Plastic surgery on the dash, cowl, and kick panels part two

Well this is embarrassing. I found my bumper fix was only half a fix. But I’ll get back to that later. Meanwhile I have been hacking away at the doors and the center section of the car. But first, here’s a selection of big scale cars from our local “Space City Shootout” competition last weekend. None other than our own Colin Shannon sponsored the big scale category and there were some GREAT kits on display.

Including… this lovely1/8 scale Corvette (3rd place) from my friend, and Forum member, Stephen Miller, and the drop dead gorgeous Williams from my friend Alex Hague who walked off with a mantleplace full of prizes. But enough of this frivolity.

You may be wondering how much plastic I butchered since the last post. Ummmm… yeah, quite a lot. To recap, the problem I’m trying to solve at the moment is how to get the doors and cowling to fit. As usual it turns out the kit parts don’t fit all that well. I sanded off a lot of material from the door inners to get them to mate properly with the door skins and then for the combined door parts to fit properly in the opening between the cowling and the tail section. And keep in mind that I carved the whole body off the kit more than a year ago, so getting the cowl and tail to fit without any kit-provided mounting pins or frankly any other structure falls firmly into the “wow, who’da thunk that!” category.

My original idea was to reinforce the kick panels from the kit and build hinges for the doors. I was quite proud of getting all that to line up, but unfortunately the kit kick panels were (a) different sizes (I kid u not) (b) not square and (c) too flimsy to support the dash and cowling. Not that they actually fitted together anyway but I’m trying to be nice. I quickly found that my carefully crafted hinges were not going to work, so I had two choices, either try to make everything, or use some commercial aftermarket hinges. In the interests of getting it done, I chose to use the aftermarket hinges, but with a twist.

I got these 1/10th scale nylon RC hinges from Amazon. They are pretty good, but not much like the 1:1 car. So I removed the pins they came with and redrilled them to accept a brass rod. Then I “ganged” two hinges to be more realistic. I have made a small “frame” around the ganged-up hinges, but next I needed to deal with the utter lack of positive location in the kit, so of course, I made my own.

Note the gratuitous picture of Colin’s enhanced foot-well panels. The pictures above show me making brand new kick panels and fitting them into the car so they are locked into place. None of this is actually glued in yet, but I now have a very robust hands-free mounting for the entire cowling/windshield.

This is the first time the dash cowling has been happy to sit there without using clamps and 3 hands. My new scratch-built kick panels are made out of 80 thou styrene. I glued the pieces together while locked into a small caliper.I added a strip of 80 thou to the back of the firewall to “capture” the kick panels. It all sits there, happily locked together without any glue.

Anyway, I’m super tickled at how well this has turned out

Cheers,

Chris