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:
