Thursday, February 05, 2015

Shelby Cobra 427 Finished - Finally!

Well, I got my money's worth on this one.

The body was stripped four times. The first time because the decals didn't work. The second was because the bonnet got spattered with paint when the bottle exploded. The third time was when I realised that the stripes were looking really bad. The last time was when I half finished it in metallic blue and ran out of paint!

I finally decided to finish the car in a sold blue and forget about the metallic paint. This was because I started to respray the body in overall metallic blue and then found out, half way, that I hadn't decanted enough to finish the job. In the end, it got painted all over with US Navy Gloss Sea Blue.

I was applying the white circles - I still had three left from the Fujimi kit itself - when one of them broke up and wouldn't go back together in any decent way. So, the car only has two white circles on it at the moment. In the image below, I have used the good side! Hopefully, in all the cars I have to do I will find another circle so that I can finish the other side off. The number 3 was done the way I described before. I propped the car up on its side (the only 3 that I had left for style was on the car) on the scanner bed. Imported the scan into Adobe Illustrator and made a good copy. I then printed out 6 of these onto white ink jet decal paper. A quick coat of matt varnish and there they were. They don't look too bad unless you get up close when you can see the white decal paper background. It is a little bit denser than the the Fujimi decal. I am not really up to cutting out a perfect circle so this will have to do.

In any case, here we are - a Finished Shelby Cobra 527!

Sunday, February 01, 2015

Fujimi Cobra - and so it goes!

The day dawned bright , clear and cold. I had thought, overnight, what I was going to do to the Cobra body as I wasn't very happy with the depth of paint that had built up on the bonnet of the car. I decided to clean it all off and to repaint it. This meant that I could mask it up correctly. Previously, becuase I was going to use the decals, I was able to paint the body in blue and rely on the decals for the white stripes. Without the decals, it would be best to paint the body white at first and then mask out the stripes whilst I painted the blue but, because I had the blue laid down already, I had to mask off the blue which meant masking out a 1mm strip down the middle of the car. Not easy!

This time, I could paint the car white first - not all the car of course, because all of the other decals were already on, so just the bonnet area. However, firstly, I had to get all of the old paint off first. After a while with degrees of sanding sticks and some IPA, I was able to get it clear and clean.


I then gave all of the affected area a coat of white.


With it all looking hunky-dory, I then masked out the stripes and painted the final blue top coat. However, I had a disaster when taking the masking tape off. I had previously coated the car with Klear to protect the decals. Ha! Half of the number 3 on the right hand side of the car peeled off with the tape. Fortunately, I had three white circles from the Fujimi decals so this wasn't to big a disaster. I managed to remove the rest of the decal fairly easily and, as I had to make one 3 up anyway, making two wasn't going to be an issue. It was when I took off the masking tape that I decided that I could build something else for a while and let this one get out of my hair. Have a look.



The blue hadn't taken properly in the middle of the two white stripes so I tried (!!!!) to hand paint it in. What a mess. My wife's comment was "Put it away for a while and make something else!"

Oh well, that makes two unfinished cars in the cupboard. I think what I will do, when the time comes, is to buy another kit and redo the body from scratch. I still won't have the number 3 but...