I've spent so much time on the interior that it's all starting to come together quickly now, but i'm starting to make a mess of it. In future I need to learn to slow down and be patient on certain parts cos I seem to be messing things up towards the end of the actual part completion, or in most cases, when I'm building the second of 2 identical parts.
I finally tackled my first "real" windscreen/windows and they turned out better than I expected they would. I used some plastic sheet from the cover of a document binder thingy and glued the widow frames to it using plastic model glue and held them in place with pegs and clamps. The outer frame kept unsticking, so i held it in place with a rather too generous layer of white glue.
Here you can also see the finishing up of the side windows, the pillar between front and rear windows was out of line, between the inside and outside parts of the skin, and up around where the doorframe meets the windscreen so I removed some of the internal sections to make it easier to line it all up. In this next pic you can see before and after versions of the roof, more on that in a sec.
While attaching the sides, shaping the roof and preparing the windscreen, it became pretty obvious that my choice of card thickness and dodgy cutting was definitely going to let me down. For starters the roof was way too small, mainly due to the one thing I didn't allow for when building my custom roll cage... the inward slope of the passenger and driver windows. To fix this I pasted the roof sections into paintshop pro and printed them out at 110% which made them way bigger than I needed, but bigger is better than smaller as long as i don't go too far with the trimming.
Just thought I'd throw in one more shot of the blower and hood, I took this one for my new avatar and it turned out better than the last ones I posted so why not.
By the time I got the roof on, the random glueprint and smudge gremlins had given the whole top section a good once over, and twice over, and once more for good measure. They then teamed up with Mr Macro to ruin my day.
The windscreen itself is pretty clean and smudge free, I'm happy with that but not the mess around it, which isn't helped much by the way the black marker i colour edges with stands out so much. I'd love to throw some putty or filler on it, sand it back and give it a nice spray job, but I'll save that kind of behavior for my next build. :twisted:
Moving right along, it was finally time to start on the "boot / trunk / bit where the big tanky things go", finally I was going to have somewhere to mount the tanks that have survived for nearly a month on the coffee table in the lounge room surrounded by kids, cats, a dog that likes to chew carboard toilet paper rolls and random gusts of wind from open windows and doors without a single scratch or dent. Did I accidentally knock the end off one when getting ready to mount it? YES!! Of course I did.
I lost a few of the bits that go on the tanks along the way, but that didn't bother me as I wanted to make some custom caps for them anyway, using a little bit of the silver card and some bits of black card for 3D detail and a handle. The tanks look a lot worse to me now that when i first made them a month ago... a lesson to be learnt when selecting the right way to colour edges. Not sure what the lesson is... not sure if I learnt anything, I still find it funny that they turned green and can't be bothered fixing it.
So now I have to make the hood, windscreen and roof parts, which are now all one part, match up with the sides. There's going to be some trimming, some swearing, and some dodgy cover ups but I think I'll get through it ok and now the end is almost in sight.
