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Pocher F40 with Autograph transkit upgrade challenge build


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Yeah, I get that but, I'm no where near close to these kinds of details yet. I still haven't done most of the mods needed to the inner wheels yet. I still need to remove the lug nuts, drill out the center hole, trim the width of the inner wheel to clear the calipers, etc. What you are seeing is just a mock up, to see if I like the direction I'm going in. The tires are the MMC replacements so they are much softer and easier to work with. In addition to the Autograph transkit, I have also purchased a set of MMC tires, a Tremonia PE interior upgrade set, the RC wheels shown, a quart of automotive single stage acrylic urethane with reducer, additional brass bolts from MMC and of course the used assembled Pocher F-40. So, this is more than just an Autograph transkit upgrade addition on my F-40 build. Rich's is a build of a new in the box Pocher plus the transkit so, they will be different animals when both get going full time.  

We need to encourage him to finish his big Pocher Volvo truck so, he can join me here and make it more interesting.

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Bloomin PB are sure ruining a lot of people's viewing enjoyment.

They must be one of the most hated hosting sites out there at the moment.

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Some very nice work going on here Wayne....especially like the wheels :)

 

You and I have discussed the viability of using RC parts....a good source for a lot of different parts in the Pocher arena....even if only used as a 'pattern' for mods ;)

 

Have to agree with Mr C regards those tyre treads!

 

What plans do you have regarding weathering?

 

Respect

 

Ron

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To be honest with you, I haven't given weathering much thought yet. Right now, it's about all that I can do to carve out enough time and energy to just work on it. I will say this though, weathering is my absolute weakest part of my modeling skill set. So, before I even attempt any form of weathering, I would have to do quite a bit of practice. And, even then I'm not sure; just being honest here. I suppose that this subject is a conversation we will probably be having in the future! Lol:D

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1 hour ago, larchiefeng said:

 So, before I even attempt any form of weathering, I would have to do quite a bit of practice. And, even then I'm not sure; just being honest here. I suppose that this subject is a conversation we will probably be having in the future! Lol:D

To be clear Wayne, I'm not advocating a mud-spattered, drippy mess! Simply a track car appearance of many heat cycles and track and rubber films. For sure you are many steps away from those concerns so not preaching you to concentrate on them now. If you feel it's a weak point for you (I don't - I know you're a skilled learner) why not confer with our resident 'patina master' UK Ron?  His track experience and finishing mastery creates 'reality' before our eyes. :Tasty:

 

Glad we'll be having any conversation about this ambitious and complex project in future - means you'll be hard at work for us for months!  -and so will Rich! :P

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Major, that, was my thought as well but, like you said, I like the idea of being able to see the detail. 

Mr. C and Ron, I'm sure we will have more than one conversation about weathering down the road.

KP and Roy, yeah the PB thing will have an impact on the first part of thread if I don't go back and edit all of the pictures and replace them with images from Postimage. I still have a while left on my subscription so, no immediate danger of losing the photos. The Mercedes just has too many to go back and edit and since it's over I doubt anyone really cares any longer. The TR is fairly short and is still an active build but, just barely so, I might edit those just so when I get back to it they're still there.

Anyway, here's the engine disassembly and some preliminary work on the drilling the holes for the new hardware. As I have stated before, this was a built model when I bought to use as the donor car for the upgrade. So, everything has to be taken apart and cleaned. This is what I have to start with and some of the parts were actually glued on so, disassembly was tricky on a few parts.

 

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Here you see a section of the plenum circled in red. This is a part that I wound up breaking and the only reason that I took it off is because there is a PE part that goes between the the two sections. In retrospect, I should have probably left it alone, oh well.

 

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Everything spread out and ready to be drilled and cleaned up for paint and reassembly. The intake tubes circled in green are being replaced with resin parts so, I didn't worry too much about breaking them when taking the engine apart.

 

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The beginning of drilling the holes for the replacement hardware. I decided to drill through the top of the molded on bolt heads and if they got started wrong I could always cut them off and start over. Just my way of giving myself two chances of drilling a fairly straight hole in case of a major screw up.  Almost all of the molded on bolt heads still need to be cut off here in these pictures.

 

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Here's an example of some of the glue I had to get through to take this section apart

 

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After going back and forth on whether or not to use steel/nickel plated bolts or brass, I've decided that I like the brass better. This is my own personal preference but, I do believe that the original transkits actually had brass hardware in them. I know that the transkit for the Testarossa engine has all brass hardware and I rather liked it so that's the reason.

 

Here are a couple of bags of 1 mm bolts from MMC that, I'm using. I need a total of five bags to do the engine and transmission.

 

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Just placing some bolts in the holes to test and see if the holes are big enough for the bolts.

 

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Well it's time to run up to the post office. I just got a message telling me that the rest of my bolts order has arrive so, now I can continue on.

 

 

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Yeah, they're kind of pain but, it's not really too bad. I have all of the holes drilled and the old molded on nuts removed. There's not anything too exciting with the drilled holes that, isn't already shown here. I have to sit down with the instruction book tomorrow and carefully go through what attaches the where on the engine and transmission before I permanently attach any of the bolts. I see various plates and brackets that attach and support things that hang on areas that a bolt will go through. As much as I would like to paint most of the engine and trans as a unit, I don't think that's going to be possible. There's too many additional details to be added to do it that way so, I'm going to just have to paint all the parts separately and take my time going through all the reference photos, DVD and printed instructions and try and figure out a sequence. Or, maybe I can just go back to the frame and wait for you to get back on the engine and copy you! Lol :rage:

 

Oh, I managed to remove the annoying PB ransom demand from my signature :party::penguin:

Edited by larchiefeng
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You are talking about drilling the holes, @larchiefeng. An old colleague, who was building the Aventador, was recommended to use a soldering iron and melt down the screws.

 

Do you (or other here) have any experience or comments about this recommendation?

 

8-)

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From personal experience....using a soldering iron is a recipe for disaster....yes it will 'melt' down the moulded nut...and also anything around it!...more so when dealing with old plastic such as Pocher.

 

The benefit of drilling them out is using the moulded part as a guide to get the correct position for the replacement bolt.

 

Ron

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Rich, work faster! 

Major, the old melt method for the bolts and screws are mainly used for stripped out plastic on old Pocher plastic. Melting the screw in rethreads the hole. It's not really a good idea for doing what I'm doing for a lot of reasons, among those are as Ron points out. 

I did have an update to post here but, I forgot to put the pictures into Postimage. I've been working on setting up a blog for hosting my pictures and using it for doing third party hosting. I've loaded the pictures there as well but, I am still working on it. I will post some pictures of the painted engine and transaxle tomorrow with what I have finished. I'm also starting the first pieces of the PE that mount on this section. I'm on steps 10-14 of the transkit right now.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've been in action, just not posting. I needed to get the long term photo hosting thing worked out before posting. No sense in posting work that will disappear. I've already seen at least one picture from Postimage disappear from the thread.

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After drilling out the bolt holes I went through about 5 different colors of aluminum trying to find the right color or a color of aluminum that, I can live with. The following are a number of pictures showing a few of the different shades of aluminum that I tried.

 

 

Polished aluminum

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Semi matte aluminum with chrome ribs

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Didn't like those ideas so, I stripped it all off and primed again

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Finally settled on buffing aluminum plate

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Going back a ways in this thread, Rich posted a picture of his engine and the intake. Pascal noted that the square cut out sections that were highlighted are not on the real engine so, I decided to fill them in with plastic card and Bondo. Here's a few pictures of the process and I'm not quite done yet but, I'm close.

 

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Almost done but, still needs some minor filling to be done

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Starting the paint on the body from the inside out

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That's it for now but, there's more to post and tomorrow I should have more body parts in paint

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Great to see action on several front here Wayne. Some things of note.

 

Be careful about laying painted surfaces on cloths, plastic films or that big foam block. Even paint dried several days can print through the texture of other surfaces. I'm sure you just placed it for the photo but it's worth remembering. Ask how I know...:mellow:

 

You may be on the way to doing this but on 1:1 Ferraris, the body color does not extend to the inside surfaces. The cars I have worked on including a Dino, 288 GTO, Mondial and 355 have a satin black inside skin. It's also tough to keep clean on them. Some with kevlar or carbon have the raw weave showing.

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Thanks Mr. C. The section of the  body that is touching the foam block is not painted black. I took advantage of the angle and continued spraying down and along the side to get to areas that might be more difficult when the body is turned over. 

The reason that I am painting the entire underside of the body the same color as the top side is to eliminate any areas that might show up when assembled or could be missed by other details. Black has a way of hiding things and making it look more like it's intended to be that way. But, the main reason why I spent so much time grinding out the raised part numbers and trying to get rid of the ejection pin marks is to create a smoother surface for all of the carbon fiber decals that go on to, almost all, of the inside of the body panels. So, what isn't covered by decals will be black or detailed later as needed. 

There's a lot of thinking and doing things way ahead of when they actually come into play on this transkit. The actual Pocher model could probably be assembled in a weekend if no painting or detailing were involved but, this is a whole different animal! Because I have other big projects going on with the house, I don't get to work on this for long stretches at a time and I have to go back and read everything that could possibly come into play with whatever section that I'm going to work on at the time I return to it. I spend a lot of time re-reading instructions and looking at both build pictures from others and pictures of the real car. It's very time consuming every time I come back to it to make sure that I don't overlook something.

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TBD, on the weathering. I just don't have your skills and eyes for realism Ron! What you have done on your Ducati is something that, I can only dream about. I suppose that I will probably try and do something but, I will practice on other stuff before I actually attempt on the engine and transaxle. 

Thinking about what would actually be on an F-40 in the way of stuff to weather; it would probably be somewhat minimal. These cars are pretty well cared for so there might be a small amount of grime and road or track dirt. Something that would be there after some weekend track time. As I said, my F-40 is going to be a bit of LM in the interior but mostly stock F-40 on the engine. Something of safety upgrades to be able to run on the track but, not so extreme as to be a true LM car. Weekend stuff and classic gentleman racing.

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Another quick update on the engine getting some preliminary work, primer and paint.

 

Gluing up the main engine sections prior to paint

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Primer the assembly

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Engine painted along with the other parts that were already painted

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Some more underside painting of the body panels. Most of this will be covered in carbon fiber decals except the under the bonnet which has a variety of parts and a center section of carbon fiber decal. A lot of the front and rear bonnet undersides will have some matte black along with the decals but, because some of the wheel wells wrap over with color, it's necessary to shoot the gloss black. The other colors will come later after the decal areas are masked off prior to applying them. The decals lay down better on a gloss finish so, that's another reason for painting the whole underside gloss black.

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I will be painting more parts later today but, I will wait a day or so before flipping them over and painting the right side up.

 

 

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A small update here today. I'm not very happy with the way the engine has cleaned up. This is the problem with buying a used/built model and during the disassembly of the engine I had a lot of issues with the amount of glue that was used for holding the parts together. Subsequently, there were some parts that got broken and others like the engine block that had a lot of glue splotches from sloppy work. I have spent a lot of time trying to clean up the glue and repair some of the broken parts but, it's not as good as I would like the platform for this amount of detail work that is to come. I have been looking for a new complete F-40 engine kit for some time on eBay and I haven't seen one for sale in over a month. I've seen various sprues for sale that have only portions of what I might need and not very inexpensive at that.

So, I've decided to get a Scale Details all metal engine for the car as a platform from which to use the transkit kit for all of the details over and above what is contained in the engine kit. I will probably go ahead and build up the other engine and possibly use it as a separate display piece or as a partially assembled engine inside the car with the hoses, wiring details showing as a real car would be with the engine being worked on. I could then have the detailed metal engine as the display piece next to the car. 

Anyway, whatever I decide, I will now have some more options to think about as the build progresses and more different things of interest to follow along with. This whole thing is getting more complicated and is kind of taking on a life of its own. 

Not much to post in the way of pictures today since it was just more of the same on the paint. I am just continuing to paint the under side of the car and waiting a couple of days for the paint to gas out and get to a point where I can do a little sanding to smooth out any dust particles and anything else that would show up under the decals. More later when there's something to show.

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