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Whilst the digital modelling of the McLaren M23 and others is trundling along in the background, I needed some traditional modelling to balance out all that new fangled CAD and 3D stuff and whilst I wait for the new resin printer to arrive. I have a fair few subjects to choose from but figured I would start with one as close to OOB as possible (it won't be 100% OOB as I'm pathologically incapable of building something OOB without adding or tweaking details!) Picked up this Lotus 25 on ebay for a good price. As this is part of my World Drivers Champion winning cars serries I'll be building it as the 1963 setup for Jim Clark who clinched the championship at round 7 of 10 at Monza. Lights out and away we go with some cleanup on the main monocoque. Bit of (tamiya fine surface) primer and some polishing before a bit of dry fit of smaller parts: I'm painting the outside in the recommended Tamiya spray TS-43 but after trying it on a test piece I don't like the thickness of paint the spray can gives so I decanted some, added some lacquer thinners and I've been using my airbrush which lets me do lots of thin controlled coats of paint. The main monocoque and rear cover have had three and two coats respectively at this point and the top cover is primed and ready for it's first coat at lunchtime today. Surprisingly for my first car model in 35 years it even looks like the Lotus 25 it's supposed to be! The fit of the rear cover isn't perfect. I could spend weeks fettling it to perfect fit (and there will certainly be plenty of obsessive perfectionist nonsense in the rest of this series of builds), but this one is supposed to be a quick build to get me off the start line. Decided to not worry about the gaps as I'll be displaying it with the covers off to the side with the added advantage you will be able to see the engine and gubbins. Removed all the small parts from the sprues and cleaned up the mould part lines and some minor flash then got them all primed. I like to leave a bit of sprue attached to a part where it won't show if possible to give me something to hold or get the spring tweezers to grip whilst painting and drying but thats not always possible so I also use the bits of cardboard and double sided tape method (and the occasional cocktail stick through a suitable hole method): Tamiya included a large sprue of chrome plated parts in this kit but they are all far too shiny and uniform for my liking so I decided to strip the chrome off. Forgot to take a photo of the shiny parts before stripping however I also forgot to strip the engine inlet trumpets so here they are alongside the still shiny sprue to give you an idea of the problem: The main problem is the underlying plastic is black (as gloss black gives any metallic the best background colour) and when you remove them from the sprue you end up with unsightly black areas around the sprue gates making the chrome plating rather pointless. Stripping the chrome is easy... 5 min coated in Mr Muscle oven cleaner spray, followed by a good rinse in plenty of water and all that shiny chrome is gone, simples! The first set of parts I already did only got 5 min in the foam and I didn't give them a stir part way through so where a part was against the side of the plastic takeaway tub it was a little less exposed to the foam and thus left a tiny bit of chrome: another 5 min in new foam sorted that easily though and I know from now on to stir them around a bit to get all the surfaces treated equally. And now I have lovely clean parts ready to be primed and then sprayed with a range of Alclad II metallic colours so that they have a bit more variation and nuance than the single colour bright chrome Tamiya provide (and no unsightly sprue gate scars!) The main exhaust part I primed still had some part lines and flash I had missed and after cleaning those up and sanding it had a mix of primed and not-primed areas. Time to see if Mr Muscle will strip Tamiya fine surface primer too. After 5 min it hadn't done much: Giving it a half hour to see if that works. Watch this space for more exciting adventures in plastic! 😉

I know that I will regret this. I started on a Tamiya Lotus 25. But as usual I can't build something out of the box. I decided to build mine as a car without the yellow stripe from the 1962 season. The thing that worried me was that I meed a new windscreen for this. It took many attempts but I think I have a template for it now. I'm not sure this was a good idea or if I'm just going to ruin a kit. I started by filling the openings in the sides. A couple of incisions with the saw was needed to make the upper part narrower at the back. But the engine cover must also be higher and I'm not sure how to fix it. I will improvise. I made a couple of cuts and added material to it. I found a good side view in a book and my conversions so far match the image very well. The nose should be a little longer though so I started by adding plastic to the front,. That gave me some material to reshape. I think I got the basic shape of the car now. Time to start scratching some Weber carburettors.