used some hose clamps from Detail Master (DM-2480) which can also pass as cable ties (with some imagination). I also made a second electronics box at the passenger side. This one is mounted on the floor. I'll have to lighten the cables a bit to make it more visible once installed. As a base I used an electronics box from the kit,...

Unbelievable... The last update for this project was December 2010. Time to resurrect one of my (too many) forgotten builds. The second coat of primer (as mentioned at the end of the previous update for this project) has been sprayed. I think it was somewhere last year that I did that. In the meantime I've also sprayed the colour. I intended to use the original Zero Paints colour which I bought for this project back in 2009 (I think it was) and used on the first body. Back then, the ZP came in plastic bottles. And this is what's left from that bottle... All the solvents have evaporated. Only the pigments are left, clogged at the bottom of the bottle. I didn't bother to try and revive the contents of the bottle. Black being black (sort of) I used my own mix of Tamiya X-18 and XF-1 (80% to 20%). I also decided to (finally) start using my Harder&Steenbeck Infinity airbrush instead of the Evolution I've been using. The Evolution needs some new seal...

Last Saturday I was at the annual dutch IPMS event Euro Scale Modelling, as always held at the NBC Business Centre in Nieuwegein. This year marked already the 11th time that I visited this event. We arrived shortly after 10 o'clock and a big row of visitors greeted us outside. Luckily, the weather was fantastic and after a short wait we were inside. The 2 big halls were filled to the brim with merchants and exhibitors. And some great models were on display here. Apart from that there was the competition area which, at least in my opinion, seemed to host a lot more models than last year. And there were some real gems there too. There were just a few military/AFV models, just like last year, but that was more than made up for by the ships and cars categories. Below you'll find a selection of pictures from the event. More can be found in my Flickr album .