An Aside--53 Vette "Don Yost Style"

As a Christmas gift to myself I bought Don Yost's "Airbrushing Model Cars" DVD....Yost apparently is an old pro who has won top prize at every model car building contest ever held since the beginning of time. This guy has a pretty different take on airbrushing than the direction I have been going.  For one, he uses (exclusively?) enamel paints from Testors, mixed with laquer thinner, and sprayed through an external mix airbrush.  He makes it look easy....

I didn't want to try this different take on airbrushing on my 60 Vette Gasser project since I had invested too much time in customizing and "engineering"--I saw myself melting the plastic with laquer thinner.  Instead I grabbed up a really old AMT 53 Vette kit I bought at a swap meet for $5, prepped the parts, and started spraying!

The result?  Yost's method is fast, quick, easy, and REALLY REALLY WORKS!  

I had this vision of using his method to knock out the entire project in one rainy December day--builds usually take me weeks....and I might have been able to, but the body proved to be a lot of work.....

The engine is box stock and done....

But the body had the same front and rear valance issues as the Toyota 2000GT, and had to be corrected the same way....putty, sand, putty, prime, sand, etc., but I wanted it done fast, fast, fast!

Yost has you spend a lot of time on prep...that makes sense to me....the body for this "proof of concept" build had been painted previously.....I demonstrated to my 8 year old nephew the joys of airbrushing so it was already painted acrylic blue without any prep; I had to strip off most of the old stuff, sand the mold lines, putty in the valances, and respray with German silver, my final goal being a flat white enamel, covered with a couple of shots of two part automotive clear.

I rushed one of the base coats and the paint ran, so now I am letting it gas out and will sand it smooth and try again.

Yost also recommended taping small parts down to the bench with masking tape and then airbrushing each part, flipping it after a quick dry and hitting it again.  This didn't work as well for me since the paint puddled up and made the final surface coverage a bit dicey.  I will stick to my "alligator clip method" I guess.  Nevertheless the Yost DVD is highly recommended; he takes a difficult topic and breaks it down into simple steps that get the job done fast.  To quote or maybe paraphrase him "this isn't rocket science--those guys wouldn't even let me in the door!"  For this hobby that's the right attitude!

60 Corvette Gasser--Body Work....

Continuing from last time: I am working on a 1:25 scale 1960 Corvette Gasser; this was an old project, started 4 years ago or so, then abandoned due to poor planning.....can I do better this time?

While waiting for some of the chassis mods to dry, I prepared the body for paint....the body for this build came from an early MPC '60 Vette....after the 2008 attempt I salvaged the body and put the remaining parts into the parts box.  But! Four years later I couldn't find some of the trim so I purchased the kit again...

....this kit!!--AMT #31910--figuring it was the same tooling for a lot less dough ($9 US on Ebay). But it's NOT THE SAME KIT AT ALL!  The tooling is completely different....

Ah!  Turns out the above kit, AMT 38595, is the same tooling as the MPC Corvette, at least as far as I can tell, and it's a lot cheaper (The MPC kit, long out of production, is $35 to about $100 on Ebay and elsewhere; the above reissue is maybe $15 on Ebay)

To give you an idea of how different the tooling is, take a look at the bodies side-by-side!  The "red Vette"AMT body is on the right, and IMO is square and poorly proportioned.  The MPC body on the left is long, round and sexy.  Man I love what MPC did back in the day; their sculptors knew how to make things "boss", as my bros and I used to say!!!

So it was all the usual prep work; getting rid of mold lines (there were lots), gluing in the front and rear valances and then removing gaps (total pain as it was on the 2000GT build!) and the usual sand, sand, file, sand, file, rat spam and sand....

This time I tried out a different putty formula to fill the ugly gaps and do basic repairs: "Mr Surfacer" from "Mr. Hobby", imported from the land where the most obsessive craftsmen in the world live: Japan!  This is "liquidy", viscous, runny, downright smelly putty, as if you took a bunch of traditional styrene filler putty and mixed it with a gallon of liquid styrene glue, then bottled it up and sold it, which might be all that Mr. Hobby is doing here....

So how does Mr. Surfacer stack up? Well, he does OK, maybe, but I am not sure I will abandon CA glue for Mr. Hobby/Mr. Surfacer as my gap filler of choice just yet. Mr. Surfacer putty doesn't shrink and is easy to apply, but it pits and cracks a bit. Yes, this rear end still needs a bit of work but that's par for the course!  I will shoot it with primer and take it from there....

Wait a minute! Time to run along and wrap gifts!  So no more time for models today. Have a good holiday folks!