66 Olds 442--Body Work, Part I

Still working on a mild custom 66 Olds....the goal of this build is to test fit everything and get everything entirely in shape before doing ANY finishing....



This is one of those AMTish things that drives me crazy. The instructions say if I'm building a non-vinyl top (I am) to remove the side trim pieces, a bit of which you can see here. This trim wraps around the front, sides, and rear. It all has to go. I haven't been doing this that long but I do know that removing a big old chunk of trim is a going to be a lot of work! But I need to do it; getting rid of the trim will make this look less like "your Mom's Olds" which is what I'm after here.




To make things harder there's a piece of body trim that can't be removed--this little crosshatch gizmo thing on each side. So I have to carefully sand and file around it. I ended up putting my finger over it to make sure I didn't accidentally scape it up. I have read of others "foil copying" this sort of thing, then sanding away the original, then gluing the copy back on, but I have never had any luck with that whole process...it always ends up looking like a little blob of bird doodoo.

So that's for a different project.....



OK, after some filing and sanding here's the back so far. A new problem is cropping up--on the 1:1 car, about mid-door there is a nice sharp point where the body sheetmetal is bent at a 20 or so degree angle. The trim strip covered that, and with it gone, I have to try to get it back somehow.



And here's the side. It's getting there, but as with so many other crafts, to do a good job is going to take time. I just have to get used to it. It would have been nice if AMT gave optional trim pieces you could attach or not, depending on what you wanted the finished model to look like, but, nope.



I continue to do a lot of reading about how anyone working with minatures does his thing without losing his or her mind and going blind at the same time. One key is to have good magnification, that's comfortable to wear, so I'm told. To this end I bought a $40 magification headband thingy from Micromark, which seems to work OK, although you have to hold your work x inches for it to be in focus (no way around that I can think of)


But the best part is the instructions that came with. This picture of happy Mr. Science Guy rocks the front of the instructions and I just cracked up. I mean, this guy just had a frontal lobotomy and now he's ready to party! I liked it so much I cut out his picture from the cheesy manual and put it above my bench. These are visual aids for the truly inspired.