250LM moving on

I have made some good progress with the 250LM. The inside of the body is painted black; the cockpit shell has been painted with Alclad Steel (maybe should have been aluminium on checking some images on the web so the instructions were probably wrong!); the chrome parts have been stripped and repainted with Alclad chrome; the exhausts have been painted with Steel Alclad. The cockpit is complete (well - some trouble with decals) and the wheels have been fitted.

The problem with the decals came about because I tried out the decal for the instrument panel - guess what - they broke up into 6 pieces. I tried this bit because I wanted to know how the decals would go under pressure. It seems that the answer is not very far. The only problem that I see with the decals will be the Ferrari badges. Apart from that I can probably get by with making my own. However, I will try coating the decals in Klear once I have scanned the sheet. That might keep them together.

Still, this is where we are.

I did have thoughts about putting Eduard etched seat belts in, as I have a set of blue belts in stock. However, I found from the GT40 that once the body is in, you can't really see them so the struggle to make them outweighs the result. I laid a strip of masking tape down on my nice little custom built mirror (my ex-SBX customer Martin at Crown Glass made me a nice little piece of mirror with ground edges for just such jobs as these). Here you can see the mirror with the remains of the tape attached.

I painted the tape dark blue. I then cut it into 2mm strips. Having fitted the tape, I highlighted the metal parts with some Vallejo aluminium. This will look good through the windows.