1/8 Porsche 935/78 'Moby Dick'

[Eric Cole]

Fantastic!. The paint is really bringing it all to life.

[Niro750]

Beautiful work

[ScratchBuilt]

Hello again,

For the last few weeks I've been working on getting the core of the engine assembled, and a big part of this is adding the fan and fibreglass shroud. I finally decided on fitting these two items together first, before dropping them onto the engine. A styrene disc was glued into the back of the fan housing and secured with a series of small angle-brackets - this would give me a backstop for the fan itself:



Doing it this way also meant that I could get plenty of glue into the internal joint between the two parts. The two-part fan strap also had to be fitted beforehand:



The strap was glued over the top of the housing, and the two ends secured with a hex-bolt detail:



The upper head-cooling water rails are not fitted in place yet, but have received the first couple of layers of paint:



I also fitted the oil filter housing at this time:



Still plenty to do, but getting the engine to this stage now allows me to start finalising the inlet manifolds, intercoolers, throttle mechanism, etc.

Elsewhere, I've spent this weekend working on the dashboard area. I'm always having to plan ahead to work out how I'm actually going to do the final assembly of this project, so I've added a styrene crossbeam arrangement which is currently all drilled and pinned together:



I still need to make another new fibreglass panel to fit below the main dashboard, but the small section you see above actually started life as one of the old sill cover panels. Again, this is pinned into the crossbeam and is adjustable for height.



Here's the assembly in place in the car (sorry for the lousy photo):



More next week!

SB

[indy1977tx]

Great looking work as always. I do enjoy coming over every week or so for another update on this one!

Jordan

[ianc911]

Everything looks fantastically tasty and scrumptious as usual, but this time I do have one small observation; it seems to me as if the fan blades are a trifle thick?

The paintwork is really adding another dimension!

ianc

[ScratchBuilt]

'Evening all,

I had to check the thickness of the fan blades, Ian - they're 0.5mm, which is as thin as I usually go for parts like this. I had originally planned to mould some fibreglass to make the blades, but decided that as the fan core would be styrene I wasn't going to gain anything from doing it this way. Between several layers of paint and my dodgy photography, I can see what you mean!

Moving on, this update is a little different as it is all about corrections and modifications. This time last year I was making the seat mounting frame, adding the support tubes, etc, and it has been niggling away at me ever since that things weren't quite right in the cockpit. Getting the dashboard in place last weekend brought me to decision time...



Above photo shows the original layout - note the position of the seat, support tubes, gearshift mounting, and the support frame for the adjustable roll-bar. In short, this is all too far forwards. With the dashboard in place, the gearlever was much too close. The seat would be too far from where the headrest would be mounted (and too close to the pedals), and the proportions of the roll-bar adjuster frame were just...wrong.

So, I've spent this week trying to shift everything about 20mm backwards - hopefully without having to re-make too many parts! First thing to go was the gearshift mounting - get this in the right place, and everything else could be adjusted to suit. With some careful cutting I was able to separate this from the two long chassis tubes without damage, then move it back to where it wanted to be:



Here you can also see that the seat has been pushed back on it's mounting rails - this is something that throws up another problem, as we'll see shortly. The cardboard ahead of the gearshift is a rough guide for another bit of dashboard which needs to be added; with the original layout, the lower half of this panel would have been completely blocked by the gearshift.

In the next photo, I've fixed the gearshift in place but have had to remove the original boost-knob mounting to do so. This would have to be re-made. The supports for the adjustable roll-bar have been made but not glued in position - the chassis diagonal sits up a little, but will be strapped-down when the floor is fitted! To the left you can see the seat frame is now further back - the rearmost tube now intersects at the 'X' of the lower chassis diagonals. This is slightly different to the reference photos, but is the only way to fix the problem (short of scrapping several years work, of course...)



Until now, the rearward positioning of the seat has been limited by the mounting rails, and two diagonal chassis tubes (one in the outer roll-cage, the other supporting the gearshift). Moving the mounting rails helped, but modifying the left-hand rear corner of the seat frame was also necessary:



This allows the seat to go right back to the rear edge of the door opening:



I reckon that with the seat like this the amount of legroom to the pedals is about right for someone around 5' 7" (170cm); with the original layout I would have lost about 6"...

In this final photo you can see I've re-made the boost-adjuster mounting, and how the kinked seat frame leg allows it to clear the diagonal tube. Removing all the redundant seat support tubes wasn't too bad, although there's still a little tidying-up to do - a few holes to fill, etc.



Looking back, I'm happy I've done this - it's something that has been bothering me for the last year or so, and would have continued to do so. It's a situation which was inevitable given the lack of proper measurements for this project - eventually all the little guesses and approximations and comparisons-taken-from-photos would stack up and put something where it shouldn't be. Better to change things now, while I still could. Must remember to shorten the gearlinkage too, though...!

That's it for tonight - more next week.

SB

[nugundam93]

another great update!

as someone who's just done fabricating ARB bumpers and roof rack for a 1/10 FJ cruiser (tamiya RC), i know how frustrating it can be to have stuff made, only to do a rather big revision later on, all due to eyeballed measurements.

[lovegt40]

that this one is an amazing model think I already said....yes..think I already did..

[ScratchBuilt]

Hello again,

Following from nugundam93's comment, it was one of those situations where you have to decide what was going to be more annoying - putting the effort in to make the corrections now, or continuing anyway and meeting an even bigger problem later on! There was no way I could have fudged the dashboard to suit the original layout, and the scaled-up measurements for the drivers legroom proved that the seat had to go back. Life would be so much easier with some proper drawings to work from...!

Anyway, that job is progressing well in the background, allowing me to do something different. I decided to start my holiday by tackling the two main exit ducts for the front oil and water radiators. These have to match the section of ducting I made a while back which sits immediately behind the rads, and then extend upwards to meet the underside of the main nose panel. I decided that the best solution was to start with two pieces of blue foam and create the shapes by hot-wiring away the edges:



As usual, every cut required cardboard templates to be cut and taped into place:



After several hours work, they start to look more like the real thing:



I tried to keep each duct as a single piece, but it was necessary to do a small 'cut-and-replace' section towards the bottom of each one:



As you can imagine, this was all slow-going with plenty of head-scratching required - although I had several photos to work with, trying to translate that into an actual shape was not easy.

Having made the two patterns, the question now was how to make the actual ducts. My original thought was to lay-up fibreglass over the top, then destroy the patterns to remove them. However, I wasn't sure I would get the nice crisp edges I wanted, and all the changes of direction would make them awkward to lay-up without the cloth moving around and creating bubbles and pockets. So, plan B was to use rigid flat fibreglass sheet instead, and make each panel to suit using the foam as the pattern - the same method used for the fuel and oil tanks, basically:





As it turned out, I could make maybe 90% of each duct and still remove and re-fit them to the foam patterns. Once I'd added the fourth side to the top corner I added plenty of CA glue along the inside edges, and the final result was surprisingly solid. Now I could start to refine them...

The lower part of each duct needed to be modified to allow for the pipework to connect to the rads:



The lower hose to the innermost radiator was okay, but I adjusted the position of the connection to the rad to give me a better angle for the pipework. The 'solid' styrene pipe to the top of the other rad had to be remade, in order to get the correct bend around the bottom of the duct. Compared to the modifications in the cockpit, this was easy!

It was a similar situation on the other side:



Again, the top hose going through the duct was re-made to suit the position of the hole, and the connection to the rad was moved slightly.

Next up, I made the two frames which would support the nose bodywork. Styrene tube would have been easier, but I went with ali for extra strength. These are pinned into the main chassis rails for now, and will be fixed later:



Also visible in this last photo is a pair of small tubular extensions I added to the extreme front corners of the chassis. They're not 'original equipment', but provide me with somewhere to clip the ducts in position while I work on them - in this next photo you can see where I've added a pair of styrene angles to the bottom of each duct. These hook under the frames, and keep the ducts upright:



Finally, the other obvious area requiring attention was the main nose bodywork itself. I've not done much with this for a while now, but it made sense to spend some time marking and measuring the positions of the main inlet, brake ducts, and the headlight boxes:



Even here there were small differences between the original factory car and the Freisinger version - the detail of the cut-out for the headlights, for example. I'll tackle those later! First job was to sort out the brake cooling ducts - these would need to be laid-up in fibreglass and attached to the back of the nose section. I made a spare section of the nose months ago for this very purpose, so now was the time to use it! I marked the holes, glued two pieces of tube in place, then built up the shape of the ducts with greenstuff:



I've spent the last few days fibreglassing over these (as well as one or two other bits). I should be able to remove these parts from the moulds tomorrow night, so by next weekend you'll hopefully see the results. Once the brake ducts are in place I can work on the main inlet opening, and the headlights.

So, that's it for tonight. I'm pleased with how the main ducts have worked out (so far) - they took a while to do, but they would have taken much longer if I was tackling them during a regular working week, only getting one or two cuts made every evening. It would have been more frustrating, too! Hopefully I can now make good progress with the rest of the nose...

SB

[nugundam93]

great progress! it's awe-inspiring that you still manage to push on even with the roadblocks you face - i would've just set things aside for a bit and work on another kit, lol!

[ScratchBuilt]

Hello again,

A big update this time - I've been making good progress in a few areas recently. First up, here's the brake cooling ducts laid-up on the spare section of nose:



Getting them off the mould wasn't so easy, unfortunately. Despite my usual application of Vaseline as a release agent, the greenstuff section was stuck firm. After a good while trying to persuade them to separate, I ended up removing the plastic tube and greenstuff from the backing panel:



Eventually I had to dig out most of the greenstuff with a knife and effectively destroy the mould in the process - hopefully I won't have to make these again! The ducts have a few battle-scars, but nothing that can't be fixed:



After a lot of trimming and playing around with the position, here's one of the ducts glued in place. The pipework for the coolers is very close, and I didn't want to reduce the space available for the headlight boxes, so there was some subtle filing and fiddling required to get them where I wanted them:



Once satisfied with the position, I drilled through the original front bumper panel and opened out the duct holes with a reamer, files, knife, etc. The transition from the outer panel to the duct still needs a little work and filler to make a smooth joint, but it should work out okay. In this next photo you can see I've also cut out the main opening for the front coolers, and the two headlight boxes:



The headlight boxes needed a little planning to work out the best method. The clear cover panel is supposed to slide into a channel around the inside edge of the opening, then a small section of it sits flush into a recess. I added some 0.4mm styrene strip around the inside of the opening to give it some thickness, then made a backing panel which would create the channel:



Before adding the backing panel, I traced the outline required for the outer cover onto some clear plastic - the masking tape is there to give me something to draw on. You can see here how it slides into place:



The inner section of each headlight-box was made from flat fibreglass sheet with some styrene angle reinforcement - as usual, this should be more resistant to warping than using styrene sheet alone:



I've added top panels to each box, but left the bottom open for now - the clear cover is a tight enough fit into the channels, but with the bottom open I can get access for my fingers to pull the panel into place:



Of course, this now means that I have to make some headlights, indicator lenses, etc...

Next up, the main cooler duct. This was simple enough - a layer of fibreglass stiffened up with a layer of 0.75mm styrene sheet, then two small fibreglass triangles to close off each end. The mesh was cut to shape before fitting the duct and will eventually be glued into the back of the nose section. I've cut a section of the 'spare' nose section used for the brake duct mould to make an inner panel which will sandwich the mesh and hopefully tidy the whole area. This approach is a little different to the actual car, but is an acceptable compromise given the practicalities of how I'll be assembling the model:



In this final nose photo you can get another view of the main cooler duct, and also note where I've added another layer to the splitter lip around the front edge. I assume that in reality this is a sacrificial piece of wood or maybe a separate fibreglass moulding that could be easily changed if damaged over the kerbs, etc. On several period photos you can see where the red / orange paintwork on this section is heavily chipped.

I used 1mm styrene sheet for this piece and extended the panel on the inside to cover the bottom of the main cooler duct, but not to prevent access to the headlight-boxes. Once glued in place, it's doing a good job of stiffening up the whole nose panel, so that's a useful bonus!



That's the last of the nose for now. At this point I returned to the interior and dashboard structure, starting by cleaning up the top instrument pod and gluing in some styrene backing panels:



The short length of tube is drilled to pin it into the box-section which runs across the width of the cockpit. The gauge faces will all be attached to the outside of this panel only, so I don't have to worry about fitting the bulk of each instrument into the inside of the pod! It was also getting annoying having it fall off every ten minutes while I was working on the dashboard...

Here you can see the instrument pod staying in place, and the new section of folded fibreglass I made a few weeks ago - this has a short piece of 1/4 x 1/8" styrene box-section attached to the back which allows it to be pinned in place. The four angled tube sections should have extra gauges in them, but having reached this point I realised that there were a few differences with my reference photos. The Freisinger car definitely started life with this arrangement, and you can see some of the gauges going in with the wiring during the build. However, photos of the same car after the build have it with the extra gauge panel dropping down to the lower chassis tubes. Photos of the factory car in period also show the drop-down panel, and large cooling hoses coming out of the dashboard above where the four gauges would otherwise be - I assume the gauges were repositioned when it became obvious that they would be affected by the hoses.

It'll be easy enough to remove the four tube pieces from the fibreglass panel, if necessary, but I need to check my references again before making a final decision. For now, here's what I've got:



To finish tonight, I spent some time yesterday putting some of the parts together to show my progress to my colleagues at work. I don't think they've seen the main chassis in over a year, so there's lots here that's going to be new:





The work on opening up the front bumper section has given it some much-needed detail, and the whole lot is looking more and more like the 911-on-steroids the 935 actually is! Even without the wheels...

So, with a couple of weeks to the end of another year, the project is still moving forwards. Over the Christmas period I'd like to tackle the steering wheel and column, main instrument gauges, maybe even spend some time working out what I'm doing with the front anti-roll bar. The engine could receive more attention, too. There's plenty of other smaller jobs to do - it's just a question of remembering them all! Whatever happens, there'll be at least one main update before the end of 2015.

All the best,

SB

[ferrariman81]

I was wandering where you'd gone too. Excellent stuff as usual SB. What's next on the drawing board? Or have you not thought that far ahead yet?

[88Porsche944]

Outstanding work SB!

Trevor

[nugundam93]

awesome stuff with the newest update!

[kans0002]

i have no words...