Ferrari 275 NART Spider - McQueen's Machine

[mattbacon]

This is the Revell Ferrari 275 NART Spider, which I picked up for £15 on a good day on eBay last year. I want to do it as Steve McQueen's car, which he bought after being smitten with the one Faye Dunaway drove in The Thomas Crown Affair. The car she drove is the most famous NART Spider of them all, with a solid racing history as well as a starring movie role, and would be a great choice for a subject. But it needs Campagnolo alloy wheels, not wires... you can get them from Renaissance, but they'd double the price of the kit, and anyway, I have a "McQueen's Machines" theme, don't I? ;-P

Steve McQueen's Spider was modified, like many of his cars. In this case, what it needs is the ducktail spoiler made a tad more aggressive, a flip up fuel filler cap, no bumpers, reupholstered "Von Dutch" seats, and a console for a radio. It's the spoiler that I've been most nervous about, not wanting to cut into a kit that would be quite hard to replace (for a reasonable price, anyway) but last night I decided to take the plunge:




I cut diagonally from the angle where the rear panel and spoiler meet toward the blend on the top of the boot lid (ie from the back end of the car toward the front), and then before I'd gone all the way through, simply bent the whole thing upward, aided by some liquid cement along the "scored" bend line. I pushed a sausage of Milliput into the gap from the back and I had a slightly taller, more vertical spoiler.

I'm sure it'll take a couple of rounds of filling and sanding to get it smoothly blended in, but from here:


To here:


has only taken an hour or so, so far...

The bumper mountings are gone as well. Now I have to figure out how to find or make McQueen's unique blue, which was specially mixed for the car...

bestest,
M.

[BVC500]

Don't see too many of these built. Looking forward to more progress.

[cox]

Hello
I have the same project, so your project interests me greatly.
To you find documents? For Steve McQueen had been repainted blue.

[mattbacon]

This is the real thing:



and this is where we are now...




Looks a bit rough, but after some 8000 micromesh that'll all go away. The smooth curves of the real thing are now coming together.



Unforgiving picture, but if you compare this to the kit, you can see that the ducktail is much more vertical.



The plastic in this kit is REALLY good; I believe that it originated with Protar. The detail is fine and crisp, and they've done a great job of figuring out how many parts they need - a great compromise between the soft details of the XKSS I did, and the ludicrous over-engineering of the Fujimi Enthusiast GTO.



And this is the colour I've chosen: a Halfords Ford blue. It's impossible to photograph accurately in the sun!

The seats with their unique "Tony Nancy" upholstery are under way...

bestest,
M.

[stevetriumph]

Nice work. Looking forward to more progress. I will certainly envy your collection of McQueen cars.

Regards, Steve.

[mattbacon]

Slow progress... and a bit "two steps forward and one step back today"...

Got the first coat of blue on:


But it'll need a second, and I've got a couple of areas where the blue carrier has "pooled" along a panel line, so I'll have to wait for it to set hard and polish it back before applying the second coat.

I've made a socket for the flip up filler cap on the body, and built the actual filler cap, painted in Humbrol's "Chrome Silver" acrylic, which is amazing...

I've had one go at re-upholstering the seats, but I wasn't satisfied, so I've taken it all off (hooray for Milliput) and will try again tomorrow...

bestest,
M.

[Hartford]

Excellent work so far, looking forward to seeing how the interior comes together. Are you going to detail the engine bay?

Regards

Hartford

[lovegt40]

that was a great kit.the origin was Italeri when they had the royalty to make the reds in scale.many nice kit at a very good price (275, GTO,288 gto, Gt4 daytona..).
Only tyres were crap and ugly moulded,but today they are quite easy to update,if u find the kit at a decent price.

This is my 275:

[MidMazar]

I love the paint you chose!

[pb4007]

Nice job so far. The color looks a bit lighter than the real car pics, but it might be just the lighting. Besides that, you're doing great!

[mattbacon]

Thanks, guys! I'm going to do some detailing in the engine bay, but you could spend years with pipes and cables in there, so I'll see what it looks like it needs (and what you can see) when the engines sitting in place. The colour is really hard to photograph: do it inside and the camera makes it look too light; do it outside and the metallic effect looks too speckly. Outside, against a neutral grey background, on a dull day is my best hope. We'll see later on...

Anyway, I have actually made some progress in the last few days:



There are three things that make McQueen's 275 unique: the seats, the perky ducktail, and the flippy fuel filler. Here you can see the final effect of the latter two. The seats are still WIP.



I have a good reference picture of the 275GTB/4 engine, which is what's inside the Spider, which shows the ignition wiring running through a conduit on the cam cover. I cannot for the life of me see how the six wires from the distributor can fit inside the conduit but they do, and they come out in a 1-2-2-1 layout, with the last one straight out of the end. It took a while to figure out how to even attempt this layout, but in the end I decided to use some very fine insulated wire from an old computer cable. I untwisted one end and attached six of the strands to the distributor, and at the other twisted three strands to form a spark plug lead. The other leads are fine lead wire fed into holes drilled at the base of the cam cover. I then stuck the wire over the top to give the impression that the leads were coming out of it. The leads from the distributor are too thin; the "conduit" is too fat, but it's as close to the real layout as I can get.



This is what it looks like with both sides done. The water? pipe is painted with Humbrol "Chrome Silver" acrylic (as is the flippy fuel filler), which gives a great chrome effect, IMHO..



And here's the completed engine. There are't that many parts (certainly less than 20), but as I said, the plastic in this kit is very well designed and crisply moulded, and I think it makes up into a very convincing unit. The exhausts are sprayed in Halfords grey primer followed by a deliberately "light" overspray of Tamiya Aluminium, in an attempt to get a slightly rough texture and matt/greyish silver colour, which matches my photo...

Next, the cockpit!

bestest,
M.

[Tompidom]

I realy love the look of this ferrari Good work so far keep it up!

[mattbacon]

Thanks, my friend. There's been some controversy about the "scale realism" of the metallic paint, so this is an attempt to capture the colour and effect more realistically - shot outside, against a neutral grey background, in diffuse dull natural light, and not using the macro mode on the camera...



If anything it's a bit too dull, but I didn't remember to put any pure white in shot to get the top-end accurate for my "levels". The colour is dark, but a little more "zingy" and not quite so grey as it looks here...

bestest,
M.

[mattbacon]

This is where I am as of last night:



The chassis is just clipped together - there's the suspension to do. The seats have been "re-upholstered" in rather more padded Tony Nancy style. The cabin is a symphony in black on black with silver highlights, so I've tried to mix things up a bit with textures and surface finishes to give it a bit more interest. The 20 year old decals worried me, especially since the waxy cover paper was firmly attached, but the dials worked well after I used hot water to get them free, and Klear as a setting solution. The little Ferrari badge is an aftermarket one, mind you...




The suspension is yet more evidence for the quality design and crisp moulding of this kit. Again, not too many pieces, but they fit together very well, and the finesse of the detail is clear. OK, so you don't get positionable front wheels (though you probably could make them turn if you wanted, at the cost of some loss of scale fidelity)

I'm pretty sure that this is nearly ready for a big assembly phase... I keep thinking I'm there, and then some other bit that needs painting before I get started rears its head...

bestest,
M.

[Tompidom]

It is looking verry promesing, cant wait to see it finished!