WIP: Protar MV Agusta F4 Special Parts: Part 1

For a long time, I resisted building a bike, despite having slowly developed a small obsession for them whilst looking at other members of AF post amazing photos of the amount of detail you can get into a model that is one scale larger than the 1:24 that the cars usually are.

Well, in a dark corner, there were also a series of even bigger bike kits at 1:9 and best of all, they tended to cover some of the more specialised and racing orientated bikes with the kickass livery that goes with them.

It was inevitable that I succumb to the lures of big scale building and this was my first dabble.

I had no frame of reference of how to begin and as is natural for me, I started by taking on the body work, if anything, than to give an idea of how big it was going to be once completed

This is not a very modern kit; about ten years old and with that sort of age comes the softness of moulding and sinkholes that are typical of the period.

Along with the bodywork, I had a look at the chassis to see just how much space I have around it and the engine to add the detail.

The rear swing-arm seemed the natural place to start adding bits too as I had yet to accumlate enough reference material to work on the engine. Because the engine would eventually be encased by the chassis frame, I made a start on it just so I could test fit everything as I went along.


The swing-arm.

Pretty straight forward; that awful moulded in shock and spring had to go so out came the punch set to make some discs for the ends of the shock, various rods for and wire for the arm and spring.
The larger scale made this so much easier to get a good clean look for the part. When it's all painted up and in place, it actually works as the real does, compressing the spring as it moves. Shouldn't be a surprise really but pushing on the rear and watching it squat then return was well, cool... or sad... depending on your P.O.V

I wasn't very good at documenting my work so the next big jump is straight to complete body work.

You can see that I was test fitting the parts to the chassis just to see how I could fit the body panels as accurately as possible. On the real bike, the panels are held by dsus fixes and I should be able to replicated these.

The chassis also some work.

The bare frame got painted quite quickly as there wasn't that much work to do there. The engine is a tight squeeze as was expected but as it isn't detailed yet, I can't fit it properly yet so it's still there as a test fit. With swing arm in place, it looks pretty good but I wanted to do this properly so it'll all get taken apart so I can add bits galore.

To finish this post, here's that swing arm shock in place.
You can't really see it so what is true with car models is true for bikes too it seems but I know it's there and I know it works and that's what's important.

The next post should be all about the engine...