The competition 126C2 has had to take a back seat for a little while, as I finally got my PM Aston Martin DBR9 kits today, and I've been waiting to build this one since I got back from La Sarthe in June. I've followed the Aston's since Prodrive announced the project last year. Whilst at Le Mans this year we were lucky enough to have seats directly opposite the Aston and Corvette pit boxes, so we kept an eye on them especially.
For those that don't know the car, the photo below is one I took of the car as it ran in the Tourist Trophey (FIA GT) race at Silverstone in May this year. The Le Mans car is slightly different, in that the fender louvres were deleted and the sponsorship was a little different.
A few people who followed my F1 McLaren build a while back asked for a step-by-step guide to doing 1:43 resin kits. I don't claim to be any kind of expert at all, but if your interested to follow along, this is a good starter kit. Hopefully I can help and inspire you, so this will be another one of my very detailed explanations of what I do. Let me know what you think.
The kit is a typical PM affair with a resin body and tub, a large sheet of etched detail parts, som vac-form and printed windows and a bag of assorted goodies. The contents of the box are shown below. For those with good eye sight you'll notice that PM supplied completely weong tyres for the car, in that they are treaded road tyres. I beleive they are aware of this and hopefully I'll be getting the correct parts soon. I won't let it hold me up for now though!
The resin body and tub.
Etched metal fret.
Bag of assorted bits (interior detail, wheels etc.)
Decal sheet. Note that all of the black decal is actually carbon composite.
The first stage of the build is to clean up the castings. In general they are very good with just some molding flash and casting plugs to remove. Some files and wet and dry take care of this. However I noticed at this point that there was a small blemish on one of the nose vents, as shown below
To fix this I've ade up a tiny batch of Milliput (epoxy putty) and using some dental probes dropped and sculpted it roughly in place. I'll wait for it to dry completlly and the sand it so it matches the existing body work.
Well, that's all for tonight, stay tuned for more updates.