MFH Lancia/Ferrari D50 in 1/12th scale

[nick]

So I did a bad thing and treated myself to one of these puppies.

 

 

It was there, I bid on it and with low expectations, and against all odds, picked it up for a reasonable (but still high!) price.

 

Of course, its a nice kit.

 

Nice.

 

Nice can be improved upon.

 

The Real car is a thing of beauty, Brutal 1950s front engined magnificence although with a very sad story behind it.

 

Lancia built it and hired Ascari to drive it about the same time. He was driving for Ferrari before this and Lancia let him complete some commitments with them, so doing, he tragically ended up getting killing at Monza testing a Ferrari 750. 3 days after his funeral, Lancia withdrew from Racing and handed everything (including this car) over to Enzo Ferrari.

 

 

So off we go. I'm armed with a new 3D scanner now which probably doesn't help my super-detailing illness as it's a lot quicker to pull in model parts to use as a base rather than starting from scratch.

 

 

So the growing list of enhancements is currently:-

 

Full engine, mainly to sharpen up the detail and have separate fixings rather than the moulded-in bolts. I personally think this makes the biggest difference.

All the top end, cam covers, carbs, fuel lines, linkages, electrics again separate fixings where physically possible. 

Gearbox

I'm agonising over the wheels, the MFH ones are beautiful polished stainless rims, but they aren't the right shape and are painted anyway, so crime that it is, I will probably make my own including knock offs which lack detail in the kit.

 

The chassis has cast-in side panels, which are pitted as well as over thick, so I will be cutting these out and replacing with CNC ali panels.

 

Right, I've got some CAD to do now. Stand by.

 

Nick

[Vesa Jussila]

Nice purchase and I can believe it's lovely kit and you will bring it to next level.

[Mumbly]

What scanner did you get?

[nick]

3 hours ago, Mumbly said:

What scanner did you get?

Creality Otter

[nick]

I've mostly been filing, grinding, scraping, polishing and soldering this week. I had forgotten how much prep is involved with these MFH models.

 

 

Ive got a fair bit done with most of the main chassis assembled and aligned to the floorpan now

 

You can see the crazy engine alignment very clearly here too.

 

 

I built a wheel for fun and they are beautiful. I think I can improve the accuracy of them though even though they won't be as nice. It doesn't matter as they are painted anyway.

 

 

 

Here is the real wheel for comparison:-

 

There are subtle differences, the hemi-speheres on the front row of spokes notably omitted from the MFH wheel and I think the MFH rim profile may be slightly too angular.

 

So from my long to-do list I have removed the cast-in panels from the chassis and will CNC cut new ali ones as soon as I figure out how they are  attatched to the real car. This doesn't sound much, but involved a lot of careful grinding and still isn't quite finished as you can see.

 

 

Its the scruffy-looking bit in this shot, I didn't shoot a 'before' but its the red shaded areas here

 

 

So in summary, it's taking shape but is rough as hell at the moment.

 

The CAD on the engine is well underway, but I'm really struggling for reference images for the bottom end of the engine if anyone has anything!

 

Thanks for looking

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

[nick]

Cracking on with this now, getting the hang of low temp soldering finally. 

 

as an added bonus everything seems to fit as well. There is an error in the castings on the front suspension towers but it’s easily rectified. There is so much cleanup and fettling with this kit, but I’m getting into the swing of it now and starting to appreciate it. It helps having the right tools, I bought a tumbler/polisher a while back and I just got some great little carbon fibre shapes for making super fine sanding boards, they work a treat for this job.

 

 

[nick]

Well a day slaving over a hot CAD machine later, I've got the basics of the engine layout done now. I think MFH pretty much made this up by the looks of it.

 

 

MFH have a strange asymmetry in the cam boxes, that I'm pretty certain isn't correct, this is looking at the front face of a head and you can see the head studs are at different heights each side. 
 

 

This is the drawing I’ve been mostly working from and they look symmetrical to me, as do all the photos I can find. 

 

the studs all look the same length in this shot too, so I don’t know what MFH were doing here, anyway I’ve drawn them at the same height.

 

 

The MFH sump is entirely made up and a bit lazy IMHO its just a plain extrusion of fins front to back.

 

 

you can see in my only other drawing that there is stuff going on at the front and rear that just hadn’t been attempted. 

 

Anyway, the basic geometry is complete now and the fun part is next hanging all the detail and ancillaries off it.

 

in fairness to MFH, although the engine is a 90° vee, the pent on the cam covers is 100° and they picked that up.
 

My main gripe is that the resin engine block is a good 2 or 3mm shorter than the cast cam covers. There’s no good way to correct this really other than packing the firewall end out which isn't great. This was my main driver for drawing a complete engine even though I don’t have much more additional info to improve on it. 

 

 

[nick]

More work on the engine today, getting a bit tighter with the detail now...

 

 

 

Here's the target

 

[Tomasz Zamiara]

I admire your inquisitiveness. I made this model straight from the box. Good luck

 

 

IMAG4165 by Tomasz, on Flickr

 

[nick]

9 minutes ago, Tomasz Zamiara said:

I admire your inquisitiveness. I made this model straight from the box. Good luck

 

Thanks, and a beautiful job you made of it too. 
 

 

[SprueMan]

Nice work nick!

It's amazing that MFH kits can be improved upon. But they can be, I can see.

 

Hope for more

[nick]

As usual, I underestimated how tough it would be to get information for this engine. In the end, Revs in Florida dug out just enough clues to get the front end drawn, so many thanks to them.

 

 

Theres still a lot of guesswork in the oil pan, I assume there is a drain plug somewhere I don't have at least - maybe other stuff. Its still an improvement on the MFH thing anyway

 

 

So  not too much left to do on the engine now. I've roughed out the carbs, and they are fairly simple affairs so Gearbox next big job!

[nick]

Arty-farty render time

 

 

Nick

[nick]

Carbs cracked today

 

 

and the first test print isnt terrible either

 

 

In danger of actually making a model soon the way I'm going on.

 

Nick

[nick]

and the enevitable renders, one indoors, one outside

[albergman]

Fabulous render-porn!   Got to get into this.   

What a marvelous piece of design work Nick.  Sr Jano would be pleased.

[Noel Smith]

Really nice project Nick. I am sure that you will do it justice with all the improvements you are developing.

You'll be marketing MFH kit upgrades next ! 

 

Changing the subject momentarily.

I am just about to start the Italeri Bugatti T35.     Regarding the upgrades you have been developing.   Any bits available already?

 

[Pete in Lincs]

Exquisite is the direction you seem to be heading for. Please take care on the corners 😉

[nick]

First Prototype Print

 

It goes in the frame anyway! which is a bonus, the Bentley really didn't. I guess Airfix 50 years ago and MFH are at opposite ends of the food chain in fairness.

 

For a first print this is my best effort yet. I have some errors in proportions, but nothing catastrophic. It would have taken about 20 iterations to get this point when I started out.

 

 

Maybe I'm getting somewhere after all.

 

Thanks for looking and the support.

 

Nick

 

 

 

[CrazyCrank]

I can already smell the engine oil and petrol.👍

Absolutely gorgeous 😍

[nick]

Sorry for the delay. I didn't like that one after all.

 

As I was looking at fixing the proportions, I stumbled across quite a few errors and omissions with the MFH version. So much so, I decided to come away from it completely and re-draw the engine from scratch using all the data I have accumulated but fitting within the envelope of the MFH original. So here we are.

 

 

One omission is the fairly prominent webs from front to rear on the lower engine mounts.

 

 

Heres just about the only photo I can find showing it

 

 

I still need to correct the sump to match this shot.

 

The inlet flanges were orientated the wrong way around on the MFH engine, which was throwing a lot of the geometry out it turns out.

 

 

They should be like this

 

It's not possible to have the water inlets where they need to be with the flanges this way around it turns out. You can also see in this shot that the MFH version is missing all the tubes that carry the head studs into the block as well.

 

Also the MFH Cam covers are almost symetrical and they really aren't in real life, so the overall front profile of the engine was fairly incorrect 

 

 

You can see just how assymetrical they should be in this head on view

 

 

Customary render shot

 

That turned out to be a big job then. Anyhoo. Onward and upward.

 

Thanks for tuning in.

[nick]

still plugging away, on version 3 of the engine print now and fine tuning the fit into the MFH Chassis.
Made a start on the gearbox too, which again seems oversimplified and out of shape compared to my limited references of the real thing.  I’m going to need to modify the firewall as the prop shaft and cover are just cast as one piece and don’t pass through the firewall. 

I think I finally figured out why I couldn’t make sense of the sump, there’s a big bite out of the tail end of it where the 12° engine offset kicks it out. I discovered this by finding an image of a die cast model believe it or not. Once the penny dropped, it was easier to make sense of the photos I have. 

 

MFH have missed this entirely too. 

[nick]

Heres the current state of progress with the updated engine.

I'm using a new Mars 5 Ultra printer, and it looks like I need to tune the antialiasing/layer heights. I think the CAD model is starting to look OK finally now anyway, or it will when I tweak the printer.

 

Please forgive the ugly cellphone photos -  I really, really hate Apples new macro algorithms, previous versions were far better.

 

 

[SprueMan]

That loooks goood!

That engine is so great I can almost hear it.

[nick]

1 hour ago, SprueMan said:

That engine is so great I can almost hear it.

Thanks @SprueMan I can certainly smell it, although that’s probably just the resin fumes getting to me  

 

Small setback while I shout at Autodesk - despite having auto backup set to 5 minutes in fusion 360 , I’ve somehow lost 2 days CAD work after a crash and a corrupted backup file that won’t load. Not for the first time either.
It was one of those finishing touches/gilding-the-lily moments, you know the ones, ‘ I’ll just make this one last little tweak, then it’s done’… and boom. Oh it’s OK, it will just reload from the recovery file, which happens fairly often in fairness. Only, No it won’t, not this time. 
 

oh Flip, I said. Or something like that anyway.

 

I have paid support for fusion so I then had a nice game of ‘have you done all this completely obvious stuff the cat would have thought of?’ Yes, ‘oh have you done all this other stuff freely available on the support forums’ yes, ‘oh do you have a previous version you can use?’ Only the one that’s missing 2 days work I told

you about at the start of the support call ‘well can’t you just use that then’ err it’s missing 2 days work? Etc, etc…

 

I guess this is the digital equivalent of carpet monster rearing it’s ugly head.