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Old 08-03-2012, 12:22 PM   #1
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Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Recently I started the Model Factory Hiro Porsche 917 LH. It represents the car driven by Vic Elford and Kurt Ahrens during the 1970 24 houres of Le Mans.This one to be more precise:


Before I start, a bit of history on this car. This is the so called “Lang Heck” or “Long Tail” verion of the 917 and we're talknig about chassis #042. The LH verion was designed to produce less drag en was therefor very effictive on the long straights of Le Mans (at that time without the chicanes on the Hunaudières. It was powered by a 4.9 liter 12 cylinder engine, the most powerful Porsche had at that time. During 1970 the car was used by Porsche Salzburg (basically the 2nd factory team next to John Wyer's Gulf team. The 1970 Le Mans race was the first for this chassis and it started out well, taking pole position in a time of 3m.19.08s.Vic and Kurt led the race for a 225 laps before they had to retire with engine problems. They also managed to set the fastes race lap.
During the remainder of that year the car was used for testing as well as being “lend” to one Steve McQueen who was shooting the movie “Le Mans” (but only Porsche driver Herbert Linge was allowed to drive it).

For the 1971 Le Mans this car was rebuild to the newer specification Lang Heck and was only entered for that race. Again it took pole position. (this car is also made by MFH). Since 2009 this chassis can be seen in the Porsche museum.

On to the kit! It's a typical MFH kit with a lot of white-metal and PE combined with a very nice 3D printed body. With so many parts I always check if everything is there beforehand. I'm glad I did because the rear torsion-bar was missing.Luckily MFH's customer support is top notch and the missing part was on it's way the next day! In the meantime I did a glued the big white-metal and PE-parts to see if there would be any fitting problem. After concluding there were none, I simply put the parts in acetone to dissolve the CA glue again (don't try this on plastic as that will dissolve!!).
Eventually the time came to actually start the build. I usually ignore the order of construction in the manual, so I started with the cockpit. The chassis and the firewall were glued and screwed together.



Next I assembled the frame and made sure it fit correctly into the chassis:





I then seperated the top and bottom of the frame to make further building easier. I did this by putting it in a thin layer of acetone. The result is this:



After that the lower part of the frame was glued onto the chassis and the sides of the chassis (indicated by the “1” and “2” in the picture) were added:



Just for fun I made a dry fit of the bigger parts and made a picture:

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Old 08-03-2012, 01:30 PM   #2
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

This is an awesome kit of an awesome car from the most awesome race ever, so hopefully this will be a... wait for it... awesome build!

subscribed and eagerly awaiting more!

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Old 08-04-2012, 09:36 AM   #3
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

This should be good. Awaiting more.
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Old 08-07-2012, 12:22 PM   #4
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

On with some smaller parts; the pedals and the brake-cylinders. First pictures shows the pedals as they are now. What you see here is made up of 6 parts already.



Next are the brake cylinders. I put a 1 cent coin next to them to show the size. The ends will be bored so a small rod can be attached. This rod will be connected to the brake pedal. As you can see, I put one rod in place to show what i mean.



I've been wanting to try a airbrush “technique” which is widely used in aircraft-modelling; pre shading. The interior of this kit seems a good place to start. First thing is to give the parts where usually the most shade will be a black spray. Eventually it all looks like this:



Basically just a few quick lines with the smallest needle in my airbrush. Note I didn't do the part between the smalles part of the cockpit. As this will be covered later I left it untouched so the difference with the rest of the paint job would be recognisable.
Next I loaded up the airbrush with Tamiya XF-20 Medium Grey and started spraying from the inside of the surfaces, slowly moving to the outside, always making sure I don't cover the black completely. After that I added a bit of white to the XF-20 and again started spraying from inside to out on the surfaces and again making sure I don't get to the edges. The result is very suble en hard to see in the picture. A friend of mine suggested I could go even lighter with the grey as most of the inside will be hard to seen anyway. Perhaps I'll do that, need to think about that a bit

For comparison, the green arrows indicates the part that was simply sprayed grey.
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Old 08-07-2012, 01:09 PM   #5
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Interesting results. I too have read about preshading; primarily used with military models. The results always seem too subtle to be worth it though, but perhaps it's just the pictures. What are your feelings? Was it worth the effort? Is it really visible?

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Old 09-01-2012, 10:18 AM   #6
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

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Originally Posted by ianc911 View Post
Interesting results. I too have read about preshading; primarily used with military models. The results always seem too subtle to be worth it though, but perhaps it's just the pictures. What are your feelings? Was it worth the effort? Is it really visible?
The result is indeed very subtle and hard to capture on camera. Although I might do another run with even lighter gray to make it more noticable. I probably will use this more often, but only on interiors and underside's of cars as I don't think it will work on the body.

Beside the cockpit I've started work on the engine as well. We all know by know Hiro sometime adds “crazy” details to some of his kits and this one is no exception. The first picture shows the inside of one of the cylinder heads. The green arrow on the left points to one of the valves whereas the one on right points to a spark plug.



Sadly these details disappear on step 1 of the manual....

On the the building of the engine then. Below all the main components have been glued together. On the left side the PE which represents the cooling ribs has been added already.



The entire block was then primered and painted black. After drying I drybrushed it with Tamiya XF-16. Again most of what you see here will be covered later on:



Some other parts recieved a coat of Alclad burnt iron. I dryfitted these for the next picture. You can already see the main block disappear...

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Old 09-04-2012, 01:05 PM   #7
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Looking good. Will you paint or texture the fiberglass shrouding, or leave it as is?

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Old 09-04-2012, 02:03 PM   #8
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

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Looking good. Will you paint or texture the fiberglass shrouding, or leave it as is?
It will not be left as is. I'll explain all in my next update, hopefully later this week.
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Old 09-05-2012, 11:36 AM   #9
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

looking forward to this, especially for the next update where you'll be explaining the fiberglass texturing
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Old 09-05-2012, 01:12 PM   #10
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Cant wait to see more of this build. Thank you for sharing your pre-shading technique, I had never heard of it before. I am going to research it.
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Old 11-04-2012, 04:40 AM   #11
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Time for a long awaited update.

I changed the front suspension a bit to make it easier to bolt onto the car. Instead of having to use the small screws I can now use bolts:


And this is what it looks like on the car (without bolts):


I then turned my attention to the interior. The kit comes with a white metal part for the foot rest, which is lumpy and doesn' look right to me. So I made a new one from sheet metal. This was done by hammering the sheet over the white metal part and then cutting off the edges.


And this is how it looks like in the cockpit:


Finally I added the front shock-absorbers:
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Old 11-04-2012, 04:55 AM   #12
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Onto the engine then. I added the small triangular PE parts for the exhaust on the bottom of the engine. The clutch was addded as well. Mind you, this will disappear forever when the gearbox is "bolted" onto the engine.


Next up is the fiberglass shroud which will be placed over most of the engine. To get the desired effect I sanded it with 400 grid Tamiya sanding paper and then washed (not painted!) it on the inside(!) with a combination of oil paints (black and a bit of raw umber). Because the part had been sanded the oil kind of sticks a bit better. I put the round part in the foreground as a reference as that had not been done yet.


Another sub-assembly is the ventilator on top of the engine. This piece alone consists of 11 parts.


Then it was time to put all of it together and start adding the ignition wiring. In the picture all of these have been added; a total of 24 wires which took me 2 evenings... Only 12 more fuel-lines to go now
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Old 11-04-2012, 11:42 AM   #13
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Nice work; the treatment of the fiberglass shrouding looks very good. A really beautiful model from MFH...

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Old 11-04-2012, 11:54 AM   #14
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

Excellent build so far...Keep it coming!
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Old 11-05-2012, 03:27 AM   #15
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Re: Porsche 917LH - Le Mans 1970 - Ahrens/Elford - MFH - 1/24

I'm sure the wiring was a nightmare, but it turned out very nice!
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