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3201 Heller (Bobcat) 1/24 Renault R5 Turbo Rally


Scargsy

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Hi so this is a recent rebox (number 80717) of their original kit released under their 'Bobcat' label number 3201 from 1983.

 

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It's a pretty simple kit (a whopping 39 pieces) which is what originally attracted me to it, given a lot of more modern kits I've been doing with far too many fiddly bits.

Even with the low parts count it has a rudimentary engine, opening doors, bonnet and rear hatch.

 

It comes in a fairly sturdy flip-top box, most of the parts in a single poly bag, with the clears in a separate one.

Here's the parts view...

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As I mentioned in the GB chat. it's part started (below the 25%) - some parts cut from the sprue and the 3 parts of the lower chassis / inner tub and dash glued together, also the 2 engine halves + fan belt attached together. Other than that the only thing I've done is remove a few bits from the sprues to dry fit and done some rather rough rudimentary initial painting on the engine parts and chassis.

 

The instruction booklet is pretty nice, clear, multi-colour and stapled.

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The decals look like they might be somewhat on the thick side but that might be as well if the white parts have to go over the yellow coloured paint.

In terms of the kit - so far I've noticed a few minor annoyances:

  1. I noticed the driver side B pillar seems a bit misshapen when I dry fitted the door, it seems may have got a bit squashed at some point rather than a mould issue, hopefully fixable but if not I'll just leave the door open.
  2. The pins to hold the various hinged parts and glass parts are a bit huge and out of scale, still probably better than having flimsy ones.
  3. There's not much rally specific detail (if any), they also do a road going version of the kit, and judging by the seats, etc. I imagine it's exactly the same kit with just some road decals. The seats are the part that annoy me the most - looking like sports ones and just roughly extruded from the inner tub part, annoying given the doors open!

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I've ordered some after-market bucket seats and may use them - if they seem in scale and I can fit them in, though cutting the originals out might involve a lot of swearing, if only I hadn't attached the tub already!

I may also try scratch building some fire-extinguishers for the co-driver's side.

 

I did find some reference material which although not the actual Tour de Corse (Corsia Rally) winning car from 1982 that the kit decals represent, was still driven by Jean Ragnotti the following year. Reference material here.

 

Ideally I'd like to do the car from the Monte Carlo Rally Ragnotti/Andrie won with in 1981, from the photos I've seen the markings are pretty similar but the seats were unusual in that the drivers was red and co-drivers was blue (I'm guessing the works team just grabbed whatever they had in the parts bin). Maybe I'll just use these decals and do the funky seats colours if I get the aftermarket ones in.

 

 

 

 

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Ah, the 5 Turbo, cool! The road version was pretty hot in the eighties, I remember my math teacher had one. He was a young clean shaven guy, he rather stood out between the rest of the math teachers because of that 🙂 

 

Best of luck with thise one. I recently built a rebox of one of the bobkit kits, a Volvo F12. I ended up throwing away most of the parts and scratching them! One of the few kit parts I used was the cab which looked pretty good. Judging by the look of the "body parts", your "5" should come out just fine.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 06/10/2020 at 05:03, Bengalensis said:

Good to see a works R5T being built here!

 

If you want to build the -81 Monte Carlo winner I have extra Tamiya decal sheets laying around.

Thanks for the offer but I think on reflection I'll just try with the supplied decals, not sure how good a fit the Tamiya stuff would be to the Heller kit.

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So I ordered some aftermarket seats, not sure they're period correct but looking at the FIA regulations it appears a 4 point harness was legal for rally in 1982.

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So I started the surgery - no going back now...

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After a lot of hacking I managed to completely remove the moulded seats - would have been a lot simpler if I hadn't already glued the lower chassis on!

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At this point I was a little worried about the structural integrity with it flexing a bit more, so I strengthened it up with some 1mm plasticard sheet cut to fit the recessed lower chassis, first down the lower groove..

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then ontop of that to create a flatter floorpan. I needed to slice this in half first to fit it in through the access hole.

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I then used some plasticard to build the firewall and fill in the gaps.

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I then used some filler and added a bit of cocktail stick to simulate a bit of roll-cage (and hide my bad joins/sanding at the top).

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Given how badly I managed to smooth it down - it might have been better to cut a nice flat sheet of plasticard to fit fully across the back.

I'm planning on adding some texturing, so hopefully it won't stand out too much - it will be behind the seats anyhow.

After a bit of priming, here's how it looks (the roll-cage and engine cover are just dry fitted for now)

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I also primed up the seats,

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as well as the body - though I had a bit of an accident with the main shell - it fell off the paint stand onto my dirty garage floor and got a load of bits stuck in the roof but it managed to wipe most of it off with some thinners. The roof is actually pretty scratched up though from my rough sanding so I'm going to need to do another coat of primer.

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Did some dry fitting of the body shell pieces, as mentioned before the drivers door seems to be a bad fit - it seems like the window frame is warped inwards somewhat.

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The rear hatch also isn't a great fit, though at least the bonnet and passenger door fit fairly well, other than some large panel gaps - makes a change from panel lining kits I guess!

Next thing is to try out this Zero Paints textured paint and another coat of primer over the shell.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A little update:

So I tried the Zero Paints Charcoal Texture paint on the seat fronts and carpeted areas, it's a lot finer texture than I was expecting though does a good approximation of say cloth/Alcantara at 1/24.

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It seemed to shrink in a bit on the engine cover, possibly I hadn't fully primed those areas or there were contaminants on the surface. I just brushed a bit of black primer for now on them.

The texture wasn't as much as I'd have liked so for the interior floor / bulkhead / cover I decided I'd do some further texturing. I got out a tinlet of grey enamel paint (since it's slow curing), brushed it on the areas then sprinkled some 'micro balloons' on - it's a filler material for glues, very fine glass bubbles/particles I think, try not to inhale or sneeze when using it!

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I also did a bit of painting on the engine (blue metallic cover) and installed it.

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I didn't overdo the engine detail as it's not exactly going to be visible once the model is finished, but there's quite a nice amount of detail for a kit of the age and low parts count.

I glued the engine cover in and then applied some acrylic black wash over the carpeted parts using Vallejo Mecha black wash, then whilst it was still slightly wet I dabbed off the excess using some kitchen roll. It was maybe a bit darker final colour than I'd like though the results were acceptable so I'm going to leave it alone.

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The wash definitely helped bring out the texturing and hopefully will help seal the micro-balloons in.

The dash did contain a small amount of raised detail for the dials but it was tricky since I'd glued it in to get them, I did use the end of a trimmed cocktail stick to attempt to stamp in the two larger dials (though one is a bit off). In reality the instrument cluster is a dark grey and the dials black with orange markings but I wasn't in the mood to attempt any of that!

I started scratch building some seatbelts - these are actually for another kit I'm building but there's hopefully enough spares (and spare PE buckles) for this kit too - I took some kitchen foil and applied strips of masking tape on both sides. Then sliced them to get approx 2mm strips before priming and applying red paint, they will need a second coat of paint.

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I've tried using ribbon and even thin plastic before as seatbelts but for me the foil method works better and the final result is posable, keeping its shape better and is super cheap.

 

Back to the body work and unfortunately the wing mirrors are particularly nasty, with sink marks on both sides - of late I've seen this as a common theme on car kits, coming with sink marks in them (why???) The photos don't show it up well.

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I gave the body a second coat of light grey primer...

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Attempted to do some minor fixes on some seam lines I'd missed (not a great repair)

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The roof still had some visible scratch marks from the sanding (hard to see in photos, so I gave the body a coat of white Alclad 2 primer, hopefully the white will be a better base for the yellow if it's somewhat transparent.

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After that I gave the primer a very light sand with some pretty worn out 1000 grit paper, over any small imperfections I could find.

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So I gave the roof and skirts a coat of white then masked off and applied some yellow.

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Unfortunately though on removing some of the masking tape it became apparent I've got some issues with the primer not binding to the plastic! Urgh I've never had this happen before, no idea why - possibly because I didn't wash or key the surface, or maybe because my first primer coat was a bit on the light side so didn't bite, I've never had lacquer paint behave like this previously and the coats were left fairly long (24hrs+) between application.

Masking up the doors I saw huge flakes come up on the pretty low tack Tamiya masking tape...

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I sanded it back but actually in the end after this it was still coming up so I just pulled as much as I could off with tape.

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I continued the masking for the black and gave it a coat - my masking isn't the cleanest, there's some rather nasty bits and some other bits of paint peeled up, so I'm going to need to try and do some repairs - though I've kind of run out of masking tape at the minute!

Here's the current shell state - just dry fitting the doors, bonnet, boot and bumpers...

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I'm not sure if it's possible to brush paint lacquers to do the touchup, I might give it a go, the black sides at the rear I'm not too worried about as there are black decals that will go over the rear wings.

 

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I remember driving down the Finchley Road in London a few times in the mid  1980s in my Renault 5 TS behind one of these. It took me a while to work out it was rear engined!

 

Nice to see one - reminds me of old times 

 

Regards,

Adrian

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On 06/11/2020 at 13:29, JOCKNEY said:

This is where @Scargsy tells us he has an original R5 Turbo Rally in the garage, that he's modelling the build on !

 

Sorry about the paint drama, but loving the build.

 

Cheers Pat

Unfortunately not - just a rusting lawnmower and a small airbrush booth!

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I made a small bit of progress - the interior is now finished, seats in and scratch build belts.

 

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The belts are maybe a little uneven in width but hopefully it won't be too noticeable once the shell is on, I made them out of some foil coated both sides with masking tape before painting. Next time I think I'll use some thin (2mm) tape on one side, that should make it easier to cut the strips to the same size!

I used some spare PE bits I had laying around to tart it up a bit.

 

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Oh Man, what an excellent adventure! 

Just found this and had a read through. At one point I thought I could hear a chainsaw revving... 🤩

This is full-on modelling, Scargsy, and it's coming on great. 

 

I've had out of shape door /window pieces, and it's sometimes resolved by the addition of the inner clear plastic. Do you get a Heller style door inner that includes the window with this one? 

I need to go back and look at the parts. 

Excellent stuff so far 😎👍

 

 

Later.... Ah, I see....! 

Edited by rob Lyttle
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 19/11/2020 at 01:00, rob Lyttle said:

I've had out of shape door /window pieces, and it's sometimes resolved by the addition of the inner clear plastic. Do you get a Heller style door inner that includes the window with this one? 

There is an inner window piece but it's not on the doors (one for the rear hatch) but I'm hopefully the single piece for the front screen and rear sides might provide a bit of bracing where it forms an inner roof lining.

 

I touched up the paint by the wipers and other areas of the yellow using the lacquer paint and a brush, seemed to do quite a good job (only issue being a bit of step - I think I went on heavy with the previous coats), one of the nice things about lacquer is I guess that it's mostly thinners (if you see how little pigment is in it once you let it settle), this I guess means it will dry pretty smooth.

I masked off the side skirts and gave them a coat of white primer which again seemed to do a good repair job (a few steps in paint depth here and there but they are good candidates for some weathering). The doors also got a coat of white primer and a couple of coats of yellow.

 

On to the decals - and no sooner have I overcome one obstacle and along comes another.

The front (decal side) seemed to curl up excessively when wetted (I'm not sure if this is because the carrier film/decals are shrinking) but the decals ended up splitting/cracking - I managed to line up a few of the pieces but the strips down the bonnet shattered and the main door panels didn't conform well at the top - I let them sit to attach then went in with a bit of decal fixing solution to try and wet them but they were that brittle they snapped off.

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So with them screwed I've contacted Heller about some replacements - which seemed weird: French company, got automatic reply in German (maybe they're now owned by a German company) but I've not heard anything more so far. I've ordered some aftermarket ones from Renaissance Models - though they're designed for the Tamiya kit but hopefully they will be usable. I hope the door numbers will be similar sizes (I'm worried about the bright yellow showing through the white, so having double layers might be useful.

 

The bumper also has issues - I've snapped off one of the pins when dry fitting - but that shouldn't be too much of a problem and my brush painting for the lights is a bit rough, though I think I've hit on a useful technique I didn't know about before. The main paint is lacquer but touching up with acrylic - if you let it semi-dry (touch dry) then it's still possible to clean it off with some acrylic airbrush cleaner on a cotton bud (it's not harsh enough to hurt the lacquer paint coat). So I've bought some very small cotton buds and think I'll give this a try in future!

 

So here's a question or two for you guys: I might need to somehow remove the old decals but I've got no idea on the best method? I think I'll try something like some decal solvent to soften them and then masking tape to gently pull them off, is that a good idea or does anyone have any better suggestions?

Also for the remaining decals, is there anything I can do to strengthen them / stop them splitting when I wet them (slowly wet the backing paper from the back? Coat the decals with some clear coat?

 

 

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8 hours ago, Scargsy said:

Also for the remaining decals, is there anything I can do to strengthen them / stop them splitting when I wet them (slowly wet the backing paper from the back? Coat the decals with some clear coat?

 

Hi Scargsy. for re-inforcing decals I'd recommend Microscale 'Liquid Decal Film'  - it's brilliant!  It's intended to be brushed on, but I've also had success (after some practice), spraying it using cellulose thinners.  

Your R5 is looking super-sharp :thumbsup:

 

Cheers

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1 hour ago, CliffB said:

 

Hi Scargsy. for re-inforcing decals I'd recommend Microscale 'Liquid Decal Film'  - it's brilliant!  It's intended to be brushed on, but I've also had success (after some practice), spraying it using cellulose thinners. 

@Scargsy I can recommend the same product as Cliff, it has worked well for me too. Dries very smooth when brushed. You may need a few coats to build it up. For removing decals I often use masking tape as the first try, depends on how well they adhered. But with your previous paint adhering problems in kind I'd be very careful here.

 

You're doing good job beating this into submission.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sorry for the lack of update, not much happening in the build for a while.

 

I managed to get the decals off the doors without much damage to the paintwork. I used a bit of Microscale Decal Sol to soften them a bit before tearing them up with masking tape, all looking good...

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So on the replacement front, after putting in a request on the Heller website and not getting more than an automated response - to my surprise in the post I received some free replacements from Heller pretty quickly! They didn't even ask for postage and seems they came all the way from Germany.

I'm not sure if Heller are monitoring this group build or not but if they are - many thanks!

Also (same post) I received the Renaissance Models aftermarket decals I'd ordered, they're made for the Tamiya kit and some seem somewhat differently sized (I'm guessing due to differences in the base kits).

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I've also ordered and received some of the 'Liquid Decal Film' you guys suggested (thanks) - I'll give that a go on some of the spares from the original set first (I'm unsure how thick it dries).

I might use a mix of the decals - think I'll mainly try the Heller ones but the small round yellow sponsorship logo on the doors didn't show up too well against my door colour, so I'll use the aftermarket ones I think (with at least a black outline). I might also try that white aftermarket bonnet stripe if it looks like a good fit for the part. Also I might chop out those Sabelt decals from the belt decals and stick them on my belts. Also the aftermarket kit has a little trip computer/radio decal that I may use if it fits.

 

 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Scargsy said:

I've also ordered and received some of the 'Liquid Decal Film' you guys suggested (thanks) - I'll give that a go on some of the spares from the original set first (I'm unsure how thick it dries).

The first time I used it I was surprised at how thin a finish it dried to. I used a flat brush that just about fitted into the top of the container to apply it, and it went on fairly thickly, but dried to a lovely thin finish.

 

Nice work on the decal removal as well. 😀

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