71 Roadrunner 1:25th Scale--and a Side Olds 442 Project....

From last time: I'm still working on a 1:25 scale '71 Roadrunner "Vintage" build. In the meantime, I am beginning a side project: 1 '66 Olds 88 Dynamic.

The Roadrunner dries after a second round of color coating. It's slow going due to the wet weather here.....I want to give it extra time so nothing in terms of bare metal foil, clear coat, or decals gets messed up.

In the meantime....as far as the Dynamic 88 project: for this I bought a donor kit from AMT--the 66 Olds 442 #6268.....



But it turns out the donor kit is in the wrong scale! The Dynamic 88 is 1:24 scale, and this AMT donor kit is 1:25, which makes it a bad donor kit. But the 442 Olds kit looks so good that I decided to just go ahead and build it.....

For the last few weeks I've been struggling with "where I want to go" with this silly hobby. Should I be concerned with trying to improve my skills at the expense of the pastime not being as much fun? After some thought: it seems I am programmed to try to always be better at anything I do....crafts, artwork, and hobbies are no exception, and there's no point in fighting it. So let's improve away. This time, I am focusing on a "clean stock build" using new techniques I learned from a book by Gerald Wingrove.



I've tried to "clean up my builds" before but with only limited success. As I said in previous posts, Gerald Wingrove is considered by some to be the greatest car modeler of all time, and looking at his work, it'd be hard to argue that a build could be "cleaner". His builds look like they just drove off the showroom floor with no test drives allowed! How does he do it?



One thing Gerald emphasizes in his book: He builds everything up first, fits/tweaks/lines up everything, gets everything ready completely ready to go, and only THEN starts thinking about finishing and final assembly. In the past I've done a bit of this, but really, not nearly as much as I should. I end up painting parts and trying to fit them, the part doesn't quite line up, and the re-fitting and re-gluing processes mars the paint. The result--crooked, badly painted things. Doh!



It doesn't seem to take that much more time to build a plastic kit the "Gerald way", but for me, it requires rethinking the build process. For example: I am cleaning and fitting everything first, handling parts as infrequently as possible, even bagging stuff up when not using it, as opposed to just tossing it back into a box. Things that don't fit well, due to (say) a pin being misplaced or a part not lining up are dealt with while the project is still in "white plastic" using basic scratchbuilding techniques.



And: did I mention the AMT/ERTL '66 Olds 442 is a super-cool kit? Extremely crisp molding, fit so far seems to be good for everything; excellent detail. Some refitting is needed: for instance, the exhaust pipes didn't line up quite right with the holes in the chassis. But it's really not too bad. Take a look at this air cleaner for instance. On the tree, it's nearly perfect. Cutting it off and cleaning it up should be pretty easy. After having messed with vintage kits it makes me appreciate this "modern tooling" a lot more!

Roadrunner on Hold--so in the Meantime.....

After a lot of sitting around staring at the 1:25 MPC 71 Roadrunner MPC body I have decided that it's going to be too much work to modify the body and front grille/bumper to suit my needs. I love MPC, I really do, but this body just doesn't get it done--it is too far from the spirit of the 1:1 car, so I'm not going to use it for the '71 Roadrunner build.

I'm not giving up; I have ordered some resin parts from Modelhaus and Bandit Resins to get the '71 Roadrunner build done....so now I'm waiting for the parts to show up, then decide what to do next.



In the meantime I have been building a "box stock" '69 Superbee in 1:24 scale...Revell 85-2363....I don't normally work in this scale so it makes it more likely I will stick to a stock build--and I need to build box stock now and then to see if my basic skills are improving. Also I wanted to practice creating a vinyl roof, having never tried that before. This kit serves as a better test bed for this than a $45 resin body.



Things are progressing OK on the Superbee but I remain a bit unchallenged by a stock build and find myself at times a bit bored and impatient. I also see an awful lot of really, really good scale muscle car builds all over the place; the hobby forums are full of them, with one Revell 1:24 69 Superbee build better than the next. It seems some of the very best builders build lots of muscle cars. It's a bit intimidating.

However, I'm doing everything I can to keep boredom and intimidation out of my hobby life, so it's on to other things while I figure out what to do about the MPC Roadrunner situation.

So....I have been reading up on casting resin parts. As with so many other things these days, the Internet makes it all easy. Like the crazy world of polymer clays crafts: there is an entire Internet universe devoted to all aspects of casting--and this casting universe is totally and completely nuts. You can spend your entire life doing nothing but casting or for that matter just reading about casting; and of course being able to cast small and large items has 1001 uses to almost every hobby or craft as well as many professions.

So what am I waiting for? I got a "starter" resin casting kit from Alumilite and plucked some random parts out of the parts box to get some casting practice.



The Alumilite starter kit has everything needed to, well, get started. To do my first single mold casts I followed the how-to directions on the Aluminite site, combined with some reading on various casting forums.



For mold boxes I used some scrap plastic I had lying around; I didn't cover the seams very well on one of the mold boxes but thankfully not too much Silicon spoo bubbled out.




So here are the 2 pieces cast so far. The Halibrand type front wheel came out a lot better than I expected; I lost the master cylinder but the vacuum boost part came out really well. Overall, I did a lot better than I thought I would for a first effort--it was really pretty easy.

Next up: a two part mold--casting a turbocharger from a CART racer, a rare part that would be very useful for custom builds. Step one is to mold the "back" of the part, then flip the mold box, remove the clay, and create the mold for the front. Exactly how I am going to cut holes to get the resin down into this two part mold escapes me now, but maybe I will figure it out. Overall casting with 2 part molds looks to me to be exponentially more difficult, so I'm really not expecting much the first time out.