66 Nova--Setting the Stance

For the past week or so I've been working on a 1:25 scale AMT Nova #636. The goal is to keep things in the realm of "Not a Project"--nothing custom, nothing fancy, rather, a simple and relaxing build.



Unfortunately, AMT never makes things too easy, and this kit is no exception. A lot of the problematic areas I've seen with their kits pop up here. For one: the "steerable" front is fragile; intuitively I don't see it holding up the weight of the model. In this case, each front wheel is supported by a small spindle that is in extreme danger of falling off and/or breaking.




To (try to) fix this, I glued the dickens out of the top A-frame (using sytrene glue, CA, and plastic weld). Then I did the same to the lower supporting axle assembly in an effort to "sandwich" each spindle in place. Finally I glued the seam between the frame and the inner wheel well, again with CA, normal glue, and plastic weld. When this was done and dry, I shot the entire axle assembly with primer/sealer. The result isn't very "clean", due to the amount of glue I had to use, but inside the wheel well, painted flat black, no one will notice.



Another issue: in my experience, AMT engines never sit quite right on their motor mounts. I am seeing that here; the motor is not sitting flat, nor straight, when nestled into the engine compartment. I will have to tweak the block and motor mounts to fix this. This is why I test fit--I would be unable to sort this out once the engine is painted.

(By the way, no photos yet, but I have a strong suspicion the exhaust system won't fit and will have to be reworked, and the front and rear bumpers and grilles will have to be modified to fit without large seams being visible....just a guess, but on most other AMT kits I have built to date this has been the case.)



The stance--the way the model rides on its front and rear axles, wheels and tires, is key to the model looking good versus looking like a load. I have learned that AMT kits sometimes have poor attention paid to "stance" while the kit is being mastered. Fixing the ride height before paint is critical to the final model looking good.



This Nova kit is no exception--but, as this is "not a project", I wanted to keep things easy. To start, I taped the rear axle in place and added the cool, huge rear slicks. The back end looks great--so far so good.

On the front end, the "stock" ride height looked so bad that I didn't bother photographing it. Basically the front rode higher than the rear, and that's not a look I wanted.




To fix this, one option is to really cheat--just epoxy the fronts into the wheel wells.



This is the lowest ride possible in the front. Looks good I guess, but steering is pretty much impossible.




Here, I turned the front spindles over 180 degrees so the ride height is lowered by about 1/8" (real inches, not scale). This is probably what I will end up using; this is a good look, and I could see the 1:1 car having a ride height like this.



OK, this slightly lowered front is probably what I will end up using. But looking over the photos, the super-low front end appeals to the ten-year-old in me. It's not a slam dunk! I am going to go out of town for a bit so when I come back I can review this, and maybe the decision will be easy. Right now, at this very moment, the ten year old in me is winning out! Who cares if the 1:1 car can't steer! This isn't a 1:1 car!

66 Nova--"Not a Project"

After taking months (!) to build the 66 Olds it's time to cool down. Let's try something easy! Anything with big rear tires and little fronts appeals to the ten year old in me, so why not AMT's Chevy Nova 66 Pro Street #AMT-636. A steal at $18.



Open the kit up--it's molded in blue! Why do manufacturers do this? Do they really think in this day and age most modellers aren't going to paint every part?



Along with the odd blue plastic is flash--everywhere. It's not too hard to get rid of, but takes time.



After faily lengthy cleanup the engine compartment was easily assembled. I will test fit everything I can, and check out the stance in "blue plastic" before doing any real painting. I learned this lesson the hard way--fit first, paint later!





As I was cleaning up the parts, I realized that sanding the soft blue plastic brings out odd white chunks that are strangely resilient to filing, as if the plastic is a bit too soft and too rubbery. Don't know what's up--I think primer-sealer is going to be necessary.



Hefty rear racing axle. The parts didn't fit together quite right, but it looks nice and will get the job done.




Small block Chevy? I would have liked something bigger, but this is a "non-project", remember? No swapping in any other engines for this one--I will stick to what came with the kit.



The body looks good and seems to be void of any major sinkmarks. There are a few mold lines to clean up--so a quick shot of primer-sealer will help identify them.



I have to leave for a few weeks, but when I get back this should hopefully be a quick build--quicker than the last one! We will see!

66 Olds 442: FINISHED!

After many weeks the Olds 442 build is finally done....



To me this hobby has become like learning an instrument or a language. I am constantly attempting to figure out how to build things "cleaner" or "more professionally". My goal is to be as good as what I see in magazines. But then I realize: it's something that, ultimately, doesn't really matter that much to anyone but myself.....and in the very last stages of this long build I had an epiphany, I realized that improving at a fairly meaningless craft has little or nothing to do any of this.



Nah....I'm not just passing time.



When I have to have some quiet, when I have to be by myself, or when I have to pretend I am 11 years old again for whatever reason, this is what I do: sit at my work bench, smelling paint fumes and plastic and glue, and it all bring back memories of endless hours listening to AM radio in the basement, building model cars with my brothers, like it's the summer of 1970 again.



And my heart aches for the simplicity of those times.



What next? Maybe a sloppy build? A build where I do everything wrong? Use no paint? Intentionally get glue all over everything? I can't see myself doing that. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter how clean a build is.



It was the journey, not the destination, that captivates me.



And by the way, the damn hood doesn't sit flat, no matter what I do.

Question is: What's next?

66 Olds 442: Almost Finished....

The Olds 442 Build has taken a lot longer than I thought...I am ready to finish off the final few bits before I call it quits.



Steering wheels have always been hard for me; for instance, getting the wheel's rim to look right relative to everything else never happens. This time out I tried using Silly Putty as a masking agent--I read in a hobby mag that this should work, but it didn't--the paint leaked under the putty and I had to start over. Some of the putty also sticked to the plastic and made a mess. So much for Silly Putty?

One reason this build is taking so long is that the kit, for all its ambitious detail, has some major flaws...to name a few: there was almost endless body trim to file and sand off; the exhaust system didn't fit the undercarriage; and the windshield glass looked too thick and didn't fit under the car's roof. All of these needed to be corrected, and all took time.




Add to this list the air cleaner intake tubes. As you can see, they don't fit together seamlessly, and turns out, they didn't fit under the hood either. I ended up using a lot of plastic weld to smooth things out and took a Dremel tool to the underside of the hood so the tubes would fit.



I got a bit more into photo-etch for this build which was fun. Photoetch parts are thin pieces of metal that come on sprues; you cut and prep them a lot like a tiny plastic parts. The goal is to add detail and realism to the build. The license plate holders wouldn't have been possible without Photoetch.



Photo etch was also used on the dashboard--again, fun....




I came into this build knowing I needed to work more on trim, so I spent extra time on things like the front and rear bumper/grill assemblies. The front Grill could still benefit from better separation between grill and bumper, but at some point I had to move on.







OK, here's the engine compartment before final assembly. Another issue with the kit that I had to fix: there is no good way to get the belt/alternator to stay put when the body is dropped onto the chassis, or, perhaps more to the point, there is no room for the body to fit over the engine as per the way AMT mastered the kit. I ended up having to cut off the alternator and glue it back on after the body was in place.

This was a huge oversight on AMT's part....

So why all the boo-boos? I figure AMT mastered the model in a computer, and during Q A perhaps they realized they made some major mistakes (like, things didn't fit together, um, at all) but didn't have the money or desire to start over.



So here's the finished engine compartment. To get those darn air cleaner tubes in place, I didn't install the carbs at all, glued the air cleaner to the tubes, and then put a coil (?) in front of the alternator so you don't notice the air cleaner is postioned too far forward. Good enough. If this build were going into the NY Crafts Museum, I should have recreated the tubes from scratch but guess what? The build isn't bound for a museum. It has been a bit of a surprise to me, however, that a box-stock build like this can be as tough as a custom or kit bash build, due to the fact that the kit manufacturer got lazy during QA. Who would have known?

Happy Macro Birthday!!!

I am one of those lucky folks who has my birthday a few days after Christmas, so family has it easy--they lovingly give me a gift and say "Here's your single present....".



This year my brother and sister in law gave me a bodacious "combined present"--a really nifty PHD (push here dummy) point and shoot Nikon. Turns out this camera has almost unbelievable specs for macro photography, which means it can be used for--wait for it--the MODEL CAR BLOG!!!



I tore open the present and got to work, and in about 10 minutes got the picture above. Compared to my auto-nothing macro setup I have now, this is bliss--a shot that might have taken 15-20 minutes to set up now takes about 30 seconds. Dealing with the lighting is still a bit tricky, but it took me 2 minutes to figure out for tight macros to work I have to defeat the built in flash and use some form of external lighting--for this, it's just a natural light fluorescent a few inches away.



I had an old steering wheel from something or other on my workbench, so here it is. This has very little "photoshoping". With more setup work, I probably could have gotten this to look much better.....



Here's the emblem off the 442 Olds Grille. In reality it measures 4mm x 1mm. Not bad for a PHD camera!



And the problem now is (of course) you can see TOO MUCH....notice the bad overlap of Bare Metal Foil. With a non-macro shot, you probably wouldn't notice this. But I notice this. So much for a "clean build"....




Man this is going to be fun! This headlight bezel measures 8x4mm. It is incredible how far PhD cameras have come. And nothing against my in laws, but I have a feeling this camera didn't break the bank either!

66 Olds 442: BMF and ClearCoat

For the past several months I have been trying to create "clean" build of a 1:25 scale Olds 442....there are two things working against this: clean builds take a lot of time, and I don't have a lot of time; and, being a bit absent minded and sloppy, doing things in a "clean" manner doesn't come very easily to me.



Last time I wrote about the color coat, using a mix of Jacquard acrylics I whipped up, applied with a cheap airbrush to the body.



Now it's time to add the trim...for this I used something called "Bare Metal Foil" or, as the hobby magazines sometime call it, "BMF".




This comes in a single 4"x8" (?) sheet and costs about six bucks. Think of rice-paper-thin, uber-fragile tin foil with a semi-sticky adhesive on the back and you have a sheet of BMF. You cut out strips with a #11 Xacto knife, stick it over what needs to be chromed, tamp it down with something like a toothpick, and, using a very (very!)sharp knife, carefully, and I mean carefully, cut away what you don't want. You can spend hours with BMF--it is not for the faint of heart. For me, the windshield surround you see here is about the best I can do. It seems impossible to me, and I've tried, to get a really smooth finish out of this stuff, but it's better than nothing.




I have read articles in hobby mags about using BMF, and one writer I remember said it's not that hard to use--I have news, it is. Very hard to use. Very, very, frustratingly hard.




I will say, however, that it looks better than trying to mask and using something like Alclad II or one of the other "real metal" paints. I couldn't get that to look decent at all.



Once the BMF was tamped down, I brushed over it with some Future Floor Polish which is basically clear acrylic paint. Besides dulling the brightness of the foil, which I've found makes things look more realistic, it means breathing on the BMF doesn't lift it off. So I'm now up to about 5 coats of clear. When I hit 7 or 8, it's time to polish, another frustrating and difficult thing to do well. Merry Christmas!

66 Olds 442: Color Coat at Last!!!

I can't believe another month has gone by! Here we are again--after Thanksgiving already. Where does the time go?



From last time: still working on a 66 Olds, with an emphasis on a "clean build"--something that doesn't come easily to me!



This morning the body was still in primer (I've taken to using Plastikote T-235 Gray--seems to orange peel less than Duplicolor's similar product). If you've followed previous posts, the '66 Olds kit (AMT/Ertl 6268) was mastered with trim for a vinyl top. I used vinyl on the last two builds--and didn't much like the way either came out. So, off with the vinyl trim. But, it turns out, it was a lot (I mean, a LOT!!) of work to grind and sand away the large trim strips that run the length of the body. After weeks of sanding and finishing I figured the body work was as good as I could get it.

And: with a brief break in the rainy weather I figured it was finally time to apply the color coat to the body.



But what kind of paint? I've tried different paints over the past couple of years--enamels, acrylics, and lacquers, mostly, trying to figure out what works best.

After returning to the hobby after a 35 year absence, I started out using enamel--that's what I used growing up. Turns out enamel takes a long time to dry and is intolerent of when follow up coats are applied (you have to apply second costs right away, or wait about a week--if you don't, you end up with paint that never really dries).

On the plus side, enamel is the defacto hobby paint for plastics(still), self-levels, has little or no orange peel issues to deal with, is easy to polish, and with patience, can come out looking great.

Next up: lacquer. I tried a fair amount of lacquer finishes, but dealing with the fogging and orange peel associated with lacquer, and after enduring some catastophic failures due to bad primer, I have decided perhaps it's not worth the trouble.

This said, I have settled (I think) on acrylic, and specially, acrylic paints by Jacquard....Jacquard may be what I use from here on out--best to just know one thing well, maybe. I have written about Jacquard before, but to reiterate, as a craft paint it has a lot going for it: it's easy to mix, easy to airbrush, a breeze to thin, cleans up quickly, sticks to almost any primer, and best of all, is non-toxic and doesn't stink up the house. Just the fact that it's not poisonous makes Jacquard acrylic get my vote going forward.



I had some Jacquard purple I mixed up a few months ago but never used--so I used that....first up, a the mist coat. It took about 30 seconds for this to dry.



After the first color coat, things are already looking OK....to me, a notable thing about Jacquard is that a Jacquard color coat looks radically different depending on the light that hits it.





After the second color coat, in very bright light the Olds looks red/pink/copper. I didn't much like this at first--it seems too feminine for an old muscle car like this, but it's grown on me.



In low light the 66 Olds looks downright purple/maroon, and looks great. OK, Jacquard it is, from here on out. Will I miss out on some other great paints? Maybe, but, at least my wife isn't yelling at me for stinking up the house!