TOPIC:

Have a little more work on my Volvo ...

Painting finished, window masks & protective film removed...



Which has revealed a couple of problems - firstly a few bits of paint bleed, no doubt caused by a bit of moisture behind the masks (I put them on wet) sucking in the water based paint ... I'll be ignoring these for the moment, it only looks bad in extreme closeup ...



Secondly, wobbly lines ... perhaps painting it free hand was a bit ambitious, but I think it would have worked fine if I'd only had to do the two coats, seven meant mistakes were bound to mount up ...




Never mind, "we have the technology": a photo trimmer + self adhesive vinyl sheet makes ...



... my own line tape - approx 1.5mm wide...




Everything looks a lot straighter now:




A couple of hours & 28 decals later (seriously), the windows are done ... I'm not quite sure how many there are left to go, but the numbers go up to 83, and several decals are duplicated/triplicated/quadruplicated (is that a word?)

More work on the Volvo ...

...one side decalled up, but still a long way to go...


... front end in bits, ready for bearings ... & replacing loose plastic hubs (which I hate- they're always breaking, or sticking to the wheels, or moving a little & loosing the pins) with bloo alloy ones from Racing Punk...


... finally finished...

moving on to the 6R4 again, window masks have been removed, along with the sharpie lines on the outside (with isopropanol), "freehand" painting issues are the same as with the Volvo, so lining out will be needed...





With paint on it's obvious how badly the wheels fill the arches, front an rear, so I've ordered some white chunky 5-spokers with a lot of offset (9mm for the rear, 6mm for the front) & will swap the tyres over...






interior kit from RadshapeRC is slightly odd ... vacform is thick, but does loose a bit of detail beacuse of that ...



... we also appear to be going Back to the Future ...



... extra bits (head, fire extinguisher, steering wheel, handbrake, gearstick, tiny mirrors, extra dial guage pod, and a couple of other inexplicable bits, one of which could be a rearview mirror, without a fixing stem) are moulded in clear ...



... interior needs a lot of cutting down to fit the 6R4, I'll be spraying this with Plastic Primer on the top side, then brush painting the details with Tamiya X-/XF- acrylics ...



... but I won't be using the head, as I already have a lot of spares already painted ... and yes, i know this looks "odd", but I have to store them somewhere ...

That is so very serial-killer of you to store heads in a box... They look awesome dude.

Louisbaby wrote:

That is so very serial-killer of you to store heads in a box... They look awesome dude.

Yep, that's exactly the sort of picture you see on the news, with a voiceover of someone asking "how the warning signs were missed"

Done a little more to the 6R4 inbetween watching episodes of Farscape ...


Finished the paint edge lining, also made my own window surrounds & as mauch of the decalling as I could with self adhesive vinyl, as based on past experience and looking at the decal sheet, they're, well, a bit crap...




"Proper" decals added, along with the interior ... I didn't do to much to it, just a little semi gloss black (X-18) on the dash, seat, gearshift gaiter & steering wheel, flat aluminum (sic) on the gearstick & steering wheel spokes & boss, homemade "overall white" (flat white with a little brown) on the driver's body, flat red (XF-7) on the straps, gloves in leftover homemade Sand Rover seat brown, helmet was already painted with clear blue (X-23) over silver, added the interior kit instrument & strap decals:





A couple of interesting pictures I found on teh interwebs:

They really shoehorned that V6 in there ...




Someone trying to convert a stock Metro into a 6R4, and failing:

Wow - I think I missed a few posts.
All the progress is looking great!

Me too,
The Volvo is looking brilliant! I remember seeing these in the BTCC quite a few years ago.

-Lars

These two are pretty much finished now, the new wheels for the 6R4 have arrived, & fill the arches a lot better now, I've also made some mudflaps out of 3mm silicone sheet, it's too thick, rather inflexible & bends the wrong way, but I wanted them to be red, and rubber-like, so it was either that or parts cut out of a whoopee cushion ...






All those layers of paint & the extras take their toll on the weight - a bit porky at 1650g...





I've given it a quick run - predicatably enough grass is a bit too much for it, and three of the tyres popped off the rim, so I'll need some superglue to call it properly finished ... I've just bought a cheap 9T brushless setup & did think abot putting it in, but overall I'm rather uninspired by how this has turned out, so probably won't bother ... it's the curse of the TL01 chassis - still IMO Tamiya's worst effort

The "Bullisotrm" (sic) 9T brushless combo arrived today, resplendant in its cheap anodising & "Smart Barking" (sic) feature... I've installed it in the 6R4 & given it a quick bench test ... judging from the way the tyres are ballooning it's probably not going to have any more top end than the Orion 19T brushed motor I took out, but I hope for moe torque & therefore a bit more "real world" speed, especially accelleration...

The ESC looks very very similar to the EZRUN 60A ESC, just a tiny bit cheaper to make as there weren't any battery connectors on it - not really a problem, as if it had come with a Tamiya connector I would have cut it off & fitted Powerpoles anyway.

The motor is 540 sized on the outside, but a lot of that is fins - take those away & it's closer to 380 size - from the whole number (i.e. 9T, rather than 9.5T/8.5T I should have expected that, but got a bit caught up in the "bargain" price ... the anodising is a lot thinner than a EZRUN motor - it doesn't show up too well in the photo, but the blue speckles barely join up & you can see a lot of the "natural" alloy colour through it.

The grass needs cutting before I give the car another run, I'll give it a proper try after that