Kit's Khaos

[kerick]

That's one nice looking attic!

[McColm]

I used a paste table as a workbench before just need to reinforce the legs and a few sheets of plywood for the top.

[PR19_Kit]

While taking a break from the Super Monsoon and Spiteful builds, until the One Week GB comes upon us of course, I'm catching up on building one of the ZILLIONS of slot racer kits I have in the New L:oft.

This one's a Policar BRM P160 white kit from the early 70s, and I want to build it as Peter Gethin's #18 Yardley BRM car which won the 1971 Italian GP at Monza with the tiniest winning margin of all time! He crossed the line 0.01 seconds ahead of Ronnie Peterson's March. All five of the lead cars were covered in 0.61 seconds too, it was a tight finish!



The white kit has all possible P160 options included, which means millions of little bit, and it doesn't come with any instructions! 

You have to dive into the Policar web site and download them as a 22 pager .pdf file! I don't want to haul my laptop up onto the New Loft, it's probably melt, it's so hot up there, I printed them out.............. all 22 pages!

So far it's not going too badly, and I've done most of the changes to make it into the very low-drag configuration they adopted for the Monza race.



Goodness knows how they build them in the factory, ready painted, as the white engine cover (red arrowed) just WON'T fit without chopping some parts of the oil collector pipework (green arrowed) away. 

[Pellson]

Oh Ronnie.. He was the nicest man. Humble and kind, but a true national hero. Every Swede having access to a television set watched every race he participated in, and I still vividly remember the fatal crash on the Monza circuit seven years after this event, Kit.

[zenrat]

Great looking cars too.
I can't get on with the modern ones.

[PR19_Kit]

Great looking cars too.
I can't get on with the modern ones.

With you 100% there Fred, plus the current ones SOUND like junk! That BRM V12 was a real screamer in its time. 

[zenrat]

For me, they loose that aesthetic appeal when the side pods completely filled the space between the front and rear wheels and ground effect came in.  Late 70's.

So this I like...


...and this I don't.

[PR19_Kit]

I quite like Alan Jones Williams, the #27 car in your lower pic.

That very car was in the main hallway at William's factory in Grove when I looked after the moving floor in their wind tunnel, and as luck would have it, I was building the Tamiya 1/20 kit of it just then. I asked the reception girlie if I could take some pics of it, but she said cameras weren't allowed, quite normal in F1 land of course.

So I was crouched down behind the car, looking at the venturis to make sure I got the shape right on the model, when this large bicycle wheel arrived alongside me and a voice said 'Technology's marched on a bit since we built that one you know, you won't learn anything new down there.' I looked up and it was Sir Frank himself, in his wheelchair! 

We had a chat about what I was doing there and he told the girlie it was quite alright for me to take some pics '.... of the old car...; :-)

I never did finish the blasted model though, I just can't get on with 1/20 models when all my other car models are 1/24.

[PR19_Kit]

For years, nay decades, I've been scanning every decal sheet that passes before my eyes, and saving them in a large archive on this laptop, just in case.

SO far every printer/scanner I've used, one each from Epson, HP and Canon, have talked to my graphic software (PaintShoPro 4. & 5) and manged to produce real 1:1 scale files that can be re-printed as and when I need.

Today, using the Canon TS8000, I wanted to print out the Swift FR5's swept fin flashes, but with a thin white outline. Easy enough to do with PSP 4 and a few strokes of the track-ball, but the decals were too small! 

Some deep investigation showed the sheet had scanned at about 65% of it's proper size, and I've no idea why that happened. It was a moment's work to re-scale the file, and re-print the decals, but I've no idea when that error occurred, which means I don't know which files in my archive are correct and which ones are undersize.       

[scautomoton]

Can you not look at the file metadata and see the date, then check it against when you got this printer?