This roadster conversion is being done by one of our long time customers, Chris in Houston, TX. I am adding the pics that have been sent to me along the way as these were received before the idea of a forum was hatched. Uploaded in no particular order.
The amount of modification, scratch-building and styrene work is jaw dropping, and Chris' dedication to completing this build is amazing (having even tried to do some scratch-building by candle-light during a black out!).
Rather than me notating each and every image, feel free to post any question on here as Chris will be picking up the thread after this one.
Tail now has its first real primer coat. Hinges now have flexible attachment points to make it easier to glue them accurately. Also they have magnetic touch points under the front lip of the boot so they will hold the boot lid up when it’s open
I had to grind a lot of resin off the inside edge of the roadster tail where it joins to the kit floor to get it to sit evenly.
Having real primer on it really helps make it feel like it will be a real car, not a wreck sitting on blocks.
I mentioned the “new” boot lid that I made out of the roof of one of the 2 donor bodies that I have. However, there’s no photo, so here’s a few more. First the donor body which I had already carved the windshield section off. Poor thing! You can also see the hole where I carved out the gas flap to replace the one I butchered on the resin tail.
I copied the interior ribbing from a photo of the 1:1 car and I put a stub of a paperclip in the front of the ribbing to “connect” with a magnet I had already put in the boot latch that I made. Since then I have filled the groove with black CA glue and polished the lid ready for paint.
What can I say but WOW! Really Awesome!! Really nice work - love the U Joints on the rear end. Not to mention all the rest of what you are doing. Cannot wait to see the completion! Keep it up.
New old photos. Here’s the new rear end - almost entirely scratch built.
Everything in white is scratch built including the disks, calipers, shocks, and springs. I got some RC uni-joints and used those. I articulated the upper and lower control arms and carved off the kit control arms mounting pins. Looks good enough!
Picture 22 is the aftermath of me cutting the windshield frame off so I could build a proper windshield. The roadster windshield is nothing like the kit one, so this is going to be a bit of a challenge.
Picture 21 is me solving a problem with Colin’s first version of the louvre detail set. The bonnet has a slight curvature and the louvres are dead flat, so after a couple of failures, I figured out that I could sit the louvres on “shelves” controlling how deep they sit. With that and a bit of sanding they fit great.
And after all that, Colin came through with a much better version with the shelf molded into the louvre. Genius! I’m waiting for his new stuff. In the meantime this is how it looked after my last attempt.
I still need to fill and paint, but this looks so much better than the kit.
Picture 20 is WIP from the front. The kit front suspension has no brake caliper at all and the uprights are nothing like the 1:1. I opened up the molded shut parts of the uprights with a dremel tool to more closely resemble the real thing.
I made new brake disks and calipers (did the same for the rear brakes too). The calipers will mount to the “ears” on the uprights and I’ll put some resin bolt heads on to make it look finished.
The kit “radiator” is just an empty box, so I filled it in and put some mesh in to make it look more like a real radiator.
Picture 13 is another view of the rough fit, but before I carved the windshield off. Picture 14 is a view of my 2nd equally wretched attempt at hinges that would work. The less said about those the better!
Picture 15 is a much more recent view showing how close I managed to get the hinges to the inside of the boot opening. I’m really pleased with that.
16-19 are WIP of building the join between the front and back halves of the car, as well as mating the roadster shell to the interior of the tub. That was a ton of work and there’s a lot of styrene scaffolding hidden inside.
The kit has almost no connection between the cabin floor and the coupe floor. So when you cut the body away, there’s literally nothing to hold the upper tail, the boot floor and the lower tail together. My solution was to level the boot floor so I could glue that to the lower tail.
Then I cut out 2 pieces of .60 thou Evergreen sheet styrene to form a rigid joint. I glued the front piece to the front side of the joint, spanning cabin floor and boot floor. Then I glued the other side in giving me a rigid connection. I can hold it by the tail and wave it around without fear of it breaking.
Picture 12 is a failure. At first I tried to do the boot interior as a box within a box. That was a bad idea.
Picture 11 is a rough fit exercise to see if the tail and doors would line up with the A-pillar/firewall. It kinda fits, but I am going to need to do some surgery to close the gap between door and a-pillar/firewall.
You can see I carved off the windshield frame - it had to go so I could make a new acetate windshield and make it all fit later.
I also opened the vents in the dash and filled them with mesh. I like it.
Picture 10 is the resin roadster tail. I bought it from some guy in the Netherlands on eBay. It’s got a few flaws, but it’s easy enough to work with. I cut out the boot lid, glued in some support styrene for the lid to rest on and set about building the connection between the boot floor and lower tail section - and most importantly between the tail section and the interior tub floor.
The picture of the gas cap is an example of a swing and a miss. Like an idiot, I decided to make an opening gas flap. I got the part you see done, but the rest was a debacle because the resin was too thick and too soft.
So I carved the gas flap out of one of the donor bodies, sanded it down to about 1mm thick and then glued it into the gaping hole above. I was unhappy because the kit puts the gas flap a long way away from where it is on the real car, but I figure I escaped with a win, so I left it alone. If and when I build the roadster tail from scratch, I will put the flap in the right place AND make it work.
Pictures 5-8 are WIP with the boot cards and hinges. My first 2 tries at hinges were hopeless. I totally underestimated the size. The last time I started by trying to clone the hinges for the 1:1 car. Getting a mount point in the boot “wall” was too much trouble, so I glued neodymium magnets on the back of the boot card and glued a partner magnet on the hinge arm at the pivot point. Hey presto, working hinges!
Later I replaced the magnets on the hinge arms with slightly thinner versions to get the hinge arms closer to the inner boot lip. There’s a photo above somewhere showing how close they are to the edge. Success!
Pictures 3 and 4 are a further part of the experiment. I have always harbored the idea that I could completely scratch build a roadster using only the donor kit parts and some Evergreen styrene. After carving up the original donor body I decided to cut the roof off the other donor body and see how it went.
The answer is that it fits perfectly on the regular kit floor and tail - not surprisingly, but also there’s enough material to pull it off. So sometime down the road, I will do it!
Picture 2 above is part of an experiment. I needed to replace the resin boot lid (shown elsewhere above) because it settled into a bit of a wave that I couldn’t fix and it wouldn’t sit properly in the boot opening. I guessed correctly that there was enough material with the right curvature in the roof of the donor kit body to make a new boot lid - so I did that (also above somewhere).
Then after talking with Colin about some other customers who are working on the coupe, I decided to drop the coupe body on top of my project to give everyone an idea of how to go about building a more realistic coupe door frame. The kit interior is worthless as far as that goes.
Picture 1, above shows the cabin and tail section while I was part way through building the inner tub walls. I learned that there’s a 2-level door post with an angled edge because the inside of the door is at an angle - not vertical. I think there’s another shot of that somewhere above. For reference, here’s a shot that I used.
I still need to put some extra styrene around the boot opening in a few places so it’s even all the way round and covers the tops of the inner “boot cards”. I made those removable so I could paint everything without worrying about overspray on the boot interior.
Also (surprisingly) every series 1-1.5 roadster had the same puce-colored cardboard boot cards. See the boot photos on the real 1:1 Series 1 that Colin posted. I couldn’t get an exact match, but this card stock is close enough.
There’s a 1-2-3… order to put them back in. When I’m ready I will put some Tamiya thin cement on the backs of the boot cards and glue them in permanently.
Awesome build. 😍
HI Chris, really nice job, great work. Amazing what you are doing from scratch! What do you use for cutting the plastic? Knife, knife saw blades? I have used both depending on what I was trying to do. Just curious if there is something better. I have just gotten back into building about 1 3/4 years ago after not building for about 49 years. Taking a bit to get back in step.
Thanks - Ed from Oregon