Bugatti EB110, Revell, 1/24

[mattbacon]

A great article in last month's Octane promoted this to the top of the build pile! It'll join the XJ220 and soon-to-be-built NSX in an "early 90s supercar" corner of the garage...



The Revell kit is very nicely detailed, generally, but the mould is suffering, and this is NOT a car that likes to be packed in a flimsy box and sat on a shelf for years. Airfix/Heller do the whole cabin as a transparent piece that sits on top of the body, whereas Revell has gone for a roof and the flimsiest A-pillars ever committed to plastic. The body shell is also flimsy, and warped on my example, so I've assembled various "working" bits into one, much more solid, shell. The opening bonnet shows you little except the battery, but fixed in place it beefs up the front end nicely. And while it would be nice to have an opening engine cover, both it and the roof were warped. Fixing it shut lets me use the window between the cabin and engine bay as a solid "bulkhead" which pushes the roof and engine cover nicely back into shape... not quite figured out how the "wing" works yet.


Heat shields covered with cigarette foil. They'll need a bit of fettling, but the texture is perfect...



Wheels stripped of chrome. Lots of flash in the holes, so these are the "best of eight" -- I had a spare set from a donor kit I bough just for the tyres for £5, but the originals demonstrate how tired the mould is. It seems bizarre that they would chrome them in the state some of them were in, but there's obviously no intermediate quality check...




The engine is nicely detailed, if a bit over complex -- I don't see a need to have the cylinder head in three stacked parts, especially when they don't fit very precisely, which can end up with your cam covers not aligned and not parallel, if you're not careful. If I was building another one, I'd set up (unglued) the base/sump part of the engine on the bearers in the big chassis part, and then glue on the block/head parts to the base, fine tuning their fore and aft alignment in the chassis, until I was sure that they run directly front to back, and then add the induction manifold and check that for alignment, all while the glue is soft.

The blue detailing is prototypical, but there's a bit more to do to the throttle actuator rods yet...

bestest,
M.

[Miklaren]

Great start! I never knew a kit of this car existed...looks like you're battling the body issues quite well. Love the engine too!

[r33nz]

Great start, I built this kit many years ago and had a lot of fun with it, have another one in the stash I hope to get around to one day

Cheers
Glenn

[willimo]

This is such a neat car, I love that one of these kits is getting built. Such a labor of love. Great start!

[mattbacon]

Thanks, guys. It's not the easiest kit to build, and you need to clean up the parts because the mould is getting tired, but it is impressively detailed nontheless. I'm progressing steadily in several areas, but only this to show for it so far...





That's about it for the engine now. The exhausts and turbos are fixed using very strong, but flexible, "Serious Glue" which should allow a bit of room for manoeuvre when it comes to attaching all the pipework, of which there is a LOT. All I've added is a throttle linkage and return spring -- a bit overscale but it'll busy things up under there -- and the blue hoses coming out of the sides.



To start work on the pipe work, I'm using the engine bay as a temporary jig. I want to get the pipework glued together into usable chunks before painting and then assembling permamanently. As well as these exhaust pipes, there are some smaller diameter secondary exhausts that have to fit parallel and around them, and then the air intake hoses that come over the top inside the turbos. All are provided, which is pretty impressive. The fit isn't brilliant though, which is less so...



Template for masking up the window in the firewall behind the cockpit. It's not all glass under there, so I needed two identical, symmetrical masks. I made this out of cardboard, folded so both sides were identical, and then drew around it to create two masks from kabuki tape. A fair bit of swearing later, they were on opposite sides of the window...



Body in primer. I should get the French Blue on tomorrow, now I've got the wing sorted as well...

bestest,
M.

[joelwideqvist]

Oh, that's one good looking car! Great work so far!

[MidMazar]

Keep up the good work, I have one of these in the stash and thank god I didnt sell it, have been downsizing. Your work is inspiring, engine looks good. Be careful polishing that bad body because the pillars are so weak. I reinforced mine from the bottom of roof to the sides of the inside door. Good luck and keep us posted@!!

[mattbacon]

Thanks, guys... I'm hoping that the Zero 2K will do it's usual stellar job and I won't be needing to polish the body at all!

Yesterday, I made a blue thing:




Some small areas of other colours to add, and then it will be on with the SHINY...

bestest,
M.

[mattbacon]

Interior under way...




A thing I did notice in pictures is how shiny (OK, "plasticky") the leather in the interior looks. Revell have also made some nice texturing on the seats. Outside, under lights, I know the shadows and highlights are overdone, but once they are inside a small and rather gloomy cabin, I still want the impression of texture to be visible.




The dash is quite symptomatic of this kit. It has only two parts, yet OOB there's a big rectangular gap to the left of the binnacle which almost looks like a socket to glue something into. There's nothing there in the real thing though (or the kit parts), so I filled it with plastic strip and made it go away. On the other hand, there's some beautifully detailed engraving on the dials and controls, which comes up a treat when you paint and drybrush it. There's a decal, but I had no confidence of getting it to settle down over the detail, and I figured I could paint a better "burr walnut" veneer than the pixelated version on the decal. The wood effect is hard to see because the highlights from the gloss mask the grain, but I used Vallejo Woodgrain (transparent browny-red) over Cavalry Brown. A bit of research showed plenty of white labelling all over the instrument panel, which busys it up nicely.

Won't be long before the cabin is finished now...

bestest,
M.

[mattbacon]

et voila!




My owner has decided on a non-prototypical walnut gear shift knob, for a bit more colour in the grey, grey and grey cabin...

Now, back to the body and engine (one day I'll build a model in the order the instructions suggest, but... this is not that day)

bestest,
M.

[nugundam93]

love the seat textures and the wash

[mattbacon]

Thanks very much! Last update for today...



Brake discs waiting to go in. Look carefully, because you will never see these again, once they are inside the wheels!






...and now I have a shiny blue thing. The Zero 2K is "dust free" now, and I'll stick it in the airing cupboard to cure hard overnight. The rear spoiler bay and diffuser section are Zero's "Graphite Grey" -- I think it's carbon, probably, but on the pictures I have there's no visible weave pattern at all.

bestest,
M.

[das_auto]

Looks great Matt! Well done!

Emil

[el manolo]

wonderful job, so far!

[mattbacon]

Thank you, gentlemen!



I've been playing around with some settings on the camera, just to see what happens, and used this as a test subject. You can see the colour properly, and get the impression of the wing in place. It looks lower and sleeker than I expected...



Wheels done. Contrary to what I expected, you can actually make out the brake callipers, if you look REALLY hard. As so often in this kit, their are little touches of detail that are amazing -- you can actually read the "BBS" logo on at least two of the wheels. Shame that the plastic sagged a bit and filled with flash in places around the "spokes..."




I hope these will help some intrepid future modellers battling this beastie. The spring, drive shaft and frame are a really tricky fit. You need to make sure that the frame is firmly rooted and square onto the undertray (which meant, in this case, removing some really weirdly located ejection pin towers inside the "shoulders" at the base of the frame which should fit neatly over the inner corners of the moulded wishbone). The drive shafts need to go well up into the sockets in the frame. And I had to slim down the upper spring locating pin considerably to get enough room for manoeuvre so that the spring didn't foul the drive shaft and lever the whole thing apart.




The fit of the upper wishbones is really unclear from the instructions. I have no idea what, if anything, is going to fit onto those two pins on the top edge of the frame, but it ain't the wishbones. They clip into place with no inboard/outboard positive location, so just make sure the wheel carriers are vertical. The steering link goes with the ends angling towards the front. Oddly, although the shaft on the wheel carriers have "flats" to orient the wheels, the brake disk collars that fit onto them don't...



And this is where I'm at tonight. I wanted the engine and exhaust silencer to be really firmly fitted to give me some solid anchor and reference points as I start trying to get all the tubing plumbed in around the engine, so they are glued in with "Serious Glue". The lolly stick lets me clamp the engine down firmly with tape while avoiding any pressure on the turbos lurking underneath...

bestest,
M.