[drunken monkey]

but all the angle measuring and moulding you would/could do as part of a regular build anyway.
Cesar Bossalani certainly does for his builds as I recall he didn't like the look of some suspension components in a kit so he made his own wishbones.
Same as when any of us re-make our our shocks and springs; there is measuring, cutting, making and if you want to have near as identical parts, molding and casting.
It then isn't much more work to turn a static kit's fixed suspension into a (sort of) working one once you've made your shocks and especially if you use metal tubes and rods instead of styrene.

As I said before, the molding and casting people do all the time for body kits/mods.

I don't have a lathe so I've done no milling or turning.

In fact, pretty much everything I've done so far is what would be called sculpture more than anything and nothing I've done isn't anything I haven't done for an architectural model for study or professional purposes.

But yes, to reiterate, that is just what/how I've been doing things.
You can certainly take a more technical approach to it and say 3D scan a real car then 3D print a master to scale and use every possible form of fabrication to make the same car model and than I think I would happily call that an engineered model but that is a veeery extreme example.

In the example you gave of a 1/12 model being very highly engineered, I would say that suggests to me that 1/12 scale shouldn't be judged against 1/24 more than anything because of the differences in limitations between the scales. Even then though, in a modelling competition, how much does that matter when the judges should be judging modelling skills, not engineering skills?


And it's a Lotus Elise.
I stopped taking photos of it because I hit a brick wall in my initial casting technique.
Figuring out if I really want opening doors on it or not because if I have them opening, I'd like to keep as close as possible to the original as possible which would mean sculpting the unique hinge mechanism then making casts of them then hoping it's strong enough in resin.