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Alfa Romeo Coupe Elegant 1/8


Pouln

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Good to see you back on this! Great workshop and lots of work space! I like the addition of the work table in the middle and I expect that, you will too as the build progresses. I have quite a bit of counter space but, I find that things rapidly pile up around where I'm actually working. With all the big sub assemblies and wanting them close by to fit and mocking up you really do need lots of square footage to lay it all out and still have ready access to it. The only other comment here is, it's too clean!  :maskup:

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Thanks, Wayne.  
Yes, you cannot have too much space to work.

Too clean? Well most probably because I hadn’t restarted my build yet. I will not post a picture of how it looks now 😉

 

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Pocher cut some corners here and there. Most obvious at this point is the missing inner wings at the rear.

If I was to finish the build as Pocher intended, you would see the backside of the seats from the wheel arches. I already extended the floor from behind the seats to the fuel tank, but the sides are still open.

You have been cursed with the same Pocher curses that my Rolls  was born with.

The doors - I scratch built 4 out of frustration with warpage and thickness. Perhaps the truss rods I cobbled will work for you to hold the shell at the dimensions you need for trial fitting.

Same with the open wheel arches - I scratched inner fender panels to hide the rear seat area. If you have time and patience, you'll find them in the reconstructed thread.

If not, you're doing just fine at solving Pocher Problems without my 2 cents.

And your shop is to die for....

 

 

 

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Without having a workplace at the moment - not even a kitchen table - I am envious for your space. This lets me look forward to when I'll be able to get back to modelling.

 

Good to see you around again and returning to the big Pocher. I will still follow. Thank you for showing - keep the pictures coming 🙂

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59 minutes ago, Schwarz-Brot said:

Without having a workplace at the moment - not even a kitchen table - I am envious for your space. This lets me look forward to when I'll be able to get back to modelling.

 

Good to see you around again and returning to the big Pocher. I will still follow. Thank you for showing - keep the pictures coming 🙂

Thans. will certainly do.

I hope you’ll find a time and place to start modelling anytime soon.

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1 hour ago, Codger said:

......If you have time and patience, you'll find them in the reconstructed thread.

If not, you're doing just fine at solving Pocher Problems without my 2 cents.

And your shop is to die for....

 

 

 

Did you actually go back and insert al missing pictures in that enormous thread?

That must have been a hell of a job, but the thread is a big help and a lesson for all of us.

 

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25 minutes ago, Pouln said:

Did you actually go back and insert al missing pictures in that enormous thread?

That must have been a hell of a job, but the thread is a big help and a lesson for all of us.

 

Yes, all 970 of them. Thanks to the great staff here on Brit. :worthy:

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You did this community a big service by recreating your thread. Therein is so much to be learned.  So thank you so much for doing this.👍

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ok, first attempt to start with the inner wings. I decided to fabricate a vertical inner panel that will go, seen from the outside, inside the chassis rails. at the back it will stop at the edge of the petrol tank and I will put a panel there to close the gap between the tank and the upright inner wing.

Bigger job will be to connect the upright with the inside of the wheel arch. That will probably cost a lot of time, doing, redoing, redoing, redoing and did I mention redoing. Every time of course mounting the body and removing the body.

Anyway, all part of the fun.

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In these two pictures it shows that the tank is made of 2 parts. My mistake was to put glue on the whole of the surface when I glued the perfectly cut ☺️ side panel. 

Didn't do that at the other side, so that one is ok. I decided to leave this as it will be nearly impossible to see it when the car is finished.

 

I'm also looking at the inside of the body, thinking about headliners and such.

I would like to hear your opinion on what cloth to use.

Three choices. 

1. White - quite thin somewhat shiny cloth - I added a close-up. in the background you see the backside. That is really super shiny.

2. Grey - flanel like - nice material, very convincing, but I'm not sure about the colour.

3. brown, same as the floor mats. felt like and quite thick.

 

I will use brown leather around the rear window.

See for your self.

 

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Well, that's all for now. Do let me know what fabric you prefer.

Thanks for watching.

 

Edited by Pouln
small addition
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One more thing.

Here is a picture of one of the items that will not be seen when the car is finished.

I created a battery with clamps for the wires. It will be below the parcel shelf and when the inner wings are done, there is no way you can see it when the body is mounted.

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Ah, and all that mess that is shown at the top of the picture is the backside of the seats. Luckily that will be invisible too.

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My choice for headliner was the back side (suede) of the kid leather used on my seats. Nice soft fuzzy look but in scale. Piping makes for nice edges. It's important to use a light color because it's dark under the roof. Double-sided tape is your friend. Here's photo 762 from my thread:

762-pasted-Graphic.png

 

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That's a good idea. The backside of the leather I use is somewhat lighter that the skin side. That may work very well.

As to piping. I plan to do a lot as it nicely breaks up the bigger area's. I have lots of 1mm leather strings in naturel, light brown, dark brown and black. One of those should do.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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23 hours ago, Codger said:

…. Double-sided tape is your friend…..

Chas,

I actually do not trust double sided tape. It will work …. for now… but one never knows for how long. I use contact glue. Easy peasy.

I know it will stay there. Used it to glue the seat upholstery too.

Gives immediate strength, which you need to be able to stretch the leather.

You had quite straight surfaces but the roof panels of the alfa are curved to all sides. Lots of stretching needed to be able to fix it without the need of additional cuts in corner area's.

If I were to use double sided tape the leather would cause a lot of tension on the tape,

So I think I'll try contact glue first.

Oh and it is much safer than cyano glue as it will not stain the surface in any way or form.

 

 

Edited by Pouln
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14 minutes ago, Pouln said:

Chas,

I actually do not trust double sided tape. It will work …. for now… but one never knows for how long. I use contact glue. Easy peasy.

I know it will stay there. Used it to glue the seat upholstery too.

 

Certainly true and we all have our methods that give results.

I recommended it because for 10 years, my daughter and I were professional art framers. In our shop we used Scotch ATG 924 (a double-sided, clear transfer tape) to bond art, matboards and fabrics to them. That was in the '90's and we have all our personal framed art in our homes and nothing has de-bonded. Nor any of our customer's art.  On the Rolls, I have used it to hold much of the top gaberdine to the roof along with a bit of CA and fabric glue. The ATG has been in and on the Rolls since mid-2016 and no droops.

Use your favorite; you're familiar with it and get good results. :)

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2 hours ago, Codger said:

Certainly true and we all have our methods that give results.

I recommended it because for 10 years, my daughter and I were professional art framers. In our shop we used Scotch ATG 924 (a double-sided, clear transfer tape) to bond art, matboards and fabrics to them. That was in the '90's and we have all our personal framed art in our homes and nothing has de-bonded. Nor any of our customer's art.  On the Rolls, I have used it to hold much of the top gaberdine to the roof along with a bit of CA and fabric glue. The ATG has been in and on the Rolls since mid-2016 and no droops.

Use your favorite; you're familiar with it and get good results. :)

Thanks for the explanation, Chas. Good to know what brand you trust.

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Today a small update.

I have fabricated the inner wings. They consist of a vertical surface that is placed inside the chassis rails.

To make it a bit sturdy I have connected the left one with the right one using some I-beams (polystyrene) and another vertical surface right in front of the petrol tank.

Connected to the vertical surfaces is the actual wing that will fill the gap between the vertical service and the body.

Everything painted dull black.

 

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Next items on the list are the door lock mechanisms.

I created a little drawing which I will try to follow. However the lock will just be 7x8mm so we'll see where it gets me.

I ordered some watch gears and hopefully there is stuff in there that I can use. Hope they arrive soon.

The gear will drive a little rack that will slide out to actually keep the door closed.

 

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And this is 0.15mm brass that I will use for the lock case.

 

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Partly folded in a box like form

 

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So this lock will be about 3mm thick and I need to clear some space in the door panels.

So I hacked away some plastic from the carrier of the inside door panel.

 

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That gave me just enough space to place the lock case between outside panel and inside panel

 

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Well, that's it for now. I am now waiting for the watch gears to arrive and then I'll need to find a way to create the rack and make a working lock of that.

Thanks for watching.

Edited by Pouln
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  • 2 weeks later...

Hope you are all doing well.

So what have I been doing these days.

Well. I started with my first 3D design steps.

Actually not for this model, but I will be using the design in another iteration of the Alfa in the future.

Most time was spent on finding a suitable 3D design solution. I don't mind to spend some money on it, but I certainly do not want a product that is subscription based.

So I downloaded a few, but until now I am not really happy with them.

The design of the radiator in the pictures was done with browser based Tinkercad. You can do almost everything in it but a lot is quite cumbersome and takes a lot of time.

I exported the design in .OBJ format and imported it in DesignSpark. This has a lot more options than TinkerCad but takes also more time to learn it. I'm not there yet.

 

Suggestions for a 3D design package that is not on subscription base and affordable are welcome.

 

But what about the results?

Well below you'll see three views of the radiator I designed. 

It is not done yet. there is a square mesh pattern on both sides of the radiator that need to be added.

I did add some protrusions where the hoses will go, but at the bottom connection there should also be a t-connector for a thinner line coming from above. I'm just not sure how that looks where it originates.

Problem is that I haven't found many reference pictures of the radiator setup.

Anyway, here is what I've got so far. I'm not unhappy with the results, as it is a first try.

 

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That's it for now. I somehow dread firing up the 3D printer. I have a Kudo3D Bean, bought from a Kickstarter campaign and judged from the forums, there are lots of troubles with it and Kudo3D does not want to help.

They state that they lost money on the early bird offering through Kickstarter. No kudo's for them (pun intended).

 

Might be mine is fine. Who knows. One of these days I will experience that.

Before that I need a slicer that supports this printer. They bundled a slicer, but after the campaign they said that it is going to cost money after the 30 day trial period.

Functionality is not really good so I'm goin to skip that one. 

For the same money you can get Formware. It supports this printer and many others so that is where I probably will go.

 

Anyway, enough of my ramblings.

 

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I'll vote for Autodesk Fusion. Drawback is that all your stuff lives online, though you can export everything in the most common formats for local use. Object files can be exported easily. Indeed 3d-printing is widely supported by Fusion. It has a steep learning curve but can do anything the really large CAD-packages can do. Since it is free for private use you don't have to worry about subscriptions and stuff. Though they may pull the plug one day. There is no standalone version.

My biggest problem with Fusion is that its tools are very close to Inventor, though the underlying workflow is completely different. - This matters very much to me, as my dayjob is at least 95% construction work with Inventor. Above that I think it is a playground for the inventor developers as successfull new features I see in fusion come drippling down into inventor some time later. This means constant upgrades in functionality, but sometimes it becomes instable and the interfaces change every now and then which is bad if you use it only occasionally.

Biggest plus for me is the very good freeform workspace which allows you to model surfaces with irregular curves very well and quite intuitively. This I haven't seen in any other CAD package yet - but it started to dripple down into Inventor...

 

If you want a very safe bet and can live with oldschool CAD-Work theres OpenSource packages out there. I think freeCAD and libreCAD were the names of the most advanced ones. But these were on a level that compares to professional parametric CAD-packages of about at least 20 years ago the last time I looked into them. This was when I decided to use Fusion.

 

So, Autodesk Fusion360. Any other solution with no or little investment won't even come close. There's only the big names in this game. It is in my eyes perfectly suited to modelling.

 

For Freeform modelling without advanced CAD functionality there'd be Blender. This is a very advanced open source tool suite aimed at cinematic animation, probably on par with the big names. Naturally this involves sculpting tools, so the freeform capabilities are pretty good. Parametric CAD capabilities are on a level with free or basic CAD packages I'd say. It's learning curve is even steeper than with Fusion, and to be honest I didn't come to grips with the concept of doing things. The moviemaking, lighting and FX-overhead didn't make this beast any easier to use for me. Coming from parametric CAD design it is very hard for me to work with freeform sculpting.

 

 

Hope I could help you out a little. This of course only reflects my personal experience and opinion.

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Thanks for your views on this. I looked for the personal use license on Autodesk site but didn't find it.

Thanks to your message I again searched for the personal use license. It is not in the list of subscriptions, but I found a link and was able to download and register.

So thanks for that.

I'll go with Fusion from now on.

Lots of "get you started" material on you tube. Great.

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Glad to see a Fusion 360 colleague :) 

 

The 'personal use' option is there, used it this week as a matter of coincidence. You'll have to search for it though... once the software is download, register it and choose 'hobby'. You can use this amazing software suite free of cost. 

 

I'm sure you'll be up and running in no time, as it is quite intuitive and easy to learn; but if you have any question you think I could answer, feel welcome to contact me. 

 

Good luck!

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On 4/18/2020 at 10:40 PM, Schwarz-Brot said:

Poul, there is a complete set of good video tutorials available from Autodesk. It really helps to play along these to get you up to speed. They also helped me to understand the mindset behind Fusion workflows better.

Yes, I found them. Helps a lot. Thanks.

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  • 2 months later...

Goodday!

It is time to show where I am now with this build.

The door locks: well, that did not work as I wanted. Thinking about alternatives right now.

I couldn't resist and have trial fitted the body including doors etc.

This is what I looks like

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Quite a nice fit, I would say.

 

So next I started with painting.

Painting is not the most difficult thing. I found that keeping all the paint on,is much more difficult.

It is so easy to loose paint here and there while sanding to get the perfect surface.

Anyway, I have probably painted the parts 3 to 5 times before I was happy.

The paint used is AK11097 Burnt Red (AK's 3rd generation paint). I use an airbrush with .4 needle.

Btw, this new line of AK paint is great to work with.

 

I have wetted part of the door to show what the colour will be after gloss coating.

 

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The top will be finished in black leather(like), so I left it bare. 

 

Next came the gloss coat. 

I was planning to use this:

 

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This box contains 2 60 ml bottles (1 varnish and 1 thinner), 1 20 ml bottle hardener and 2 syringes.

Instructions: Mixing varnish and hardener 3:1 and thin as needed. That leaves you quite in the blind wrt thinning.

 

I put a few drops of thinner in about 1.2ml solution.

I never used it before, so I did a trial on a piece of PS I had lying around.

The thing is that I continued the trial on the radiator shroud. Big failure!

Result was worse than horrible. This is what I got.

 

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I don't know what caused this. Paint was too thick but that could not have been the only problem.

Anyway, the 2K stuff sands pretty good, so before taking off all paint layers I tried to rescue it by sanding.

This is a pic half-way the process.

 

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I managed to get it nearly flat without destroying the base colour.

So, new trials were in order. This time only on the scrap piece.

I mixed varnish, hardener and thinner in the following amounts: 

V: 4 ml, H: 1.3ml and thinner 2 ml.

Actually the result on the scrap piece was very good, so I continued with the panels of the car.

Here is the result I got (no sanding or polishing done yet).

 

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Not bad being a first time that I ever painted such a big model, I guess. I used an airbrush with .6 needle.

I think I can get this looking quite nice, doing the 1200, 2000, 4000, 6000, 12000 grid routine

 

Well, that's where I am now. If all goes well with polishing I will gloss coat the wings and body.

Results will be shown here of course.

 

Thanks for watching.

 

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