[wet sellery]

A couple of years ago I bought one of these (photo from the Looksmart website) :

They cost way more then I want to spend on a 1/18 model, but I got the opportunity to buy a damaged model.

Mini looks like this (don't mind the total mess on my desk) :

The floorboard is broken into 5 pieces :

The rear wing is broken into 6 pieces and the body is broken in half in front of the windshield :

The damage will be repaired.

But before I start the repair, I want to share my view on this model :

It looks nice, but the way Looksmart made it, is just dumb.

This model costs at least € 260, given the amount of resin that they used to build it, I'm not surprised with it's high price.

The resin is over 5 mm thick in some spots, that makes the model very heavy.

It would have been a lot easier to use a metal plate for the floorboard, covered with a thin layer of resin with all the details for the underside.

It would also make the model a lot cheaper and less fragile.

To sum it up : I'm not impressed.

This is supposed to be a high-end model, but when you take it apart it's just a poor designed and bad assembled lump of resin.

The body does look nice, but small details like the exhausts, should be metal tubes, not plastic ones that don't have enough depth.

It comes with a very nice display case, but that's not enough to justify the price.

So, no Looksmart for me. This model isn't worth it's high price tag.


Enough rambling, next update will show the repair.

It will be interesting to fill and paint the cracks in the body, we'll see if it will be a success or a disaster.

Sincerely

Pascal

The amount of resin is ridiculous.

 

[P A D]

Hi Pascal,
You're on the wrong forum. This is Diecast Exchange not Resin Cast! 😂 😂 😂

I look forward to you working some magic on this pile of cross linked chemicals. Let's face it, it can can only look better. Apart from being fully sealed and the high price, it does look impressive when in one piece

Cheers,
Peter

 

[vulpex]

That's gonna be interesting - you got me hooked...

 

[cwbs]

Looking forward to see the end result!

This model costs at least € 260, given the amount of resin that they used to build it, I'm not surprised with it's high price.

The resin is over 5 mm thick in some spots, that makes the model very heavy.

This is supposed to be a high-end model, but when you take it apart it's just a poor designed and bad assembled lump of resin.

The amount of resin is ridiculous.

I'm no resin expert, but I'd say they make it thick on areas they know are bound to break under stress (torsion, impact, etc), to try and avoid exactly what happened to that model. Didn't work out well for that one, though...

 

[wet sellery]

Here we go.

I've glued the parts together, then did a number of dryfits that showed why this model is fragile.

First : there's the resin that was used. I breaks in certain areas just by looking at it. I've - gently - picked up some pieces and parts of resin just broke off.

Second : the model is fixed to the base plate of the display case with very large screws and plugs. They are screwed in so tight that you can hang in on a wall and the model wouldn't fall off.

Third : the big blocks of resin don't fit well enough to each other to give support.

But enough talk, time for some photos.

The floor board was broken into 4 pieces. This is the rear area, you can clearly see where the glue has sipped from the cracks :

Front :

Rear inside :

Front inside :

You can see that I've started to sand the areas where other resin parts will sit. In other areas I will do the same to glue reinforcement strips in weak spots.

This is the firewall, a huge lump of resin that requires a lot of sanding to get it flat :

Some plasticard pieces will be used to fill the gaps, again to get the parts to fit better and to give some more strength to the assembly :

To give an idea on how much resin was used. This is the dashboard, 5 mm thick :

And the engine bay, 19,7 mm at the front, 30 (!) mm at the back :

Is has some nice details, but almost everything is simply painted black, turning it into a black hole. I will add some color in the engine bay later :

The body has also been glued together and a first layer of filler was applied :

Of course there are far better ways to apply filler than the way I did it. But I wanted to use a white filler because my Motip brown colored filler will show thru the yellow paint.

The white filler I used is quite soft and can be sanded easily. During and after the sanding, I put on coats of Tamiya Extra Thin glue to give it some extra strength.

So there we go. Work has started on the resin-glue-bomb.

Sincerely

Pascal

 

[Craig]

I'm intrigued & looking forward the build!!

Yeah, taking a resin model apart is never nice to see, by that I mean that they are so crudely put together!! If they weren't so limited (in some cases) you'd think they cost much less!

 

[wet sellery]

The result of the repairs is about 50/50.

After a first couple of rounds of puttying, filling with paint and polishing it looks like this :

In this case macro photos are a good thing, they show where I need to do some more polishing.

The left side looks a little bit better :

But at this stage, I'm starting to wonder if it will be possible to repair the paint.

I'll keep trying and if I doesn't work, I'll have disassemble and respray the body.

Not looking forward to that, because some parts might (correction WILL) break.

In the meantime, I started adding some details to the engine bay. First some color :

Then some extra details :

It took a lot of work to get from this :

To this :

The shitty looking rubber hose will be replaced by one I made with the lathe :

Added some cables to the firewall, some more work will be done on the top half :

Not a lot will be visible when it is assembled (dryfit) :

The wing proved impossible to glue together without something to give it extra strength. I used needles, but they are visible on the top of the wing :

Ah well, let's say they add some character :

It's shame that the needles aren't in exactly the same spot, but with the naked eye, it's just passes inspection.

It was the only way to get the supports to fit without making a new wing. The fit was terrible and it was badly glued, even before it broke :

At this point, I'm nut sure what I will do with the wing. I may leave it as is, or sand of the tops of the needles and paint the wing black.

The real car has no carbon fiber on the wing.

So the next couple of days (weeks) I'll decide to keep the yellow body with carbon fiber wing, or finish it like this one :

But with some black details on the sides and front of the body.

Sincerely

Pascal

 

[vulpex]

Go for the red one - it looks sooo cool!!

 

[wet sellery]

I totally agree with you.

IF I can get the headlights and rear lights off without damaging them, I will respray / rebuild this model so that it will look like this :

 

[wet sellery]

The rear lights came off without any problems. The front headlights are a different story : they were glued deep inside tons of resin and I basically had to force them out with scalpels and screwdrivers. The left side only broke into 3 pieces, the right side into a lot more. A lot of repair work will be needed.

The paint on the body is strange. I used my tried method and brushed some Dot 4 brake fluid on the body. Only the clear coat and some of the yellow base coat came off. Underneath the yellow base coat, there's a white primer that becomes soft by using the brake fluid, but stays very sticky.

I'm going with 2 options :

1. Sand and polish the body without removing the yellow base coat, and use the yellow base coat as a sort of sealant to spray the grey primer and red paint. I will use a Motip spraycan, that paint will attack the resin if it doesn't have a primer or sealant.

2. Use a strong paint remover that will be aggressive on the resin, but will remove all the coats.

I'll do some testing tomorrow and will post some photos tomorrow or sunday.

Sincerely

Pascal

 

[P A D]

Hi Pascal,
So far this project seems to be all pain and no fun. Probably a stupid question, but could you not have left the headlights in-situ and masked them up for the repainting?
Cheers,
Peter

 

[wet sellery]

Hi Peter,

You're absolutely right, it's all pain and ZERO fun. I could have left the headlights in place, but I highly doubt that they will survive the paint stripping.

Brake fluid Dot 4, didn't work on the paint. Well it did remove tiny spots of paint, but I want to get this done before 2035...

Before I try more aggressive methods (chemical paint stripper or Isopropyl alcohol), I tried oven cleaner and a sealed plastic bag.

The body has only been inside the bag for a few hours, but I can clearly see that the black interior color is coming off, the yellow exterior color is still fighting me.

My guess is that it's the clearcoat that's resistant to the Brake fluid and oven cleaner.

The clearcoat has bonded with the yellow coat to give a rockhard finish.

I had the same problem with the plastic bumpers of the Ferrari F430 that I build some years ago.

In the end, I had to use acetone to get rid of the clear coat and red paint.

We'll see how this turns out...

Sincerely

Pascal

 

[wet sellery]

Victory ! It took me 3 days and a lot of hours to get the clear coat, yellow coat and white primer of the body. I soaked it in brake fluid, removed most of the coats with scalpels, then used acetone and cottonbuds to clean the residue. There's a couple of spots where the paint is still on the body, they will be removed with toothpicks. Then the whole body will be wet sanded, untill it's smooth.
Will post some photos asap.

Sincerely

Pascal

 

[wet sellery]

After hours and hours of scraping with scalpels, rubbing with cottonbuds soaked in acetone and sanding, the body is now smooth.

It will be masked on the inside and rubbed with IPA before the primer goes on.

I'll have make the headlight covers from clear plastic, because one of them has a crack.

The crack is in exactly the place where the yellow paint stopped, so my guess is that is was already cracked when it was put on the body at the factory.

Will be quite a job to cut the headlight covers because they are curved in 2 directions. But we'll take that hurdle when the time comes ...

Sincerely

Pascal

 

[Craig]

I vote for Red too!!!

 

[P A D]

For the headlight covers on my Bburago E type upgrade, I sandwiched a piece of clear plastic between two tea spoons and applied pressure before dunking into boiling water for a few seconds to soften the plastic to the shape of the spoon. I then removed and cooled under a running cold tap. This gave the curve in two directions. I made a template with masking tape over the headlight aperture then used that to cut out the cover from the curved piece of clear. If the resin will resist boiling water, maybe taping a piece of clear over the aperture then dunking in boiling water might form it to shape. I'm sure you have your own thoughts on how to do it so I look forward seeing what you do.
Cheers,
Peter