It's been like a year and I'm still working on a 1:25 scale Audi R8 from Revell. If you add up all the time I've worked on it it's probably not much. It's just spread out. Besides being busy with a million other things, I feel like I'm in a slump of sorts, and, this is a difficult kit (for me anyway) and requires a lot of patience and drying time.
So here it is so far. Body and chassis are a pair. Getting the body and interior all lined up was a pain, I had to dremel away about 1/4" off the bottom of the interior and another 1/4" off the driver's side. Don't follow the instructions here; glue to interior to the body and not the chassis, I couldn't get it to look even halfway decent otherwise.
I ended up having to cut away all the alignment pins for body/interior alignment. Otherwise everything was about 4 scale inches too high and too far to the right. And! Don't even bother putting on the rear clip/valance until the rest of the body is on. I couldn't make the body fit otherwise and never did get the rear exhaust openings to line up with the exhaust system (interesting--on the box art, that guy couldn't get it aligned either!)
So where the heck is the windshield? I didn't like the paint on the first windshield I prepped, the black surround didn't look "scale", so I bought a spare kit and got that one installed with Micro Krystal Klear.
So I am going for final assembly and then I noticed a small spot of paint on the replacement windshield that would have driven me crazy! No I don't know where the paint fleck came from, and no I didn't get a "before" picture!!!! So I carefully cut out windshield number two.
As long as the windshield was out, the dash cowling had some blemishes on it so I pried that off as well and repainted. A couple of years ago I would have let this go! Not now!!!! What happened to the good old, sloppy days past?
To "fix" the blemished second windshield I figured I'd use the trusty Dried paint remover, right? 1001 uses?
Not!!! OK lesson and warning: don't EVER use dry acryl paint solvent on scale plastic glass! NEVER EVER EVER! It destroys the plastic glass, turning the clear completely and miserably opaque as you see here. Live and learn! Fortunately Revell has a mail in for spare parts, so I mailed in for my 3rd windshield, otherwise I am looking at getting a THIRD kit for this one box stock build. And I ask: will this finally do it?
