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.