MikeA

Wow! Only just caught up with this build. Amazing work, and the detail beggars belief in 1/72. You must have very young eyes. However, it was the paint work on the engines and superchargers which really caught my eye - they look exactly like grimy, heated lumps of iron and steel. Mike

The Slough built Citroens had wood dashboards, more conventional instruments and typically a nice leather upholstery. Quite upmarket compared to the French and Belgium built ones. As a project for someone keen, I would think that a conversion of this kit would be without too much bother, although all the linkages through to the engine bay would need swapping over for right hand drive.

Thanks Noel. That name does indeed ring a distant bell. The article was more of an early inspiration rather than needing to refer to it now - I think I re-read it so many times that the pertinent parts are etched into my memory! Cheers Paul. Hopefully Heller does respond to you. I use clear acrylic rod (10mm) to support cars. I find it way less intrusive. On the Ferrari 250 GTO I used discs of self adhesive felt on top of the rod which worked really well and didn't need to fix the rod to the underside of the car. Thanks for the likes! The rear suspension and fuel tank went together without any problem. As with the front, the torsion bars need preloading as they do function. I did strengthen the mounting points for the suspension struts as, on the trailing arm, these rely on a tiny slither of plastic, as seen in the first photo, which did not inspire confidence. I also replaced the top mounts inside the wheel arches with suitably sized bolts. The suspension struts with their real springs have not exploded apart yet so I am still pursuing a working suspension...... The next photo shows the mounting peg with the strut mounted and the steel pin drilled through. Not prototypical but also next to invisible on the model. The only addition to the fuel tank were bolts on the holding straps. I did look at re-working the straps entirely but decided it was not really worth the effort. Again the kit supplies all of the pipewoprk as flexible vinyl pieces. These were all replaced with suitable copper and scale braided wire to represent the fuel and brake lines. After market resin connectors were also used. Wire wound guitar string was used for the handbrake cabling. The only hassle with it is that it is a beggar to bend into position, so it does take a while to fit and has enough room to move with the suspension. The brake drums were painted up just for the fun of it, although they will not be able to be seen once the hubs are finally mounted. I was lazy and didn't bother attending to the ejector marks on the brake shoes. The whole underbody was oversprayed with various colours to give a more used appearance. It still looks relatively pristine to many examples I have seen, but I couldn't bring myself to covering it completely with rust and dirt. The car was then flipped back upright and the front seats fixed in place. The seats are designed to actually slide on their mounts but, like all other moving parts on this kit, this is in theory only and serves no useful purpose except to pose the seats offset if you wish. And finally, I couldn't resist a trial fit of the engine before attending to all of the cabling and pipework in the engine bay. Plus I needed to check that the additional in-line fuel filter I had made was able to connect up to the fuel pump - the start of the engine bay work. Thanks for looking! Mike

Thank you Jorgen! Your build of this model was certainly inspirational and a tad daunting! This update covers the rest of the work with the interior before flipping the body to work on the rear suspension and other parts lurking under the floor. First up, having fitted the instrument panel, is the steering and handbrake lever. The steering shaft is provided as a long plastic rod which is completely inadequate, being rather floppy to say the least. The business end , with a bushing and cog where it inserts into the steering box, was cut off and fixed to a length of brass tube of the same external diameter. The external sleeve which the shaft passes through was improved with a clamp band formed from some more of that whisky bottle foil, and the light/horn control box and the steering shaft bracket, which mounts on the dashboard, were improved with some bolts. The steering shaft also passes through the under dash parcel shelf. The two pieces, one for each side were painted and had the dark brown cloth added to the top surface. These two pieces were unusual for this kit in that they both required substantial trimming to fit properly. You can see the cut away portions at the ends of the shelves where they fit against the firewall. The handbrake handle is a chrome piece which passes through a bracket which is in turn fixed to the underside of the parcel shelf. I chose to leave the chrome untouched, but will eventually weather that section of it that extends through the engine bay. There is not a lot of room for dexterous handling of pieces through the passenger door and under the dashboard to fit this handle. What I did was to insert the handle through the firewall from the engine bay side and then carefully glued the two halves of the bracket together, enclosing the handle but leaving it free to move. Once the join was solid I used the Revell glue applicator to place two drops of glue in the brackets eventual location and then simply slid the bracket into place. The bracket was held by my finger tip for 30 seconds or so until the glue held. The scraped portion next to the mirror stalk on the dashboard is where the windscreen opening mechanism will be fitted - these cars were fitted with a hinged front windscreen to assist with ventilation. The brass steering shaft, with the cog on the end, had the steering box cap slid onto it, and then had to be inserted through a hole in the wheel arch, up through a hole in the firewall and then slid into the steering box at the end of the steering rack. Easy except there was not enough room as shown in the photo below. The solution was to carefully disconnect the steering rack bracket next to the steering box, which gave just enough wriggle room to insert the shaft and cog. The cog then engages with the serrations on the rack - fine in theory, but in practice less so. The steering box cap is yet to be glued in place and the steering shaft is not fully seated in the next photo. The outer sleeve, with the light/horn control box, and steering wheel were then fitted without any difficulty. Apologies for the lack of clear focus in this photo. Maybe it adds to the aged ambience. That same ambience is also reflected in the failure of the steering wheel to consistently operate the rack, but I did try...... The rear bench seat was then slotted into place with no glue required. I also fitted the trim pieces on the door sills - these were chrome but too bright for this application as these are fairly worn, or at least dull, on every example of this car I have seen. I'll leave the front seats until I have finished with the underneath as their attachment points to the floor are not particularly substantial and the seats have some heft in them. The final photo shows the blank canvas, which is the underneath of the car, awaiting substantial weathering and detailing. You can also see the overall fragility of the steering mechanism in this photo. The connections between each of the moving parts is just too sloppy for it to ever be effective, unless everything was refabricated in brass. The connections with the stub axles and suspension are particularly bad. Thank you for reading! Cheers Mike

That seat is really looking great! Your armrest looks very smartly done - I found it very difficult to hide the seams. How did you do the covering? Mike

For what it is worth Paul, the frail looking front seat supports are actually more than sturdy enough once united with the seat squabs. I didn't even bother gluing the squabs in place as they all but click into place. The finished seats have even withstood the inevitable prodding by all who look at them - although hopefully a less frequent occurrence when they finally get hidden behind the doors. Good luck with the painting. With gloss black you should stand a better than even chance of a close match. Mike

Thanks for the likes and comments! Having fitted the headliner, the dashboard was next on the list. Although it will not be fitted until after the re-unification of floor and body, I did want to make sure there weren't any surprises at that time. The dashboard presented little diifficulty except that the glovebox hinges were a tad fiddly as the glovebox actually does open and close if you wish. The only addition made to the instrument binnacle was a fusewire surround to replicate the chrome strip. The binnacle is layered to give a pleasing 3D effect. The small chrome rectangle to the right of the instruments is where the gear lever protrudes from the dashboard. The markings in the corners of it are the gear positions and are embossed onto the part - these were drybrushed with black. Next up were the grab handles for assisting passengers to haul themselves out of the rear - my own experience of the rear seats in these cars is that you do tend to sink back into them as they almost envelope you. The grab handles are supplied in the same soft grey plastic as the seats, as a flat piece which is folded to form the loop, and should be finished in the same upholstery as the rear pillar. I tried that and gave up, settling for oils to give a leather type look. They looked quite ok but, to my horror, several days later the plastic piece had cracked apart. I had primed the plastic before painting, but suspect that the plastic didn't want to play nicely with the paint. I ended up filling the cracks, which had almost severed the two pieces, with gel superglue and repainting. Not perfect, but passable and in fact barely visible. The following photo shows the calamity, and also shows the underneath of the rear parcel shelf which was a rather vague fit. In the end I resorted to a bead of epoxy on both ends of the shelf, although that will eventually be hidden away at the top of the boot. The parcel shelf location is largely dictated by the rear back seat cushion, and the following photos show the rear seat squabs fitted in place although not glued at all. In fact no glue is required for these as they are a very snug fit. These photos were taken following the repair job on the two grab handles. The sun visors were finished in the same purple brown as the window frames and instrument binnacle. These helpfully hide the untidy fixing of the front of the headliner and can also function so that they remain in whatever position you move them to. Very handy. Then it was time to assemble the monocoque. This was fairly easy as it had all been put together as a unit when gluing all the body panels together. I clicked it into place and then carefully prised the panels apart where they needed to be glued, ran a bead of Revell glue and then clamped them back together, working sequentially around the car. Once i was satisfied that the were no glue clean-ups required, I taped the joins. The body had to be flipped over and back again in this process as the lower side panels are bonded to the floor panel both on top and underneath. The only tricky part was right at the front where the outer body panels took some extra persuasion to sit tightly against the engine bay walls but the engine cradle limits the ability to get clamps in place. I actually held them in place for about 10 minutes to allow the glue to bite before applying the clamps. Once seriously taped and clamped, the assembly was then set aside for a week to harden off. It's hard to get a sense of the size of it from this photo, but the body is 50cm long and 15cm high at this point. I was a tad nervous about the paintwork on the body, as there is obviously a lot yet to be done. However, there is no practicable way around that and I'll just hope that all that will be needed will be a final polish at the end. Thanks for looking. Mike

My primer coats were also fine, however both the base lacquers, Tamiya and Zero, and the Humbrol enamel on the inside window frames on the doors, crazed. The gloss coats also crazed although not quite as badly. I came close to binning the entire thing out of frustration but eventually got over myself. I polished the colour coats with up to 12000 grit to smooth them out, after using many thin layers, and then also polishing out the successive multiple gloss layers to smooth the final finish. The way the crazing was, however, meant that there was a continual high risk of cutting through to the base colour coat, which I did a few times. I must admit I hadn't thought of an acrylic barrier over the primer, as using a different base colourcoat was not a feasible option for me, but should work. Really annoying as the parts themselves had been washed and subjected to a lot of sanding, which is what has lead me to the conclusion that there is something in the plastic itself. For all that - first world entertainment problems I guess. Cheers Mike

I had a similar problem with the door skins, noting my build log is mostly retrospective, so haven't included that yet. I literally spent months on and off trying to get the paint to not have a fine wrinkled surface on it, despite the same primers and finish coats working fine elsewhere and trying all sorts of barrier coats. I even resorted to getting a new bottle of the finish coat from the UK. In the end I essentially resorted to using a high number of thin coats and polishing the heck out of them, which finally left me with an almost perfect finish. You can still see some fine imperfections when viewing in the right light at certain angles - a practice I now carefully avoid! I suspect it is something to do with the plastic. Bon courage! Mike

Thanks Paul. Hasn't Heller recently reissued the kit? Might be able to get a replacement sheet from them. Mike

Thanks for the comments and the likes! The next step is the headlining. This is the first of a couple of assemblies (the others being the bonnet and doors) which I was dreading. The headlining comes as a vacform piece of very flimsy white plastic which had some unwelcome creases in it. The piece required cutting out in the usual fashion for vacforms and then fixing so that it is suspended off the roof. My thorough search of the completed builds on the Internet only provided a couple which had achieved using the kit piece and almost no guidance as to how this was done. Some have effectively fixed the lining to the roof rather than hanging it, and other much more adept modellers than me succeeded in scratch building replacements out of cloth. The instructions offered no practicable help at all. I spent about a month thinking and procrastinating whilst I prepared the vacform piece and attended to some other associated parts. That meant putting the interior light together, making up the rear window and front windscreen inside frame, and making luggage netting. The two frames are painted in a purple-brown colour which rumour has it was arrived at by mixing up the left over paint in the Citroen paint shop back in the day. These were then detailed with some tiny finishing bolt heads from MFH. Excuse the muck on the clear plastic on the rear window - I never noticed it until after taking the photo. The luggage netting hangs from the roof lining just behind the windscreen. I drew out the netting outline and appropriate mesh size on tracing paper and then used scale model ship rope to form the netting using pins to hold it in place. I initially tried it with actual knots to form the mesh but, even with the 0.45mm rope, I couldn't get the multitude of knots to look right scale wise. So I ended up using small dots of superglue to hold it together. The following two photos show this process. The next photo shows the vacform piece cut out and painted, together with the interior light. The paint was various Humbrol tans with oil paint dragged over it to hint at a woven texture. The headlinings appear to have been typically a rather weathered and patchy brown, presumably to help conceal the staining of endless Gaulloise cigarettes. The centre light helps hold the headlining in place with the lining fitting over a small lip surrounding the light immediately above the chrome surround. I used masking tape over the top of the light fitting to make a template to cut the appropriate hole in the lining - the first point of no return and irreversible commitment to the scary fitting process. In the photo you can clearly see the creases on the right hand side. The side parts towards the rear were also deformed and creased, so I used some MFH upholstery to cover these areas and to match the difference in the upholstery for these areas seen in the prototype cars. The next photo shows the windscreen wiper box, which was painted in the purple brown and fitted into place. The lining was then laid out in place with nothing, including the light, glued. The lining needed to be fixed to the rear window frame, which then placed the lining about 3mm away from the roof in that area. It then gets fixed to the tops of the interior door frames, resulting in the same distance of the lining from the roof along the sides. Finally the interior light is fitted through the hole cut in the lining with the lining fixed immediately above the chrome ring, to ensure that the lining remains suspended over the middle. The problem is that none of these areas offers any decent sized glue area and it must all be done sequentially from rear to front. In addition the cut lines on the lining to separate the vacform piece were woefully unclear, so it all had to be trimmed without being able to confidently hold it in place - the consequence of it being so floppy at a thickness of up to 0.14mm as well as deformed in places. This final trimming can only be done as the piece is fixed in place as it is only then that you can determine exactly where the final cut needs to be. I eventually decided to run with some serious double sided tape which I could place on the back of the vacform piece in the relevant parts. This could then be uncovered as I worked my way forward from the rear window. However i needed to do both sides simultaneously and not have the uncovered tape stick where I didn't want it to whilst still allowing the final trimming to be done. The advantage of tape over glue is that it does provide some wriggle room without have glue getting smeared around, but there are limits due to the fragility of the plastic and the risk of the tape "balling up". The key was to use two lengths of ribbon stretched from side to side between the door frames, and moving these forward as i gradually fixed the uncovered tape onto the tops of the frames on each side. After a month of thinking and diversion behaviour, the entire job took less than ten minutes. Following which I resorted to whisky. Not perfect, but then I have yet to meet a real one in either a CV 11 or CV 15 which is not a little frayed and tatty. I was quite pleased with the final result as it does at least show that the headlining can be fitted as the kit designers were aiming for, despite the rather difficult material they provide for you to work with. Far easier, however, than trying to make my own, for me anyway. Thanks for looking Mike

Hard build and very well done!

Thanks Chris - a generally awesome kit certainly helps! I got the painting of the body work out of the way so that I could then set it aside and get the interior assemblies done. I didn't want a completely black car and, partly due to the size of the model, in the end opted for a two tone finish. Many of these cars were supplied in primer to be painted at the customer's whim, and even more have been subsequently repainted. Either way I've opted for an aged but well looked after finish for the body work. The green is apparently the same as British Racing Green but known as Moss Green, and does appear on a number of the French cars. I used rattle cans for the black, matt followed by clear gloss, and airbrushed Zero paint for the green, again matt and followed by the same clear gloss from a rattle can. Then it was onto the seats. The kit provides the squabs in a soft vinyl which, although satisfyingly squishy if you press on them, is resistant to any form of glue that I could find. This would not necessarily be an issue except that the front seat squabs were short shots, as shown in the second photo below. This required creative use of plastic card held in place by electrical tape and then the upholstery, but seemed to work OK. The upholstery is a self adhesive Hiroboy beige velour which gives, to my eye at least, a pleasingly lush look. I managed to get the central arm rest in the rear to function by substantially thinning the supplied vinyl pieces which makes up the part and using a length of brass rod for a hinge. The front seats in theory can slide on their rather flimsy mounts, but I will just be using that function to easily mount the seats on the floor in due course without having to set the mounts at exactly the right spacing beforehand. If you look very carefully in the next photo, you can just make out the repair outline under the upholstery. This will, however, be completely invisible once finally inside the car. The seat back luggage pockets are supplied as vacform pieces which I cut out and covered with the upholstery. The next photo shows the true colour of the upholstery, whereas the following photos show it to be darker than reality. Piping was simply painted solder attached with PVA glue. The seat panels at the rear of the front and rear vertical cushions should extend to the top of the seats and also be finished with piping to match the real car. This, however, would take a major redesign of how the seat parts fit together so I decided to just live with the discrepancy. These were all then set aside whilst I moved onto the other interior parts. Thanks for looking. Cheers, Mike

Beautiful shiny coat! Love the understated colour too. Used to see quite a few Light 15s in that colour before Burgundy restorations became all the rage. Cheers Mike

Thanks Paul. I have replaced almost all of the bendy vinyl pieces with brass, plastic rod or soft wire as appropriate. I did try working with the soft rubbery plastic, but I had trouble even drilling it successfully - the spark plug boots which come up later were probably my biggest frustration. At least the kit parts provide an accurate template for making these parts if nothing else. Thank you Chris - much appreciated! Having got the body off in one piece, it all cleaned up with little filling, except for the right hand rear wheel arch which was about 1mm lower against the body than where it needed to be. I am not sure why it is the right hand side which is fighting me, and I can only hope that this doesn't signal some future disaster in terms of overall fit. Anyway, nothing for it except some scrap plastic blocks to mark the desired outline, and numerous repeats of filler and sanding. With that sorted, I then completed the plethora of accelerator, brake and clutch linkages in the engine bay. These are all designed to work, and this was certainly easy enough to achieve - although serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In the end I set it up so that all this allows the control pedals to move without this affecting the rest of the linkages - just in case some time in the future unknowing fingers (an older me?) push on the pedals to see if they work..... The various springs in the engine bay are again formed from soft wire supplied in the kit for this purpose. The return springs on the pedals are not referenced in the kit, and were formed from fuse wire. The kit contains few decals, but the brake fluid reservoir markings are amongst them and come up very nicely. The clamps for the reservoir and coil were, however, horrible and replaced with brass. The reservoir and coil themselves were also re-formed to cylinders rather than the really odd shapes provided for in the kit pieces. The suspension shock absorbers are provided as either fixed or "operable" parts. In keeping with my decisions to try and retain the operable parts as much as possible, I used springs from the inside of a couple of disposable lighters which were the right length and gauge. The fixing points on the suspension have been redone with suitably sized micro bolts to allow the shocks to be removed if this plan goes belly up. Finally, with the pedal box completed, the floor could be carpeted. The kit provides soft textured plastic pieces for this, but I decided to go with dolls house carpet instead. It is, perhaps, a little too plush for car carpet, but will hopefully provide a nice counterpoint to the cloth to be used for the seats. Possibly a better scale option would be self-adhesive felt, which I used on a 1/12 Ferrari to very nice effect. The real Tractions do have a sense of grandeur when seated in or driving them and so my choice was more an artistic one in trying to create that sense in miniature. The same carpet is used for the boot floor and, eventually, the parcel shelf behind the rear seat. The protective leather kickpad behind the accelerator pedal was represented by a piece of suitably painted whisky bottle foil - all of my models have some whisky bottle foil included somewhere...... As a side note, the strengthening box section across the floor, on which the front seats are eventually located, is typically uncarpeted. I opted to completely carpet the floor, leaving only those small areas required for the seat fittings. The piping is painted lengths of solder. The model has suddenly become rather too large to easily photograph as a whole and show the detail, so apologies for the lack of perspective in the photos. It's also rapidly taking over the entire table due to the bulk of the individual assemblies which need to be worked on before brining everything together. At this stage I have the floor, the body and the engine all in various stages awaiting joining together. Thanks for looking Mike.

Thanks for that. Much appreciated! Thanks Paul! The bulkhead on mine was OK - had a slight bend but that held in place fine with glue. A couple more detail shots of the engine. I added some Archer rivets to the carburettor heat shield as they had a cloth attached to the underneath - probably asbestos. The oil level indicator was a "floating" needle inside a glass sight tube, but is just supplied as a flattened rod which I added some detail to, although not the glass cover for the sight tube. I did try using clear epoxy but decided it was better without. The carburettor is a complex set of small pieces with no locating pins. As it turned out, the instructions give the wrong mounting point for the accelerator linkage, as shown in the second photo of the carburettor, which I did have to subsequently remove and trim to fit below the bowl on the side of the carb. The distributor was fiitted with a condenser made from brass tube as the soft vinyl piece in the kit was "soft" to say the least. The photo of the springs shows the clutch return springs which have to be formed from wire supplied in the kit. The engine cradle was assembled using a jig formed from a thick slab of aluminium and some suitably sized plastic tube. Adding the torsion bars requires some thought as they need to be pre-loaded. Roy's DVD was invaluable for this as the actual instructions are not particularly clear, even with a good understanding of French. That brought me to the daunting job of assembling the flat packed body pieces - sides, roof, rear and rear wheel arches which are all separate parts. Again with the help of the DVD, this went surprisingly smoothly over a period of some days to allow each step to set thoroughly. The idea is to assemble the entire body onto the combined large floor piece, engine bay and firewall without actually bonding it to those pieces, and then removing the body once it is set up. I did end up with a gap just behind the firewall on the right hand side, where the roof piece joins with the side, which took a bit of dealing with. The whole assembly feels frighteningly flimsy as it is being put together but, once set, it is surprisingly rigid - even when separated from the floor. Thanks for looking. Cheers, Mike

Inspired by Paul, this is also my first foray into a WIP on this forum. The Heller Citroen was on my list of ones to do since reading a series of, i think, three articles in a modelling magazine in the library during my lunch hours back in the early 80's. I had vague memories of contortions required to get the suspension into place and major issues witht he bonnet and doors, so not a straightforward build. It did cause me to do the 1/16 Citroen DS about 25 years ago, which still graces the cabinet - a frustrating kit and my first venture into scratchbuilding detail. We have owned three Citroens over the years, GSA and a couple of CXs, which were all astounding cars. I also had the pleasure of driving a Traction and DS several times so these cars do hold a special interest. I finally took the plunge and bought this one last year and started it about six months ago. Much of this WIP is therefore retrospective and I'll try to keep it to the more interesting bits. I do love the magic of these Heller Citroens - the myriad of pieces look suspiciously soft on detail but under a coat of paint and some washes and dry brushing they become marvellously detailed. I have had issues with short shot and warped pieces, but on the whole the kit is an absolute pleasure. Unfortunately I lack the skill to convert this into a Kiwi based RH drive car, so French it will remain. And after all these years, i still do not have a dedicated modelling space, so the Citroen in making takes up the dining table which fortunately we only use on special occasions. First up is the engine. The block found its way to the workbench vice as it was cracked through at one end. I did put in some card to substitute for the lack of pins on pieces. The relevant surfaces on the block were also treated to a base coat of matt black enamel which was gone over with a piece of sponge before it dried to give a "cast" finish before green was plastered everywhere, as with the real thing. The photo of the hose connector for the water pump shows the original piece - almost all of these vinyl pieces on the kit are best replaced. For the hoses, I used heat shrink tube, but didn't shrink it. The rather fiddly clamps are after market photoetch pieces. Despite being retrospective, comments and feedback are welcome. Cheers, Mike

Great start and the level of grime on the engine is perfect. Have you got Roy's DVD on this one? Really helps for putting the body together. I am also building this one at the moment and was contemplating doing a retrospective WIP. I have time off work for the next three weeks but away from home, so could be time to just do it. I've spent the last month or so dealing with the bonnet and doors........and still haven't managed to finally fit them. It's a fantastic kit though. I too went all out to get things functioning, using brass where I could, but in the end it is all too fragile to trust in the long term. The trade off from having parts very much to scale, but formed from soft plastic. Cheers, Mike

Very sad indeed.....Certainly has left a legacy for us, but way too young.

I've only bought one - the 1/12 250 GTO. Took me almost two years to put together a model of Nick Mason's car as it was in the late 1990s. Amazing kit, despite a couple of weird errors beyond the expected changes I had to make, and probably the most satisfying modelling I have done. Very expensive though...... Personally I think it's a shame when these kits become more of an investment rather than being built. Just a different philosophy I guess, as my stash from over 40 years is only three kits - I only buy to build and I tend to build slowly to savour the experience! The MFH kits build up as stunningly beautiful models. My wife certainly had no problem accepting the GTO as an ornament to grace the lounge. Cheers, Mike

The 3000cc engine was big compared to that in the Austin Healy 100 - 2600cc or thereabouts. it was a fairly common way of distinguishing larger models, particularly with those produced in the UK. Cheers Mike

Beautiful old school modelling! That's a mighty fine paint finish. Cheers, Mike

I ended up soldering many of the joins in major parts like the engine block, oil tank and fuel tank etc on my MFH 250 GTO, as well as much of the frame members. I used a low melt solder and a normal soldering iron without any issue at all. They key is to not spend a lot of time on the join with the iron, so somewhat counter-intuitively a hot iron works better. The lower melt point solder and a good flux keeps everything under control. The joins are certainly way more robust and clean up much nicer than a CA'd joint. There's certainly plenty of scrap white metal "sprue"buts on these kits to get a feel for it. Cheers, Mike

I got a textured finish on my 1/12 250 GTO by spraying matt black enamel thinned with turpentine to slow its drying and then stippling it with a small piece of sponge. I did try spraying at lower pressure from various distances but tended to get more of a splatter effect than the tight texture that I was after. Hope fully the photo shows. Cheers, Mike

Beautiful smooth surface on that! Love the livery! Cheers, Mike