Lions Roar

GT-R Complete & Photos

I've wrapped up the build of the Tamiya GT-R kit.  By the time I was finishing up this kit, I was remembering why is was that I tried a wooden kit in the first place.  I get worn out on all the painting, the frustrations of various paint types not agreeing with one another, and the fragility of decals.  Although at least with this project, I took away a few valuable lessons that I can keep in mind for future similar projects.  Here are a few tidbits to remember:

- If it is going to be shiny, use lacquer.  Tamiya's gloss acrylics just never behave when airbrushed.
- Don't use the microSOL (aka Decal Melter) until the decal is in it's final place and already partly dry.
- If some of it will be painted over, remove the underlying chrome plating first, otherwise, the paint will just chip off, despite using primer.
- Give the aforementioned lacquer PLENTY of time to dry before putting masking tape on it.  Probably should wait 24 hours before trying.
- One should probably order a second set of decals for a project like this, as some are sure to be damaged.  Alternately, perhaps one could scan them, and buy a self-print decal sheet so one could make replacements (although I'm not sure about the quality difference here)
- Third party racing harness kits, while pretty cool, might not be worth the effort unless the car is an open wheel type.

Anyhow, with this project completed, I spent a few minutes photographing but this car and the last project (WWII BMW r75 motorcycle).  I recently purchased a new lens, which has some macro capabilities, and tried that out on this shoot.  I am pretty pleased with the results.  Here are a few images of the completed models:

Pasted Graphic 88

Pasted Graphic 89

Pasted Graphic 90

Pasted Graphic 91

Pasted Graphic 92

Pasted Graphic 93

The full galleries are online and can be seen in the completed models section of this web site.

Next up:  Model Airways' Curtis 'Jenny' wooden plane.  Stay tuned for more model adventures!
Comments

And Moving Right Along....

I didn't rest long after wrapping up the Panzer. I jumped right into another vehicle of the same era and same scale. This kit is a BMW R75, manufactured by Lions Roar. I'm not adding any after market parts to this one, but it comes with quite a bit of detail out of the box. It's got a variety of photo-etched parts for the wheel spokes, various engine bits and for a few other small details, like the padlocks on equipment boxes. The kit also comes with a sidecar and two versions of a little trailer.

The build was pretty straightforward, with the exception of things just being very very small. The motorcycle is the same scale as the last tank model I built, at 1/35 scale. This makes the whole bike only a few inches long. As you can see from the photos below, there is a pretty good amount of detail in the kit. Also, overall the quality of the kit modeling, while pretty good, was not quite as good as the Panzer kit (which was made by Dragon), so required a good deal more cleanup of mold seams, etc. With the parts being as tiny as they were, this cleanup occasionally resulted in broken parts. This also led me to be fairly certain that I like working on larger models :)

I'm currently working on wrapping this project up, with weathering powders, etc, but as it's not quite done, here are a few photos of the model as of last weekend. My hope for this one is to combine it with the Panzer for display, so that I can put them both on the same wooden base. This just means that I've got to be sure they generally match color-wise and look like they've been living in the same world.

Assembled in sections, engine masked for painting the body.

Pasted Graphic 76

Pasted Graphic 77

After a base coat of dark yellow.

Pasted Graphic 78
Comments