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One of the sleekest supercars ever designed. And don't believe all you read about how the car was compromised by replacing the V12 of the concept with "the engine from a Metro". Not exactly... the engine is a custom version of the TWR racing engine that powered the Jaguar XJR-11 Le Mans car, so its racing heritage is strong (it also powered the Metro 6R4 bonkers rally car, which is where the Metro jibe originated). Interestingly, the output of the engine in the XJ220 is almost exactly the same (540-odd BHP) as that of the V8 that powers today's XKR-S and F-Type R coupe. The engine is where most of the extra work on this kit went in, since the Tamiya original lacks most of the "plumbing" that is shoehorned into the engine bay. A wide range of wire, solder, jewellery elastic and even cigarette packet foil served to "busy up" this important part of the car. There's also a fully wired distributor in there, but you can't see it! (For anyone building the kit, the small cylinder at the rear end of the cam cover of the left hand bank of cylinders is the distributor, and it should be painted red!) Otherwise, the kit is great in terms of shape, fit and detail. The cabin responds really well to simple detail painting (though I did add some seat-belts, which are kinda obvious in that pale interior). The working headlight covers do work, somewhat surprisingly... It is possible, as you can see, to make the rear engine bay cover open. I ground out the slots on the body into which the hinge pins moulded on the clear part fit so that they were deeper and bigger from front to back than moulded. This allows the the cover to slip backwards as you lift it, so the front edge can clear the roof in front of it. When it shuts again, it slides forward and drops into place as gravity does its thing. The fit of the chassis into body is easy enough, but it's lacking positive locations, so you really do have to glue it in place at the front end and at the sides of the rear diffuser. All the pictures were done in exactly the same lighting. The difference is the tone of the card background -- the "brighter" shots later were taken on dark grey card, the earlier ones on a more neutral grey. It helps explain why pictures of a "Brooklands Green" XJ220 can look like anything from almost British Racing Green to zingy turquoise (check out "DK Engineering XJ220" to see the inspiration for this build...) Thanks for watching! bestest, M.

... you know how sometimes a project just seems like the right one to do right now? Well, I've been noodling with the Murcielago SV, but I suddenly got the urge to build an XJ220. Don't ask me why... The usual start with Zero Paints for the body. This is meant to be "Silverstone Green", one of the exclusive colours for the XJ220. It's NOT meant to be any kind of British Racing Green, and I found some excellent pictures of a car on sale that categorically is Silverstone Green. This is specially mixed by Steve at Hiroboy -- a "Pacific Green" originally found on a Mustang. The colour codes for the original paint are not in the 15 pages of database entries for Jaguar colours on Lechler mixing tool, so I had to get something close. One source pointed to Boyd "Chezoom Teal" which is available in a Testors can, but is not in the DB either, so this is the closest I could get after rather a lot of online research. I wanted to keep the wing painted with the body to make sure it was exactly the same colour -- I learned that lesson the hard way! As always, the clear coat transforms the colour. I'm quite happy with this, since it matches my reference pictures pretty well. It's hard to photograph! The headlight covers raise and lower, and fit rather well -- these are taped on for effect and came slightly loose before I took the pix. On to the rather neat engine now... bestest, M.