Mazda 787B

[Scale-Master]

1991 Le Mans winner. This is a 1/87th scale LeMans Miniatures resin kit produced in '91. The bodies on all the kits in this series I've seen were pre-painted, which makes touch up of the fluorescent colors a bit of a challenge. (And it does need touching up.)

The kit is packaged like a multi-blister Hot Wheels card and the clear vacuum formed plastic was super brittle. So the first step for me was to cut out the windows and headlight covers from the exact same material to see where that went. Thankfully the kits usually provide two sets of those parts. The clear was equally brittle as the packaging and the windshield split in two places while I was cutting the side windows out. So I used the second pull for the windshield. The headlight covers were surprisingly the easier parts to trim to fit.

Before installing the clear parts the interior and headlight buckets needed to be painted.

The clear fits pretty well especially considering the size.

The kit even provides a decal for the dashboard.

[Scale-Master]

The tires are soft and rubbery, which on the other cars I've built in this series works out as a nice feature. But these rims are a larger diameter and the tires look to be the same stock as used on the smaller wheels. Unfortunately they don't stay concentrically round when stretched over the wheels. Additionally they began to split after being on the rims overnight.

So I machined a new set of tires.

[Scale-Master]

The resin wheel centers for the front fit very well. The photo-etched rears on the other hand took a good amount of sanding and shaving of the rims to fit as deep into the rims as they should. Decals are provided for the fronts.

The Dunlop tire lettering is included too.

[corrrado]

Fantastic little gem, and you are making the best of it! All the shape and the details look spot on! How are the decals? On the Mazda it was quite complex with the greens and dotted silver covering the whole body. I also have a Jaguar XJR-14 from the same manufacturer in the same scale but I haven't had the courage yet to start it since it is so delicate In my example the body is not prepainted and the base color is that quite particular pink

[Scale-Master]

Thank you! I was pretty sure that many of the kits were also offered unpainted, that is the first one I've actually seen.
The decals are quite good for their age. For the most part decals of this vintage and manufacturer are very usable. (I've built quite a few 1/43rds by them too and several were 20+ years old at the time I built them.)

[Scale-Master]

This is the first decal for the body graphics. It took about 30 minutes to apply.

[Scale-Master]

Four more decals applied. A good 90 minutes for them. The two around the headlights were more work than the first one.

There are a few nice little PE parts for the rear end. This is the first to be installed. I still need to trim/touch up the decal before fitting the Gurney flap.

[Scale-Master]

The two side graphic decals were laid out on the sheet on the wrong sides. The other decals are laid out on the sheet as they should go onto the car. After a little head scratching I figured it out. These were even more difficult to get to conform than the previous ones. Even on the correct sides, they were a bit short in the rear areas.

Fortunately the kit includes a small section of green decal to patch with. It also provides a section of white dotted lines. It took two pieces of the green to fix each side.

[Scale-Master]

The rear wing is PE, I think it's maybe made of nickel, it is not brass. It comes pre-stamped to give it an airfoil of sorts. The wing tips are brass PE.

All the decals have been applied. There were a couple tiny green areas that I touched up with X-28 Park Green. I was pleasantly surprised at how close it matched these decals, but then it did a good job in the same application on the Tamiya kit of the same car…

[corrrado]

Looks really great, even the decals look nice, the smallest texts are still readable. Great job!

[Scale-Master]

Thanks corrrado!

The interior is one piece of resin. I cemented it to the PE chassis. The steering wheel is PE too with a pin for the steering column.

[Scale-Master]

Got the wheels, Gurney flap and wing installed. There's even a little PE tow ring for the front.

[Scale-Master]

Those mirrors were fun… The bodies are resin and the kit provided tiny thin PE posts. The resin parts were not painted and the PE ones were, but they were very undersized so I made new posts from thin strips of styrene.
I found a fluorescent orange Tamiya paint pen that did not need a white base to cover well and brush painted the mirror parts. Chrome silver paint will have to do for the mirror faces…