WIP Italeri Ferrari 250 GTO

This one is not much of a WIP as I had neglected to take photos of it as I was building. In fact I was so near to completing it that it was looking like it would show up as a complete build only... until something went wrong.

During the build, I had added a lot of details to the chassis. I had decided in all of my wisdom to complete the oil lines and add the additional race oil cooler in the front. Unfortunately, I failed to test fit correctly. Whereas on the rear car, things can be removed to make things fit, on a scale model there is is less room for manoeuvre and when the kit designers didn't make the kit to fit those missing bits, something's got to give.

And give it did.

This is the complete rolling chassis as they say in the trade.

This is a pretty good kit and for a long time, the only affordable way to build a complete "engined" 250 GTO. As good as it is though, it isn't er, completely complete...

The engine got the usual wiring of the distributors to scratch made coils. A fuel rail was added as well as the fuel line to the pump; this was just a bit of fishing line with some 0.15 solder wrapped around it. I removed the melded in belts and replaced with painted masking tape strips and it all looks a lot healthier now that the engine bay is a little more full.

I didn't spend much time on the interior; just enough to get the job done. I have another 250 GTO in the pipeline that I was going to give the full works so this was more a practice run while I collect reference data.

Here's some of the additional plumbing I added.
Fuel pumps and lines all connect as they should, as does the oil line from the sump. Completely forgot about the De-Dion bar on the rear axle though. You can just about see my scatch-made rear spring/shocks and the exhaust tips were shaved down aluminium tubes fitted into the stock pastic parts.

But I said something went wrong and here's what happened.
When I added the extra (missing) oil cooler, I added about 3mm of length to the chassis and the body, once made into a single piece, couldn't stretch over and something had to give.

Yes, that lower half should be fix/fitted to the nose as a single piece so this was now a fixing job.

First of all, I reattached the piece
(obviously)

What followed was a careful series of removing paint so that I could re-apply some primer to fill in the crack, sand down to smooth the base then re-paint the specific section.

Now I figured that if I could get the paint to match, then I could just sand down the fixed paint to be level with the existing paint so I masked off the rest of the body and set about painting that section.

A little sanding and the crack was barely noticeable. As I said, I had another 250 GTO in the works so I wasn't too bothered by this so this was more of a learning experience than anything.

Once this had been taken care of, it was onto the tricky task of fitting it to the chassis again. After about half an hour of praying to the modelling gods, it finally clicked into place.

All that was left was to clean up the details and re-fit the lights.


The result.

I didn't take many photos of this one but I'll stick them in another post anyway for the sake of filing.

Completed Gallery.