1/12 Suzuki GS400E

[Alan R]

Hi All,

Yet another shelf sitter that has been resurrected...

I have had this for more than 30 years, I'm sure.

I happened to be in our local Antics store, and saw the self-same kit in a new boxing, but definitely the same kit...

Anyway, here we are so far...

Box top:

Not a bad looking bike for it's day.

The engine:

 

This was all satin-chromed by Aoshima and looked a bit 'toy-like'. So, I stripped it using caustic soda, primed it with my home-brew grey primer before painting it with Tamiya XF16.

It didn't come out too bad, looks a lot more like aluminium now.

There is a little breather pipe on the back of the engine, at least that's what I think it is. However, it had gone AWOL. so I had to fabricate a replacement with 3/32^nd evergreen styrene tube with a 3/64^th rod glued into the end to locate it into the cylinder block. After a bit of aluminium, it looked the part.

 

It looks a bit flat at the moment, but I'll give a bit of a wash to bring out the details. Probably a mix of black and brown enamels, just to pop out the detail...

 

This where we are at the present. The cylinder head and spark-plugs have been added, and then a bespoke ignition lead for each plug.

There was nothing in the instructions about these, so I fabricated and CA'd them to the pins on the plugs.

 

More soon.

 

Thanks for looking, Alan.

[D1fuN0]

Man Alan.....

Second bike I owned was a red GS400E...

Brought a big smile to my face, looks good so far 

 

Mad Steve

[Alan R]

Hi Steve,

I very nearly bought a Suzuki GSX400F around that time, but ended up getting the GSX550 Katana instead. Lovely bike to look at, handled reasonably. In some ways I regret getting rid of it. However the Honda VFR750 F that I replaced it with was something else! Fabulous machine! I would love one of those again... 😀

 

All the best, Alan.

[Alan R]

Hi All,

 

Some progress was made on this.

I have assembled the frame and various ancillaries and primed them, including the tank. I decided to paint the bike Mica Red.

I needed to re-prime the tank as the paint wasn't great. However, when I was ready to re-apply the red, I saw this:

There's a huge chunk missing! The tank was short-shot.

This was a bit of a bummer. Not impossible to fix though.

I cemented a strip of 10-thou plastic card behind the gap, and trimmed it to shape thus:

 

I cracked out the milliput and filled the cavity (bit like dentistry without the bad breath!):

 

It's not quite finished here, but I smoothed it further and re-primed. It doesn't look too bad at all.

 

I just need to respray the red over it.

 

Thanks for looking.

 

Cheers,

Alan.