Pocher F40 with Autograph transkit upgrade challenge build

[larchiefeng]

I think that the body is about done and there's only just a small amount of paint left to come off but, it's ready to be worked on now.

 

 

I'm starting with the rear lower valance and cutting open the vents. As I look at it I noticed that there's an angle to the vents and I want to make sure the angle is retained.

 

 

In order to see what I'm doing, I outlined the area to be cut out with a fine pen. Here you see that angle and the outline.

 

 

I thought that it might be easier to drill some holes in the area to be removed but, later decided it was unnecessary. Anyway, live and learn and here I had scribed a line for the drill bit to be centered on.

 

 

Here I am drilling the unnecessary holes on the big drill press in the garage.

 

 

Last night, I started cutting out the vents at the workbench downstairs holding the Dremel in my hand and quickly realized what a mess it was creating. Today, I moved the operation out to the garage and attached the handheld wand for better control. I wasn't really having a hard time holding the whole thing but, this made it a lot easier and gave me better control with the carbide cutter. You can see all the dust on the bench by the part and it was a lot more than this by the time I got done roughing out the openings.

 

 

Back inside with an army of files. Because they are small rifler files they clog up fast and it helps to have more than one file at hand to keep going. I need to find my file card to keep handy to clean the files as I use them.

 

 

Here's where I left it for tonight; there still needs to be some fine tuning and a cost of primer just to get a better idea of what it's going to look like and what needs to be done and where.

 

 

Meanwhile back at the downstairs bench and back to the rotors. I made a quick little jig to solder the edge vent piece onto the rotor halves and drill out the holes for the rivets and screws. It's nothing fancy, just a block of wood with two holes at different depths. The shallow one is to hold it while I solder the edge piece and the deeper one is to hold it while I drill the rivet holes.

 

 

One thing that, I don't like is the screws in the silver plate on the rotor hub on the right . There's no screws on a real car but, that's what is provided in the transkit so, I'm going to remove those and change them over to brass bolts.

 

 

Shallow to solder

 

 

Set up to drill the holes on the left side rotor.

 

 

 

[Pascal]

Very nice work and a clever way to assemble the brake discs. I'm not sure they're on all F-40's, but I've seen hex nuts where Autograph has put the screws.

[larchiefeng]

Thanks Pascal. I'll do a little more research and see if I can see exactly what type of bolts go there and go with what I find. It really doesn't make much sense that Ferrari would use screws in that location on a wheel hub. Every car  I ever worked on back when I was a mechanic never had anything but bolts on or around the wheels and suspension. It's just too critical of a location to use screws. 

I'm going to make the rear body cuts later today and I'll post some pictures of how it comes out.

[CrazyCrank]

Very nice job, Wayne 

[rjfk2002]

Looks great Wayne.  Getting those vents open is a lot of work but looks great.  How does the body look with the paint off - any problem areas in the metal or is it pretty clean?

 

I have done a little work on the engine.  Here is a shot of the transmission housing.  The brass PE parts are bolted on while the steel ones are superglued.  There are tiny watchmaker screws in the kit (~0.5 mm or so) that can be fitted to hold the PE plates in place.  My attempt at doing so resulted in a broken drill bit.  I need some new bits before trying again...  The bolts that go into the holes are 1mm bolts with a PE washer.  It looks really nice but is a bit fiddly.  

 

 

 

[larchiefeng]

Thanks Thierry, good luck with the office move.

Rich, I don't recall seeing any Scale Hardware bolts in the transkit; are you cheating and telling me that all the bolts come with the transkit? lol! 

I finally received the replacement shock parts from Uli today so, I can get back to the front suspension and finish up everything that, is not quite done yet. 

I also rough cut out all the vents on the rear bonnet and I did take a couple of pictures. Tomorrow, I need to mark them all so I can get them as even as possible and be able to get a file in each one to get the corners shaped and cleaned up. I've been running around all week and I haven't spent as much time as I want to on the car but, tomorrow I should probably be able to get more done.

Edited April 13, 2017 by larchiefeng

[cookiezoom]

2 hours ago, rjfk2002 said:

The bolts that go into the holes are 1mm bolts with a PE washer.  It looks really nice but is a bit fiddly.  

My new Aventador transkit has <1mm screws. Fiddly doesn't really explain how fiddly it actually is. I'm terrified of the carpet monster eating then 

[larchiefeng]

Invest in some good magnifying glasses and use a cookie sheet under the parts that you're working on and then you'll be better able to see them and if you drop one or two they stand a better chance of staying off the floor. Unfortunately, I actually do have carpet under my workbench and I spent way too much time hunting for dropped screws. It also helps to know which nuts, bolts and screws can be picked up with a magnet. I have a magnet with good size head and it worked pretty well with a lot of the hardware in Mercedes kit but, not so much with the transkit parts so far. The cookie sheet is my new solution for this.

 I also have broken so many 1mm drill bits that I don't have any left in the sets. I found 1mm, 1.1mm and 0.8mm bits on eBay in sets of 10 for $4.70 with free shipping. Since I have broken so many and this seems to be about the only sizes that I'm using it makes sense to start buying packs of 10. 

 

[rjfk2002]

Haha you caught me doing some double checking there Wayne. I wanted to see if the autograph and scale hardware bolts were interchangeable - they are. I now have some spares if the carpet monster claims some bolts. 

 

The cookie sheet is a great idea. I also doubt I will use the watchmaker screws. They are just so small and frankly not noticeable once the engine is built up 

[Schwarz-Brot]

For placing these tiny screws there's a very simple trick:

Get a small strip of paper, pin a little hole into it and put the screw in there. Use this paper flap to position and hold the screw while turning it in. Right before the head is down to the surface rip the paper off. Fasten the screw.

 

This simple trick avoids the hassle of holding the screw with your fingers. No more frustration

Edited April 13, 2017 by Schwarz-Brot

[larchiefeng]

A quick update to finish yesterday's post showing the cuts in the vents.

 

 

From the bottom you can see how narrow the cuts from the cutting wheel really are. I need to take some measurements and take a little more off the top vents so I can get a file inside them and continue to clean and shape them by hand. It's just a little too easy for the Dremel to get a way from you so, in the interest of caution I'll just do it by hand. The side vents don't really need to be opened up much more as the slits are about all the body work suggests. If I opened them up to get a file inside I think that they would be too big. I also need to remove all the casting marks on all the pieces such as the X15 shown in the picture.

 

[larchiefeng]

I finally finished both rotor assemblies; they still need some cleaning up on the edges and surfaces but, all the parts are assembled now. Each rotor has 34 pieces and they were glued, soldered and pinned together so, there's quite a bit of work to get them together. The 1mm brass bolts were added in place of the 1mm steel screws with the 1 mm brass ferrules under them. Now there's still the rear rotors to assemble and the heck of it is, none of this will really show once the wheels and tires are on. 

 

 

I also managed to get all the top vents on the rear body opened up enough for the file to get inside. So, I can clean up the edges and even them up by hand but, that's all I did.

 

[rjfk2002]

That is a helpful tip Schwarz-Brot!

 

Looks good Wayne. The bolts are much better than the screws. They really look real...  

 

I continued to monkey around with the micro hardware this evening. There are some nuts that need to be embedded to eventually hold the muffler I believe. I used Mr. C's technique from his rolls build - thread a bolt through the nut and use a soldering iron to melt the nut into the plastic. It worked like a charm. 

[cookiezoom]

23 hours ago, Schwarz-Brot said:

For placing these tiny screws there's a very simple trick:

Get a small strip of paper, pin a little hole into it and put the screw in there. Use this paper flap to position and hold the screw while turning it in. Right before the head is down to the surface rip the paper off. Fasten the screw.

 

This simple trick avoids the hassle of holding the screw with your fingers. No more frustration

Great idea 👍🏻

[cookiezoom]

What's a cookie sheet? 

[larchiefeng]

It's a flat baking pan with raised sides about 16" long x 12" wide and raised sides about an inch high. The sides are low enough that you can work over them but if you drop a small bit and it starts bouncing and rolling the edges keep it contained inside the pan. If you want you can also tape the pan down to keep it in place. It sure beats hunting for 1mm bits in the carpet.

[cookiezoom]

1 hour ago, larchiefeng said:

It's a flat baking pan with raised sides about 16" long x 12" wide and raised sides about an inch high.

Oh a baking tray. I thought it was something else from the modelling world I needed to invest in. Lol

[Pascal]

Nice job on the cooling vents. Here's some reference pics :

 

 

 

 

As you can see the openings are quite big.

[larchiefeng]

Yep, Tammy it's a baking tray but, since the only thing that I ever used one for was baking cookies; I call it a cookie sheet. 

Thanks Pascal, they are indeed larger than I anticipated. I see that there is still a pretty good section towards the rear of the vents that slope downward and the forward portion is where it appears to be open and the metal is thinner there. I only opened them up enough to get the flat file inside but, now I see that I can work the forward edge and open them up starting there and then work to the rear. I'm going to have to look at the side vents closer and see what I can do there. 

I figured that it was better to go slow and only take out a little to start; it's easy to remove material but, not so easy to put it back.

[larchiefeng]

I'm working on couple of different areas today. First, I painted the front frame section with etching primer for the brass and steel PE.

 

 

First coat of semi gloss black

 

 

I cut the spindles down for the rotors to fit on now. I just need to add the bolts in the lower control arms and finish the springs and shocks and then I can hang them on the frame. There's still some steering rack modifications to do and the front stabilizer bar gets some upgrades as well but, this stuff is minor compared to the previous stuff.

 

 

There's lots of sink marks on the calipers so, I'm going to have to Bondo those in and replace the molded bolts with these Scale Hardware bolts instead of the provided watch screws. The edge on the top caliper gets a Brembo PE script for each caliper. So, for the calipers, I need to fill in the sink marks, cut off and drill out the molded bolts, replace with 1 mm brass bolts, paint them and apply the scripts before installing them.

 

 

In the meantime, I spent a few hours out in the garage with the Dremel cutting, grinding and trying to shape the vent openings. This is turning out to be a lot more work than I anticipated. I'm going slow and every bit that I'm using is clogging up with metal and I keep having to change tool ends in the Dremel. I'm going to have to figure out how to clean off the diamond bit heads and use a grinding stone to clean off the ends of the grinding wheels. I sure wish that this body was made out of plastic! I would have been done with this weeks ago.I have new respect for my friend Pascal and his cutting and grinding on the Barchetta.

These aren't very good pictures as I wa trying to show how much the vents are opened for now. There's still more to go and cleaning to be done around the openings.

 

 

As you can see the box I have it on contains all of the PE for the transkit. The PE is so fiddly and everything grabs onto one another I felt that, I needed a separate box with sheets of paper in between each sheet of PE to keep them from catching on one another and messing the sheets up.

I also painted primer on four body pieces today but, I didn't have my camera with me at the time to take pictures but, I will tomorrow. I have both doors and the lower rocker panels primed and they look perfectly smooth and ready for the color coat. When I mix up the Bondo for the calipers I'm also going use some on a couple of body pieces before I prime them. I found quite a few bad spots or mold lines and ejector pin marks on the pieces that need to be corrected prior to priming and paint. More importantly on the inner panels of the lower rear panel all of the ejector pin marks and casting numbers need to be ground off and Bondo used where necessary because the carbon fiber decals need as smooth of a surface as possible so they will lay down. Lots of prep on the body to get a good paint job on the outside and decaling on the inside.

More tomorrow, Go Lewis!

[Pascal]

Nice progress. You kept the diagonal square plastic tubes that run left and right of the radiator.

 

You might want to cut the plastic tubes off and replace them with round tubes. The tubes on the European F40 (for which the transkit is made) are different then the US F40 :

 

[silver911]

Good stuff Wayne....lots of hard graft to get there...but worth it

 

Tip for keeping drills etc. clean.....and avoid clogging....use PTFE spray...helps prevent heat as well....so far less build up of melted waste....which is what is the root cause of clogging/binding

 

Ron

[larchiefeng]

Pascal, I had to look more closely at the frame and the drawing to see what you are talking about. I assume that, you are referring to the tube outlined in blue being replaced. It also got me to looking at the section outlined in red where the radiator slots into the frame. Because of the restriction of having to mount the new PE brackets that, hold the radiator where I have them currently on the plastic tubes circled in blue it means that the radiator might not slot into those molded in frame brackets.

 

 

Once I get the rest of the control arms and brakes finished and some of the body work sanded and primed, I think that, I will skip ahead and build the PE radiator. That way, I can make sure the angles will be correct to mount it inside the lower frame brackets and the upper brackets on the diagonal braces. If I cut out the diagonal plastic brackets and replace them with scratch built brass tubes then, maybe I can mount the radiator more forward and get it to mount in the frame brackets in red. At this point, I'll make the decision on whether or not to replace the diagonals.

 

Ron, thanks for the tip. I'll try using some WD40 and see what happens.

[silver911]

30 minutes ago, larchiefeng said:

Ron, thanks for the tip. I'll try using some WD40 and see what happens.

 

Not the standard WD40 mate....that stuff will kill bits....it dissipates instantly with heat....the 'WD' stands for water displacer....in no way is it a lubricant!

This is the one (or similar) you want.....http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WD-40-Specialist-Anti-Friction-Dry-PTFE-Lubricant-400ml-Spray-/121873576479?var=&hash=item1c603b321f:m:mv79zQR3IAiq7cU81zDV_0w

As said...you need a 'PTFE' spray lubricant.

 

Ron

Edited April 16, 2017 by silver911
Missing text

[larchiefeng]

Got it, I was looking at the same can but, I didn't look further. I might have another brand but, I'll have to look. Thanks