This article will appear in the IPMS Seattle newsletter in September - I've already gone past the end of the article in actual work, so I wanted to get it out - part two will be out sometime next month...
Preamble... and Ramble...
Once upon a time, oh, about four years ago, our own Tim Nelson came to us and asked if anyone would be interested in building some replica models for something called the Champlin Collection. Being a young, idealistic boy of 35, I signed up to help the effort, looking forward to the challenge of building as close a replica of a real airplane that I could. Two years later, a jaded, cynical, prematurely-aged grump of 37 delivered his model to the Museum of Flight, where it sits today, treated like that gawd-awful lamp your great-aunt gave you for Christmas - stored out of sight 99.9% of the time and only shown the light of day when she visits. During the building process, my comments and pointed critiques (some call it whining, a label I steadfastly deny) prompted the following reply from Mr. Nelson:
You know, nothing takes the joy out of modeling like building on a deadline for someone else.
While I appreciated this wisdom at the time, and have oft repeated it, I obviously have more belly than experience under my belt, and it appears I use my head to hold more hair than memories. Were it otherwise, I never would have taken on my latest project - building a replica of another vehicle at the request of another person. This time, however, there would be no time limit, and even less reference material to draw upon. Plus, I get to write (and get to read) a few newsletter articles - what a bargain!
You see, the story begins, as I remember it, sometime last winter, when a gentleman who lived (note the past tense) in my condo noticed my garage door open (which it usually is when I’m working on a project). Not being a builder himself, he asked me if I’d like to build a model for him of a car he used to own. He even had the kit to start with, and was willing to pay me for my time. Knowing there is no way he could pay me a reasonable rate for the hours I’d put into the project, I told him (and here’s where I wish I had double-jointed knees to kick myself with) I would do it for nothing. And so began another journey...
The Real Introduction
The subject: A custom 1953 Ford Victoria.
The kit: Lindberg’s 1/24th scale ‘53 Ford Victoria (how lucky was that?)
The challenge: Build it to represent an actual car owned by my friend in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s.
The Build - Begin with the Power Plant
The engine was fairly easily done - this was my first flathead engine, so some placement of parts was off from my beloved (and more familiar) muscle car era (distributor in front on top of the pulleys? Two coolant feed and return hoses? Oil filter on the wrong side? What the...?)
I added a turned aluminum distributor and plug wires, and thanks to the weird distributor placement on flatheads, had to find a creative place to run the wires (instead of down from the plugs and above the headers, I had to run them up from the plugs and over the heads). Masking tape pulley belts lent some interest and accuracy to the final engine bay, as did black washes and dry brushing of the metalizer steel engine (I had no references for actual engine color). More on references later.
The Build - Body like a Brick...
All the time I was working on the engine, I was working on the body as well. Here’s where the real customization work began. My friend’s car had very little ornamentation on the exterior - no rear wheel well covers, no hood ornament, different bumpers, bullet tail lamps, and the piece-de-resistance (emphasis on “resistance”, synonymous with “trepidation”, “caution”, and “abject irrational gibbering fear”), a custom bird-cage grill. This was going to be a challenge... I love challenges! At least, that’s what I told myself when I wasn’t trying to convince myself this is fun...
Filling the extra body holes was easily done with gap-filling CA, and the entire body was covered with Mr. Surfacer 500 and sanded to remove high-spots. I’m beginning to love Mr. Surfacer - the 500 brand fills divots and heavy scratches with ease, while the 1000 is a good brushable filler for general work. It makes a great guide coat for sanding work before primer and sealer, and best of all, I don’t need to break out the airbrush for it - brilliant! Too bad I had to have a Japanese friend of mine translate the instructions on the bottle to see how to clean it off my brushes...
The Build - Paint
Anyway, once I was satisfied with the rough body work, I started reading an article in Scale Auto Enthusiast (I’m sure you military modelers have heard of it, maybe even seen it once or twice) by Mark Gustavson on how he gets his gorgeous finishes, and decided to follow his formula, which is based on using real automotive paint products. So, article in hand, I proceeded to apply multiple automotive primer coats, which were sanded in between with 3M auto body sandpaper in between (starting with 600 grit and working up to 1500 grit for the final primer coats). The final coat before real color was an automotive sealer, which isolated the primer from the later color coats. The quart can I bought cost me around $30 from Wesco, and will probably go bad on the shelf before I can use it all (in other words, if you want some, just ask).
I ordered paint from Model Car World to match the color my friend reported was on his car. MCW’s paints are real automotive lacquers bottled for modeler’s - to put it another way, I can go on the Internet, find an exact color match for a given manufacturer’s paint, and pay a premium for a two ounce bottle. The alternative is to go to Wesco, have the guy behind the counter find me an exact color match (using my Internet references), and buy a quart for $30+. The trade-off is cheaper by the quart v. not having twenty opened quarts of auto paint aging on my shelves - not sure what I'll do yet.
Despite the premium price, I did learn a few things about using auto paints.
- My cheap lacquer thinner won’t touch it - I had to use acetone to clean it out of my airbrush (note to self: get real lacquer thinner next time you’re at Wesco).
- Auto lacquer dries quick and hard, which is good - no more polishing through color coats. The caveat to fast drying is leads directly to point number…
- Because it dries so fast, I can’t spray it like normal model lacquers or thinned enamels. Auto paint is formulated to spray on 1:1 autos through HVLP (high velocity, low pressure) guns at 45-50 PSI. While spraying through an airbrush at 15 PSI is a valid scale reduction, the paint itself hasn’t been scale reduced. This leads to orange peel, frustration, and heartbreak (no word on teen pregnancy or stunted growth) – in other words, I’ve got to turn up the pressure and lay it on thicker on the later coats.
The Build - The Big Mistake™
Two color coats, one intermediate sanding with 1500 paper, and two more color coats later, I was happy with my progress, despite the air pressure problems. My happiness, however, like a bug flying across the highway at windshield level, was short-lived, for it was then, and only then, that I notice my first Big Mistake™
On the rear of the body, below the trunk lid, there are some mounting holes - I’m not sure what they’re for. Problem is, my reference photos show nothing mounted there, and no holes in the body where these holes are. I did mention this was after my first four color coats, right?
After sanding the area around the holes to remove most of the paint, I filled the holes with styrene rod and cemented them in place with liquid cement. I then clipped them as flush with the body as possible, and proceeded on a multi-step clean-up process involving sandpaper, sanding sticks, the chisel ends of files, and some Mr. Surfacer to make the bare spots as smooth as possible. I’m still not done, but it’s better than having holes.
The Build - Chassis, Bling, and the Little Mistake
In meantime, I got to work on the chassis. I managed to scratch-build some coil-over shocks for the front suspension - this was as useful as detailing the backside of a instrument panel, as the shocks are buried between the frame and the control arms. I also began scratch-building rear leaf springs to replace the poorly detailed kit pieces. And then, like a woman in an old country song who smells an odd perfume on her man’s shirt collar, joy left me again as I noticed my first Little Mistake (used with permission).
Part of the front chassis is actually a front body panel (it sits below the grill and above the front bumper), and needs to be painted with the body color. Why is that a mistake? Because the chassis is currently painted flat black – all the way around. Why is that a Little mistake? Because I can fix it with masking tape and paint. This is when joy bought my story that it was my aunt’s perfume, decided I was worth a second chance, and maybe we could be in a southern rock song instead...
The front and rear bumpers in the kit have pusher bars on them - unfortunately, the reference car’s bumpers did not, which meant I had to remove them from the otherwise correctly shaped kit parts. However, it’s never that easy, is it?
The degree of difficulty on this maneuver is that the kit bumpers are molded hollow in back - simply cutting the pusher bars portions off would have left each bumper in three separate pieces. Using resourcefulness only a modeler could draw forth and appreciate (because it was completely lost on my wife and daughter), and which I didn’t know I had, I filled the hollow area behind each pusher bar with gap-filling CA and set it with CA kicker. This provided enough support to allow me to cut the pusher bars off, grind the stubs down with my rotary tool, and sand the area smooth. Some Mr. Surfacer and a coat of primer later, and I had a bumper ready for gloss black, which will be covered with Alclad II Chrome (just for the bling, baby!) before the bumpers get installed.
The Build - Itchy and Scratchbuild
The toughest part of the build to date has been the front grill. I’ve seen nothing like it in any kit, so set down to do my first bit of major (or minor, depending on if John Alcorn’s reading this article) scratch-building (OK, it was my second, but the first time I was following along with an FSM article, so it doesn’t really count). My biggest problem was how to build it so it looked like a kit piece rather than a grade school art project.
The grill, when viewed from the top, follows the angle of the hood, so I roughed that angle onto a small piece of wood to act as a jig. Stock styrene rod of roughly the correct diameter was gently heated over a match and quickly bent to the correct angle - six pieces would be needed for this grill (I counted them on the reference photo - and people scoff at the New Math. Pshaw!) Each bent piece was laid into the wood jig, with another smaller piece of the same diameter rod in between each to act as a spacer. Once in place, some masking tape held it all together and tight while I glued in smaller diameter styrene rod in the center and midway on each side. Once the glue set, the spacers were extricated from the jig, the tape was removed, and the grill was halfway done. The kit grill was molded with a surround in place which I could use, so I cut the kit grill away from the surround, drilled some small holes, and mounted the new grill in its place. A little sanding and primer, and it too will be ready for gloss black and Alclad II Chrome.
The Build - References? We don’ need no stinkin’ references!
I’ve mentioned references once or twice in this article. My references are more than just my friend telling me, “I had this ‘53 Vic painted red - can you build it?” I’ve actually got six pictures of this car in various poses and angles. Before you get excited, let me explain further - I’ve got six black and white photos from six 3x3 40+ year old faded color photos, photocopied on a single sheet of 8.5x11” paper. I’ve seen the color versions once, but I can do little but confirm their existence - I have no access to them now. The one shot I don’t have is a good interior shot of the dash - I’ll have to contact my friend for more info before I get to work on it.
Epilogue
Luckily, the rest of the build should be much easier, and you’ll hear about that in future articles on this build-up. Coming up - the rest of the body paint, interior (I’ve got real color references for that - it’s white with black piping and grey carpet! No, really!), finish the chassis, control panels, wheels, and final assembly. Stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath - of all the things I’m famous for, building fast and writing regularly ain’t two of them...
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