Wednesday, September 27, 2017

1951 Belair: Completed

All done, and the result is a bit sloppy but acceptable, I guess.



The windshield, taken from the AMT kit, is a bit small, and would benefit from a sun visor to hide the gap at the top. And at the last minute, the fumes from the CA glue used to attach body to chassis fogged up all the windows :) Of course I worked on the fit, and surface area of the join between body and chassis is quite large and therefore quite impossible to take apart. Bah.



Some of the bare metal foil and silver paint is a little sloppy as well.



And the outside finish, as always, took a beating as I was struggling with the acetate windows. This just reinforces the old rule, especially with resin, that you should trial fit absolutely everything before paint goes on, and I bent that rule fairly significantly this time.



As far as resin kits go, this one was middle of the pack in terms of challenges. At one extreme are crude $20 castings needing lots of cleanup and work on fit; at the other extreme are the $400+ kits from Model Factory Hiro which are absolute masterpieces. In terms of both price and quality, Profil 24 is in the middle, and so is Best Model Car Parts who made this wagon body. You pays your money and you takes your chances. That being said, resin is (so far) the only way to get interesting models that aren't provided by the major styrene companies.



As for the AMT donor kit, I was surprised at the poor instructions and vague fit of things like the splash pans behind the bumpers. A nice kit but needs some finessing to get it right. That being said, the Stovebolt 6 and associated speed components are very nice and worth the price of the kit, you just need to ignore the 12-lead distributor located immediately under the exhaust manifold.

Time to go surfin'!

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