The kit is the lovely Jaguar Mk.2 which use to be produced by Tamiya. This is the road version of the Mk.2, not the racing one which was based on the Coombes Jaguars. The only problem that I initially had was that the kit comes with wire wheels. The Morse Jaguar had steel wheels with chrome hubcaps, which come with the Revell/Aoshima jaguar XK120 kit. A friend of mine happened to have a set of these wheels, tyres and hubcaps in his spares box and allowed me to have them (thank you Lee for them). All I had to do was convert them from the Revell fitment to the Tamiya fitment allowing them to be mounted onto the model. For this, I had to sacrifice four Tamiya wheels from my spares box, just to get the pins that slide into the rubber ring inside the disc brakes. After some filing down, these were glued to the back of the hubcaps which were then glued to the wheel rims once they were all painted. The rest of the models chassis construction was straight normal as in the instructions. The only other extra I added was the HT leads in the engine.
The bodyshell was built straight from the box, all that I had to do different was add the vinyl roof to the car just like the real version. Jaguar never fitted vinyl roofs to the Mk.2's, this was an aftermarket one which was fitted by one the past owners of the car. There are some vinyl roof kits available for model cars, I actually have one sitting in one of my draws. But I decided to make my own using thin masking tape.
After a couple of failed attempts, I managed to get the measurements right and got it to lay down in the correct location on the roof. Once all of the prep work was done on the body, is was primed and wet sanded ready for the body colour. To get the correct colour, I found out what it was on the real car and then looked for the paint code. This is when I discovered that there was three versions of this colour, two which are metallic that originated from the 1960's, but the colour I needed dated back from the 1950's. Luckily, I managed to find the code, popped along to my local paint factors and got an aerosol tin mixed up. I decanted a couple of small bottles of the colour to degas and the model was airbrushed using the paint from the degassed bottles. Zeropaints two-pack clear was used and then polished after it had been left to harden. The vinyl roof was then brush painted using Vallejo black paint thinned slightly and done in a few coats to build up the colour and reduce any brush marks from the finish.
Final construction was carried out as to the instructions, but I did have an accident with the windscreen snapping it in half. Luck for me, I have another two of the Tamiya Mk.2's in my stash, so I took a screen from one of these to replace the broken one. The Morse jaguar is a 2.4 litre engined car, this kit has the 3.8 litre engine in it. There is no visual difference from what I can see, so you would not know unless you look at the side of the engine block. The only extra items that I had to add to the body were an aerial to the right hand wing, AA badge to the front grill and the round wing mirrors which came from a Fujimi Mini kit. The number plates were made up from the silver lettered old style UK number plate decal sheet from Motobitz.
It all, this is one of my favourite builds so far, I did not go to the extreme of extra detail like I did with the Heritage Racing Coombes Mk.2 that I did several years ago. But it is just how the car looks with those steel wheels and hubcaps, not something you usually see on stands at model shows.
And a few more with the Coombes Mk.2 that I had built previously.
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