Here's the other work I finished recently. I asked a while back about the amber side markers. The answers I got convinced me that I needed to drill a hole in the body to do the job properly. Here's the story...
A previous attempt. I took some amber sprue and made these minuscule little cones. Far too small to work by hand, the rod you can see has a conical hollow in the end which I used to hold the lights while I sanded down to the correct size. They came out perfectly, but the problem is, when you get down to this amount of plastic the color just fades away to nothing. I could have painted them but that sort of defeats the purpose, plus I have no answer for getting that foil behind them and attaching to the car rigidly.
I also tried a pin head shaped in the Dremel. Looks promising...
It'll mount through a hole and the flange will make for a nice seamless finish against the body.
In place and painted. Ouch! Looks like crap!
I guess you just have to have some transparency in there to get a realistic look. Admittedly, this was a horrible polish and paint job, so ymmv.
So back to the orange plastic, this time it will have more depth to it, as it goes through the hole in the body.
The Dremel makes for a great lathe.
I put a bit more shape into them, the cones look a bit bland imho.
They come with a light switch
The transparency makes them more life-like.
A bit of finger grease here by the look of it!
I wrapped them in foil to try to capture the glow. I suspect this is not the best way to do it, but it'll do.
Makes it a bit darker with a bit of a glow.
Now, the 3rd brake light. The kit decal is just a blob of red, looks very ordinary. I needed to get some texture into the foil, best I could do was this file. I really wanted a very fine cross-hatch pattern but couldn't find anything suitable (we're talking *very* fine here...)
This came up nicely, the color is superbly rich with nice depth and transparency to it.
And the shine is just unbelievable. That's not orange or purple in there, it's reflections and what have you...
This is cool - I can cut shapes out of this material with scissors. For lights, reflectors, etc.
Before:
After:
The light will look very good I think, but what I really wanted was this:
I tried but failed to pull it off - anyone up for the challenge???