All looking suitably fiddly and grubby.
Excellent work!

The first bit of ‘tidying up’ was the oil line running from the oil expansion vessel on the firewall bulkhead around the left hand side of the vehicle to the radiator. This is shown in Photo 1 with the three arrows indicating the positions of three tiny drops of superglue gel securing the tubing to the chassis and firewall.
And then the first actual added cabling went to the battery. After much trawling through the reference photos using different angles of vision I finally figured out where one of the battery terminals led to. As you might remember, the kit provides a nicely detailed battery, which just sits in the engine bay, with nothing connected to it! The positive terminal is still a bit hit and miss as to where that goes, but the negative is connected to a thick rubber sheathed cable which passes up the right hand strut, runs behind the alternator and is then bolted to the firewall through the left hand strut bracket, effectively earthing the entire metal chassis. The first job was to create the earthing connection as shown in Photo 2. This is essentially a large spade connector with a darned great bolt running through it and was created from a scrap of thin tin sheet shaped with scissors including a short ‘tail’ which was glued up inside the rubber tube. A hole was then drilled through the flat blade to take a tiny screw from the spectacle repair set and another hole drilled into the moulded-on bracket on the firewall. The connector was then screwed down onto the bracket as seen in Photo 3.
At the other end of the black tubing we have the rubber covered battery terminal. This was made from two pieces of styrene rod, the larger diameter piece for the terminal and the smaller bit poly glued onto it at right angles to form a peg for the rubber tube to fit over. The underside of the large rod was drilled and countersunk to allow it to be super glued over the moulded battery terminal. Once the liquid poly had set overnight, the connector was painted matt black and glued to the battery, once that was set the end of the rubber tube was cut to length and pushed over the peg as seen in Photo 4. Many of the reference photos showed this cable to be fixed down with white cable ties and I had been pondering the best way to create white ties for some time. Whilst looking on ebay for possible white silicone tubing to copy the method I’d been using for black ties I found a supplier of ‘food grade’ white silicone rubber sheets in 1mm (0.8mm +/- 0.2mm) thickness. I sent off for one, the smallest being five inches square for only £2.20. As shown in Photo 5, I carefully sliced off a 1mm strip using a brand new razor sharp knife blade and this was super glued first onto the strut and then looped around the strut and the cable and pulled tight, super gluing it to itself and trimmed back once dry. It looked really good, but I later removed them when I discovered that the same company made a black sheet of the same rubber in 0.5mm thickness. This produced a perfect looking cable tie and was much easier to produce than cutting down the rubber tubing! They looked so good that I went back to the white rubber sheet and found that I could get a strip cut off at just 0.5mm in width, this produced a tie to the same dimensions as the black ones and looked more ‘in scale’. I’ve since discovered that the white sheeting is also available in 0.5mm thickness – but not in the UK – you have to order it from China (of course!)
The next part to be changed was the set of cables running from the instruments back through the black vinyl sheath to the engine. Three of them, inside the sheath were going to the ECU plug and since they are not required any more back at the engine end, I would be cutting them off short and in the process gaining some extra black tubing to be used elsewhere! As you will see a little later, the black sheath turns through a right angle when it reaches the engine bay. A vinyl tube won’t do that without kinking – but rubber will! So the next task was to replace the vinyl tube with a flexible rubber one of the same diameter as shown in Photo 7. At the time this photo was taken I was still intending to run the original cables down the tube, using them as the core for the branches of the wiring loom to be added on, but I came up with a better solution for that later. Some of the reference photos show this sheath to be fixed in place with fairly substantial metal brackets and towards the end of the kit instructions, some self-adhesive aluminium tape is provided to simulate these. I decided to plonk in some real ones as I went to keep the tube out of harm's way from the start. These were made from an off cut of the thin aluminium sheet I bought for the Sopwith Pup project (and talk of the devil, I’ve just found the cardboard envelope they came in – two A3 sheets of the stuff! That should last me!) Photos 8 to 12 illustrate the technique for making the brackets up. Firstly a strip of the required width is scored into the metal (NOT using that new blade ), then a pair of long flat nosed pliers is used to grip the scored strip and then twisted up and down a few times before the metal fatigue causes the strip to break cleanly off. The strip is then bent around a metal former the same diameter as the tubing to form the ring, I used one of the leather punch handles here though a simple wooden dowel would do it too. Depending on which part of the chassis the bracket was being attached to, various shapes of bracket were made up and holes for the spectacle screws drilled out. The first one was fitted to the side of the cockpit, Photo 13 shows the tiny screw fitted part way into the pre-drilled hole and Photo 14, the final fitting with the screw fully home (the bracket is the bottom right version in Photo 12.
In the following instalment, the rubber tube gets a bend down the far end and the complicated wiring loom starts to take shape.
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Amazing details!

The bottom wire connection for the oil valve is shown in Photo 27. This is a thin, single brown wire, which passes from a bolt connection back into the main rubber trunk. This was made from a single strand of 0.2mm wire primed grey and painted with a suitable Vallejo brown.
Now for those copper pipes! These are the pair which emerge from the rubber grommit hole in the firewall (added previously) and disappear under the ECU via a compression joint on each one. The actual thing is seen in Photo 28 – the two pipes, one brown and one white emerge from the grommit at a) and vanish under the ECU at b). Note also the thinner copper tubing at c), this is another addition coming right after. The two compression joints, one of stainless steel and the other of brass, are constructed from a combination of resin cast acorn nuts, a sanded down nut and bolt and a couple of plasticard discs over the copper plated aluminium wire, illustrated in Photo 29. Photo 30 shows the full procedure for making them up. First of all a 2mm leather punch is tapped into a scrap of thin (about 0.5mm or so) plasticard, leaving a stamped circle impressed into the plastic as at the top. This is then drilled out in the centre with a 1mm drill to allow the wire to pass through before taking the punch again, placing it back into the impression and giving a harder tap with the jeweller's hammer to punch out the disc which is seen up inside the head in the middle picture. Then, using a cocktail stick the disc is pushed further up inside the cutter, as the tube gets wider up the throat of the cutter, eventually the disc is popped out into the hollow from where it can be retrieved, given a light fine sanding to remove any burrs and finally, threaded onto the wire as at the bottom right. As I’m probably going to need a few more of these joints, I thought I’d better get some production going as shown in Photo 31! The connections were threaded on the copper wire and secured in place with thin super glue before the connectors and the short side of the wire were primed with Vallejo Grey Surface Primer as seen in Photo 32. Both pipes were then painted as seen in Photo 33, the top one is Vallejo Saddle Brown with Vallejo Chrome for the end nuts and Mig Satin Black for the central nut and washers. The bottom one is Mig Matt White, Vallejo Brass and the Mig black. Both were given a detail wash with the Humbrol Blue Grey Enamel wash and the bright copper wires dulled down with a thinned down Vallejo Copper. The pink block they are resting on is the silicone rubber mould for the acorn nuts I made up for the brake cylinders down the front earlier. The white and brown ends were then gently pushed into the rubber grommit in the firewall and the copper wires bent round to pass under the ECU before snipping the excess off. They are seen in position in Photo 34, in the process of having the white silicone rubber strips glued on to create their white cable ties.
Now for that thinner copper tube – Photo 35 shows it’s journey through the engine bay. From top to bottom, it first emerges from the very front of the engine block at the bottom of the firewall (one reference photo however shows it exiting the same main rubber trunk along the chassis side – but this way’s easier! ) It then passes underneath the twin copper pipes I just added in, in fact it passes underneath all the other cables and tubes before arriving (or exiting) at/from a nut joint on the big blue oil filter which, fortunately, is moulded on the kit one too! Equally fortunately, I hadn’t glued the oil filter down and was able to prise it up off the engine block and drill a little hole into that nut to take a 0.8mm copper plated aluminium wire which I’d already purchased to replace the brake lines at the rear later on. The wire was carefully threaded under all the other pipes and cables from the front of the engine to just past the oil filter. Then it was cut just a little longer than required, bent to reach the hole previously drilled before adding a drop of super glue gel on the end and inserting it into the nut. Because it was slightly overlong, the spring in the wire kept it snugly in the hole until the glue set. The final effect is shown in Photo 36.
In the next instalment, I find out where another of those oil tank expansion vessel output tubes snakes off to and get that one fitted in, only two more to go and I think I know where they end up now!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Many thanks for that Mark, the more you put in, the more you can find to put in on top of that too!

Whilst dredging through the slowly growing collection of reference photos, I suddenly found the destination of one of the oil expansion vessel pipes! As shown in Photos 1 to 4, the nozzle sticking out of the main expansion vessel seen in Photo 1 (and helpfully stained pink on this vehicle) runs down to the top of the engine block where it vanishes under the big oil filter, illustrated by the arrows. In Photo 2 it exits out from under the filter again and then runs under the ECU shelf. Photos 3 and 4 are from a different 312T4 hence the lack of the pink dye but still shows the same tube emerging from under the ECU where it is joined into the copper pipe pair modelled last time (not physically, but in the same cable tie bundle) from where it finally ends in a compression joint connector, set into the radiator pipe joint shown in Photo 4.
The first task therefore was to make up that connector. Photo 5 illustrates the connector and its component parts – pieces of hexagonal and rectangular styrene rod and a tiny length of micro copper tubing. The end of the hexagonal rod was first sanded down to chamfer the end before drilling out the centre to accept the yellow silicone tube already fixed on to the expansion vessel, this was helped by the fact that the styrene rod already has a tiny ‘pilot hole’ running all the way down the centre as part of the moulding process. You can just make out a depression in the side of the rectangular rod, this was the start of the 1mm hole for the copper tube which was drilled out before the end of the rod was sliced off and shaped (much easier than cutting the thing off and drilling it afterwards!) Once the copper tube was super-glued in place, the rectangular and hexagonal parts were poly glued together, welding them in place and left overnight to bond tightly.
In Photo 6 the radiator pipe joint was drilled out for the same 1mm copper tube (fortunately this part is plastic) and the connector test fitted. In the bottom half of the photo the connector has been primed and painted – Vallejo Metal Colour Gold at the end and Vallejo Bright Brass (toned down with the Humbrol Black enamel wash) for the compression joint. The connector was then super glued onto the radiator joint and the oil line from the expansion vessel trimmed to length and glued into the ‘brass’ connector. I would strongly advise however that the oil line should be trimmed to size and glued into the connector BEFORE the connector is glued into the radiator joint! That was so fiddly getting the flaming silicone tube to go into the connector hole – there’s no room to get the tweezers in there!
Finally in Photo 7, we have the finished article with the tubing securely connected to the joint. Only two more to do on the expansion vessel and I now know where they will be heading (but not for some time yet!)
The next item to follow is the rear aerodynamic wing. This was actually completed a couple of weeks ago apart from a little ‘extra’ detailing which may or may not have featured on the original Giles car but can be seen on the same vehicle in its restored ‘classic car’ condition. I was going to add the detail using my sheet of clear decal inkjet paper but for some reason it just wouldn’t work! I could print the design easily enough (well, actually not that easily but you’ll see that later), but once the decal was lacquered or varnished over, it just wouldn’t come off the carrier backing no matter how long I soaked it in Decalfix. Anyway, I sent off for a new sheet of clear decal but the same company had previously sent me an email advertising their new DIY dry rub down transfer paper (inkjet/laser) so I thought I might give that a go. I’ve just done a trial print onto a paint tin lid and it went pretty well indeed so I’m going to try it on the Ferrari by the next posting.
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

(By the way, does anybody know how to copy text in MS Word without the cursor racing to the end of the document as soon as it hits the bottom of the screen? Normally it doesn’t matter as I write up the next diary section after I’ve posted the last one but sometimes I get ahead of the text (as in this case when I’ve begun the next instalment on the rear wing) and the darned highlighting races off far beyond the part I wanted to copy!)

Thank you so much for that Roy! I'm certainly getting deeper into this than I expected!

Apologies to all, this is another of the ‘extra long’ write up instalments. It would have been shorter but it ended up with an entirely new DIY decaling procedure which I couldn’t explain with pictures – just a lot more words!
Before getting stuck into the rear aerodynamic wing, a quick nip back to the cable bundle running down the left hand side of the chassis. As shown in Photo 1, the last of the original black cables eventually joined the other three and was cut short with only about an inch and a half remaining to be tucked down inside the black silicone tube as seen here. This of course then freed up an even longer length of cable to be re-used as and when it was needed.
Things now got a little complicated, unlike most of the construction where I can show one pack’s worth of components and how they go into the model, the rear wing assembly takes up four of them. Fortunately, unlike much of the build the four packs are consecutive (I really dislike the way many partworks provide a piece only to tell you to ‘store it carefully’ and eventually get round to adding it on weeks later!) The Packs concerned here are 55, 56, 57 and 58 as illustrated in Photos 2 to 5. Pack 55 contains the actual wing, together with a tiny bracket. Pack 56 has the top ‘deflector’ bar along with the two side sections, Pack 57 has the four parts of the support and Pack 58, the parts for the high intensity rear warning light (the only light carried on the whole car). The first job was to re-paint the actual wing parts to match the front wing, which was one of the first parts to be made up. Unlike the front wing, the decals are already applied which posed a problem! I tried scanning the deflector bar with the Michelin logos on so that I could print off new decals if things went wrong. I managed to get a fairly good copy, the problem being the bar isn’t completely flat – it’s not only slightly curved in section but the logos are very slightly sloping too – not what you need when trying to scan and then crop the photo down! I later made up a design version on the Corel Print House but again, couldn’t get the exact font that Michelin had used. In the event, I needn’t have worried, I cut strips of green Frog Tape to mask the logos, airbrushed the wing and bar with black Vallejo primer followed with Vallejo Metal Colour Duraluminium. Apart from one tiny blemish the tape peeled off perfectly leaving a good logo in place as seen in Photo 6. The blemish was my own fault! In my haste to get the tape off I committed a silly beginner’s mistake – I carefully raised up one corner of the tape, gripped that with the tweezers and slowly pulled it off to reveal the decal underneath. Because the first one came off perfectly I repeated the technique on the second one – and tore a tiny piece of primer/top coat off beyond the last corner of the tape. What I should have done was to start at one corner, pull off to the middle and then start again at the opposite corner and pull it toward the middle again – thus avoiding the ‘pull’ on the paint at the end! Fifty years of modelling and we (I) can still make a ‘newbie’ mistake!
As far as the vertical supports for the wing were concerned, things were much easier! The reference photos show this structure to be composed of thick sheets of aluminium bolted together and the finish on the kit parts is spot on. No re-painting was needed here and the only embellishment was to use the Humbrol Blue Grey Enamel Wash to bring out the details in the bolts and a little along the thickness of the adjusting slots at the base as shown in Photo 7.
The two gold coloured components making up the base of the wing supports did require the usual conversion to the Vallejo Metal Colour Gold after the Black Primer coat. Photo 8 shows the parts after the gold airbrushing was dried and Humbrol Rust Brown and Black Enamel Wash had been applied but before the excess had been removed with a white spirit moistened cotton bud. While I was waiting for that to dry, I poly glued the central bracket into the top of the wing as shown in Photo 9, the bracket itself was given a Blue Grey wash to highlight the rivets as seen here.
Some of the reference photos show the two stabiliser ‘fins’ just as the kit supplied them, some others showed them with silver rivet heads though, which did add some more interest to the otherwise flat sides so I carefully added dots of Vallejo Air Chrome followed by a very thin Black Enamel Wash around some of them where it was easiest to get it in! If you want a slightly different ‘look’ to the wing, about fifty percent of the photos show the fins with red insides, like the kit, the other half show them red with decals on the outside and polished aluminium on the insides! Although you can’t see it in Photo 10, I left mine red!
Photo 11 shows the two halves of the support ready to fix together with the finished gold base. The blue arrows indicate the little pegs, which are pushed into the corresponding holes in the other side. When I tried to join the two halves I found that despite applying as much force as I could, the two halves just wouldn’t close up tight. In the end I decided to drill out and enlarge the holes very slightly and to use poly glue to secure the parts together. Photo 12 illustrates those enlarged holes and the blue lines indicate where I added some thin super glue for good measure after the parts were joined. The two main components, the wing and the support are shown completed in Photos 13 and 14. At this stage you are supposed to join the wing on to the support but I’ve left that for later as its far easier to store the parts safely in the multi compartment plastic box when they can both lay flat!
The last thing to add onto the support is the rear warning light. This is made up of just two parts – the black and chrome base and a transparent red lens. I decided to add a third part in the shape of a light bulb! Photo 15 shows the basis for the bulb, which is a transparent red styrene rod. I originally bought this to try and heat stretch it to form the red warning light on the instrument panel but it didn’t like being tortured over a candle flame and stretched. I eventually used a red transparent piece of sprue from an old model kit for that one but it has come in handy for this! I sanded down the end of the rod into a rounded cylinder and then used a very fine Tamiya polishing sheet followed by a buffing mop on the rotary tool to create the effect seen here. Photo 16 shows the three parts together, the camera couldn’t quite capture the ‘fibre optic light gathering’ effect on the end of the rod though. Photos 17 to 19 show the light going together. I first inserted the rod ‘head first’ into the base and marked it level with the top of the bowl before sawing it off and fixing it to the bottom with super glue gel. The red lens was then carefully pushed down until it clicked into position and the completed light then push fitted into the hollow in the gold base unit. Its not very evident in the photos, but depending on how the ambient light falls on the red lens, you can just make out that there is actually ‘something’ inside the light!
And finally for the little extra for which I have been waiting for some graphic supplies to arrive. Photo 20 shows the rear of the Giles Villeneuve car ‘Old No.12’ as she is today. The grey bar at the bottom of the photo is the back of the rear wing which, as you can see is clearly marked ‘NO PUSH’. Now I have no idea if this instruction was to be found when Giles was racing, You would think that the Ferrari pit crew would be well trained as to where they could or couldn’t push these cars around by, I suspect it is probably a modern addition for the benefit of less well educated enthusiasts helping out with these now classic cars. Still, it does add a little interest to an otherwise bare part of the vehicle so here goes!
Photo 21 illustrates the evolution of the decal design. I hunted through the stock of fonts in the Corel Printhouse graphics program but couldn’t find one close enough to the apparently sprayed on design seen on the wing so it would have to be the hard way! Using the original reference photo as the source, I duplicated the image in Printhouse and then cropped it right down to just the words as seen at top left. Then, double clicking the reduced image sent it into the companion Corel Photohouse which sits in the background of Printhouse waiting for tasks like this. Using the colour select pointer I selected plain white and then switched to the Colour Fill tool, positioned that pointer in the grey looking background around the text and clicked, the grey background was instantly removed and replaced with white as shown at the top right. The next part was more intricate but quite simple – I performed the same colour fill operation on the inside of each letter, removing that grey and turning the interiors white as seen at the bottom. Enlarging the photo up revealed some faint grey pixels that had been missed the first time around which were then whitened one at a time. Once all was looking ok I could simply exit the Photohouse which returned the image back to Printhouse all tidied up ready to be duplicated multiple times and lined up along the top of the page.
As I mentioned, the first attempts at a waterslide decal didn’t go well so when the new materials I was waiting for arrived I decided to try the new dry transfer method first. Photo 22 shows the first result – this is actually looking at the underside of the print, the first job is to create a second master design by taking the decal one and simply reversing it so the words ran backwards. There are two A4 sheets with the dry transfer system, the first is a clear ‘acetate’ with a tiny red arrow on one side to indicate the side to print on. The back to front line of ‘no pushes’ was then ink jet printed on and left to dry completely (you can use a hair drier to speed it up and the same sheet will take both inkjet and laser printing). Once dry, I cut off the thin strip and also cut off an identical strip from the second sheet which is equipped with a yellow backing sheet on one side and a clear acetate on the other. Removing the yellow backing, the now uncovered clear self adhesive strip was positioned over the printed one and smoothed down in place using a wooden coffee stirrer to rub it down fully.
Next I had to carefully cut around the design as close as possible, this is the main difference between commercial rub down transfers and DIY ones – the commercials have the adhesive already applied just to the back of the printed design so a single carrier sheet can have loads of transfers on it, the DIY ones have adhesive all over the carrier sheet so we have to cut round the transfer as close as possible. The final tasks were to carefully peel off the clear film from the sticky underside and position the transfer exactly where you want it (no second chances here) and then burnish down the design through the clear acetate still covering the top. Photo 23 shows the trial effort – the first ‘no push’ applied to the white plastic lid of an aerosol paint tin. This takes a while to get the hang of it, probably leaving it on there for an hour or so for the adhesive to bond would make it easier but eventually I was able to remove the final acetate layer from the top of the design, leaving the words ‘printed’ onto the plastic and then giving it a last burnishing using the yellow backing sheet from the strip to finish it off.
Well that went pretty well so the final step was to try it out on the rear wing itself. Again, removing the final acetate was the most difficult part though it would have been easier if done before the wing bar was glued together! But, as shown in Photo 24, the final effect was well worth all the effort!
At the moment I’m working away on the main gearbox section, more awkward planning as I’m having to change all the build schedule as the entire thing has to be re-painted and can’t go together as the instructions would have it! Fortunately it is all going together really well and I’m pleased with the way the new colour scheme looks. But in the meantime, the following instalment will be (mercifully shorter), and all about fitting a battery terminal for the wiring to arrive shortly from the starting motor (grateful thanks to Ruda and his excellent build diary for the info I needed for this)!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Suitably superb once again.

Grateful thanks as ever to Roy and Chris!
I'm finding more and more on this kit that it really is the little tiny 'extras' that make so much difference to the finished model - there's another one in this instalment, it's only about half an inch long but the extra time spent on it certainly makes all the difference!

Apologies for the length of this write up! I thought I'd already posted the first half up to photo 11 but when I put up the remainder the first part wasn't there! So I quickly edited in the first half before anyone noticed (I hope!) If you're reading this don't worry! I've re-re-edited the instalment and put it back into two parts as it was supposed to be!

As shown in Photos 1 to 3, the gearbox section (the main part at least) comes in three packs, Pack 59, Pack 60 and somewhat surprisingly, Pack 64!
This is because the packs in between contain some of the smaller details and the rear axle and brake discs. Pack 59 contains the main body of the gearbox as a diecast metal casting, Pack 60 is the starting motor parts in plastic, and Pack 64 is the rear of the gearbox and the first section of the rear suspension which bolts onto it, both in plastic again. Not shown here for some reason is Pack 61, which is the top of the gearbox, and which is another metal casting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t follow the kit schedule for the construction, as the whole lot needed a re-paint. With the kit parts the gearbox itself is a chrome silver finish with only the suspension section finished in gold, as you can see in Photo 4, the whole thing is actually the dull gold finish. This meant I had to build the whole gearbox first, then degrease it, black prime it and finally airbrush the whole thing in Vallejo Metal Colour Gold before adding the shadowing wash and dry-brushed highlights and then dismantling it so that it can be screwed onto the main engine block! The first task is to attach the base plate of the starting motor which first needed a little sanding down to remove the moulding flash lines. Photos 5 and 6 show the main casting before and after fitting the base plate in. The red line indicates the bottom of the ‘trench’ which the plate slides down into, and the red arrows show how the plate was slid down into position. Whereas the plate itself is the same gold as the gearbox body, the raised curved section is the same aluminium as the starting motor itself. Photo 7 shows the end of the two pegs which stick through into the metal body – I added a couple of drops of super glue to these (just to make sure) even though it was a pretty tight fit to begin with. Photos 8 and 9 illustrate the two screws which hold the metal top section of the gearbox in place on the main body. The bit I’m most interested in is that little angled tab sticking out of the top right in Photo 8 – once that’s in place I can finally fit in the ECU and complete the wiring loom from the front of the engine bay! The screw at the rear in Photo 9 is covered up by the suspension section but the front one in Photo 8 is visible and so is hidden by a sticky silver decal (actually more of a sticker) which had to go on before the re-painting. Finally, before the airbrushing could start, the plastic lower rear section was screwed in place as seen in Photo 10. That semi-circular depression is where the rear axle fits in with the two rear-brake discs sitting on the outside.
The final Photo 11 shows the gearbox with its new gold finish just resting in place against the rear of the engine block awaiting the enamel wash treatment and dry-brushing highlights – and that’s where the real fun starts!

Next instalment follows...

Robin.

That is just mind boggling work you are doing Robin. Excellent.

Mark