BaseGTR - R34 GT-R S-Tune

Small update, been block sanding the bootlid, here's a random pic of it during sanding, looks awful here because you can see the metal, primer, basecoat and filler:

And I hit it with a coat of primer yesterday. Looks decent, a couple of tiny expected pinholes to fill. Need to leave this a couple more days to ensure nothing sinks back before I will continue working on it.


And this is the bonnet after gloss black paint and a mist coat of clear. Will be done in Carbon as soon as I have the time. Slight orange peel in the paint but I don't know if I should polish this out, it will be covered with a decal and clearcoated and then polished anyway, I think polishing it now would interfere with the decal and clear to come?


And the spoiler has been clearcoated and lightly polished.

Alex SZ1996 said:

the carbon on that spoiler looks great.

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Cheers Alex, I love the look of this carbon and it takes clearcoat nicely too.

So got a bit more done the other day:

Bootlid has been painted black in preparation for the carbon decal


Made a start on the engine. I cut off the badly replicated stock turbos and manifold to start with. Decided I wanted to go with a top mount big single turbo so started working on the manifold for it using 0.5mm styrene and 3mm rods.


Here's a mockup of roughly where I want the turbo sitting.


Still tons to do, just need to put the hours in.

Had some time to apply the carbon fibre decal to the Top Secret bonnet yesterday. Here's some work in progress pictures of creating the mask, one big piece for most of it.


Then that piece took just under an hour of poking and prodding to get it sitting right. Then 3 more pieces for the other areas, ensuring I kept the direction of the weave the same.


Some pictures of it on the car, still needs to be clearcoated, but I am loving this.

That is going to look so good when you slap 2k clear all over it

Looking forward for that engine, it's always my favourite part. But Rob's right, the detail on those tyres is just mental!!

ROBSMC said:

Nice work so far. Yeah, try to avoid polishing anything that still needs to be painted (or cleared) as you could then get a reaction and get fish eyes (small open holes in the paint)

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Yeah, it's always my worst nightmare when I'm spraying any part. When it does, I just feel like throwing everything into the garbage bin! Didn't know it was called fish eyes though LOL!

ROBSMC said:

Looking forward for that engine, it's always my favourite part. But Rob's right, the detail on those tyres is just mental!!

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Cheers mate! Will try and go further on this engine than I have before. Yeah the tyres are supercool, I'm hoping Lars will at some point make some higher profile ones that are just as detailed for all the old school cars (like those IG tyres).

Continuing with the engine:

I cut off the stock belts and pulleys that are crudely moulded onto the cam cover, filled and sanded it flat. Then added RB26 lettering to it. Also, that's a photoetch piece glued onto the coil pack cover to get a flat surface, as there was a weird hole under the original decal. The covers were then painted black again in preparation for carbon decal.

Then I finished the exhaust manifold piping and did some work on the other side of the engine. I added a small rod to the front of the intake manifold to act as an intake air temp sensor as this is completely missing, drilled out the throttle bracket, squared off the fuel rail to resemble a HKS one and added a little rod onto the 3rd intake 'port' to resemble the base of an injector as Autoart weirdly missed this but added the other 5. This was then primered to see how it's looking, a few clean ups needed. Also don't worry, that pipe coming off the manifold will be chopped off and a more accurate one will be installed.


Can't wait to get some colour on all that pipework.


Then I clearcoated the bonnet in 2k clear. Very happy with this and glad I chose 2k, a few dust spots but nothing that won't polish out.


And then it was time to apply the carbon decal to the bootlid and clearcoat it. Did it in one piece and figured it would be very straightforward, but due to the curvature of the bootlid, I had to overlap the decal below the brake light, slightly skewing the pattern. It could have been avoided by doing it in 2 pieces for the upper and lower sections, but then I would have had to cut across the weave and one thing I've learnt with carbon decals is that if you cut and join them along the weave, you will get a near invisible join but if you cut across the weave, the join will be very visible. Oh well, the overlap here isn't visible from a few feet away so I guess it's still okay. But if I ever do this on another R34, I'll try out some different techniques to try and maintain a consistent pattern.

Need to let this dry fully then I can replace the brake light, bootlock decal, GT-R decal and give it a light polish and wax.

Upgrades said:

Wow, I have to put on my sunglasses.... Great outcome. Looker forward on the progress off the engine, looks very promising so far!

Giovanni

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Thanks Giovanni.

Here's a random shot of the car with the bonnet on and wheels under it. This black splitter is from an older Autoart R34 and might be what I use as a base to build the Autoselect one from, as these sit lower.


And I've made a start on the interior. The dark series 2 R34 interior is nice, but this is a track car . So I gutted it, removed the flocking and built up a realistic floor pan using styrene. 0.5 mm thick styrene for the rear seat bench and 0.25 × 2 mm for all the strips

Still got to finish it off and attack the rear door cards.