You would think it was easy - buy a kit, make it, paint it, ship it to the USA. What could be hard about that. Well!!!!!!!
I bought the kit and then did my usual with the chrome parts - soak them in Mr. Muscle to get rid of the shiny stuff. Wash them all off and respray them with varying shades of Alclad metal finish.
I then put the chassis, engine and interior together in ample time to ship for December 25th, even allowing for Xmas postal delays.
Then I started on the body. Now remember that car bodies are flawless. If they aren't you give the car back, so making a 1/25th car is not easy when it come to the finishing. Matt paint and matt varnish cover up a multitude of sins that will glare at you in shiny, polished white.
The body went together very well and then I put the windows it. Whoops - made a mess of that. The lear had blotched and I had forgotten the black surrounds that modern cars have on all their windows. In trying to clean up the Klear and paint the black, I have some unusable windows.
Solution - buy ANOTHER kit!
Now I only need to worry about the body, so again everything goes well. Oh, I had better tell you how I do the bodies. Vallejo do a brilliant set of primers. I use the white and the black. These primers have polyurethane in them so they stick like the proverbial to a shovel. In fact for matt black I only use the black primer as it finishes off wonderfully and no further treatment is needed. For the white body, I sprayed 3 coats of the primer and then two coats of Tamiya Gloss White. After that come two hand applied coats of Klear (well actually Pledge Multi Surface Polish - but we have discussed this interminably so I will stick to 'klear' as it is less typing). I hand apply because I find that spraying Klear gives too thin a coat and the gloss takes many sprayed coats to become really glossy. Klear being self levelling, there is no fear of brush marks so long as you apply it it quite wet.
I then applied the decals and applied another coat of Klear to seal them on.
Lastly, I had to paint and fit the windows. I DID IT AGAIN!!!! So, now I have a second body with rubbish windows!
Solution - buy ANOTHER kit!
By now, my supplier is out of stock so I wait until he has some more and off I go again. I paint the body and this time take extreme care over the windows and they end up fine - at last, I might even finish this model. I get to applying the decals to find that I don't have the decal strip to go over the spoiler at the back. I try and analyse what I have done but I can't see how it happened.
I tried to match the colour by painting the steps but I couldn't get the match right.
On thinking about this I did think of buying anther kit but!!!
I sent an e-mail to Revell Germany telling them of the sorry story and asking for their help. They contacted Revell UK who said that they would send me a new set of decals. What a nice company Revell are because they knew it was my fault. I then got a letter from Revell UK saying that the decals had to come from Germany so may take up to 4 weeks. Xmas will be long gone by then!
A couple of weeks after Christmas an envelope arrives and contains a new set of decals. With much trepidation (and a couple of weeks thinking about it), I finally stripped down the rear spoiler (remember I had tried to paint it) and re-painted it white - re- Kleared it - and applied the decal.
I then mounted the spoiler and had a finished Mustang!
A piece of foam board painted like a bit of road and everything was ready to go. Adding in a CD of Andre Reiu (if you don't know him then you haven't heard a great Strauss Waltz) for Dan's wife, Muriel and the lot went in the post of Wednesday 15th Feb. Amazingly, Dan received the package on Saturday 18th. I will never moan about the Royal Mail again - well......
Onwards to the third and final episode!
No comments:
Post a Comment