Opel Admiral Cabriolet SMMI Review Build WIP #2

 Work has been a little slower then I had planned on this so far, some late finishes at work and family stuff has slowed down the progress on this build. But these this do crop up and we have to work around and I have managed to find sometime over the last week two weeks to accelerate this model along the construction path.

The first set of photos are from were taken last week, the chassis and engine were at the pre-painting stage and mocked up to see how they fitted together. What is surprising to me, is that the engine is only held in place by the two mounts on the lower front of the engine block and the prop shaft, and nothing else to support it. It does not even secure itself to the underside on the body. Mind you, there is a little extra support from the water hoses for the radiator and the exhaust pipe, but this will not be that much extra.

The bodyshell had been glued together here and was waiting for the joint lines to be cleaned up on the front fenders and around the rear. One little mistake I made was to add the arm-rests to the door interior panels. DO NOT DO THIS YET! Once these in place, you cannot slide the front and rear seats into position inside the car, the arm-rests sit over the seats. So I had to carefully remove them from the door panels.

Now onto tonight's photos. The chassis and engine have been painted over the last few days. As I am planning to have the bonnet panels open, I decided to add some HT leads to the engine. I spent a little time on the internet trying to find the firing order for the engine, but without any success. But I did find a good photo of the engine showing the side of the distributor and plugs. After tracing each lead in the photo, I believe the firing order for this engine was 1-4-2-5-3-6. Well, that was what it looked like in the photograph! So that's how I did it on this engine. All I need to do now is a little weathering to finish this part of the build.

The joint lines on the bodyshell have been cleaned up and it will be given a coat of primer soon and rubbed down. The seats and folded roof were made up and the differences around the joints on the roof needed filling and sanding. Once everything is in primer, the next stage is to paint the bodyshell and interior. At the minute, I still have not decided on which colour I am going to paint the car. There is a choice of three colour schemes I have seen that I quite like. More updates on the Opel later.

Website Update

The following gallery pages have been added to my website and the "Stocklist" page has been updated to.

1935 Mercedes Benz G4

Curtis SB2C-4 Helldiver

M561 Gama Goat

I did not really do any WIP posts of this model whilst I was building it for the Scale Military Modelling International magazine, due to the four week build deadline. Well, I only got it back from them yesterday and this has been the first chance I have had to take some decent photos of her. She appears in a feature article in this February's issue of the magazine if you fancy having a read about the kit. 

So what is next for the Goat? 

I am going to build a base to demonstrate how the articulation works on the kit and add a little more weathering to the model, it needs a bit mud plastered around it. 

Opel Admiral Cabriolet SMMI Review Build WIP #1

This is a new review build for Scale Military Modelling International magazine, my forth one in the last year and the second 1/24th scale automotive kit released by ICM. The Mercedes Benz G4 I did last summer was a great model to build, even with its faults and the fiddly bits on the suspension, but this is even better from the first impressions of the kit.

First I will deal with the chassis. This kit has a proper complete chassis that comes separate from the floor section of the car. The chassis needs to be assembled and it consists of several parts for the chassis frames and front and rear suspension assemblies. Whilst building up the chassis, I deviated from the instructions slightly and added the cross braces in the middle section of the chassis. These two parts are not meant to be added until the chassis is fixed to the floor section of the body, but I wanted to fully assembled for painting. The front suspension on this model is a nice and solid unit, thus meaning that I will not have the problems of the sagging front axle I experienced on the G4.

The Admiral has a straight 6 cylinder 3.6 litre that produces 75hp. ICM have produce a great replica of this Opel engine with some nice and clean detail on it. I have only needed to remove a few mould line on the parts so far and the engine assembled up without any trouble. To finish off  the engine, you only need to add some HT leads, hoses, wires and fuel lines around the engine bay. I am thinking about doing this and will need to find out the firing order for this engine.

Over the weekend, I had a little fun with his model. For a laugh I dropped the big block Chevy V8 I am using in the 53 BelAir and it has given me an idea for a future project. But putting this larking about aside, the proper engine sits on two mounts on the front suspension, then supported at the rear by the prop shaft and by no other means. I am going to have a good think about this and do some research into it to see if there was any support for the gearbox.